The Silent Wife

by Kerry Fisher

‘We want to be a family, not an opt-in, opt-out multiple-choice group.

Had he for one moment imagined the burden of that vow, the reality he might be forced to face?

She wore adulthood so lightly, as though it were a state to be dipped into when absolutely necessary, an interruption to having fun and letting tomorrow take care of itself.

Maybe if I’d had someone to talk to, rather than protect, I’d have had a different life all together.

Never let it be said that my social life didn’t rock through the roof.

donate my body to medical science and to celebrate random memories of me as they popped up without the stress of a big gloomy date rolling round every year.

But to her, I was extraordinary, in a way no one else could ever be. Even now, she sometimes called me her ‘baby girl’ as a joke. But I loved being someone’s baby, even at my age. A safety barrier between me and the outside world, someone who would do her best to make life come good for me, without any agenda or expectation of payback.

had a sneaking suspicion I’d spend my last few weeks getting rid of manky old T-shirts, greying underwear and holey socks so I didn’t go down in history as the woman with the baggy knickers and saggy bras.

God knows how awful it must be to peer into the dark chambers of your mind in the hope of walking into the one holding the illuminating answer to something as simple as remembering who your children were.

all that concern for my safety was just control by another name.

Maggie laughed in the way that people who expect good things from the world find people who don’t funny.

I was so out of practice at the warts and all of friendship.

I could see that, unlike me, lies weren’t the oil that smoothed her path through life. They were the things that tripped her up, stopped her in her tracks because of the infrequent need to tell them. Her answer when it came was thin and high.

Instead I recalled how the house seemed to breathe around us when he wasn’t there, when I didn’t have to worry if I was being too soft or ‘not showing Sandro who’s boss’, when I could just enjoy a bit of time with my two-year-old son and follow my instincts instead of filtering them through the great avalanche of Massimo’s expectations.

She always expected the best of everyone and laughed at people who let her down.

Even in our worst times, we’d never stopped having sex. He wouldn’t have allowed me to.

But now I knew that ‘calm’ when applied to Massimo only came in the context of ‘before the storm’.

I did sometimes feel like a science experiment – join together two people from different backgrounds and see whether the marriage turns into a mutant.

Yet again, I was trapped between what I should be feeling and what I really felt.

Better than anyone, I knew outsiders only saw a fraction of what a marriage was really like.

Far easier to absorb his unpleasantness than to challenge it.

Before I died, I would master the technique of not expanding on my thoughts just because the other person had their eyebrows raised in expectation.

reminding myself that, sooner or later, his promises would tarnish like silver candlesticks in a charity shop.

A tiny seedling of rebellion and resentment was residing in the greenhouse of my marriage.

when his brain knitted together much better than it did now, before every single memory had to be jump-started like a car with faulty spark plugs.

‘I’m sorry. I should have seen what was going on.’ ‘No one could. Not even me, half the time.’

Some people don’t take well to being married, they feel trapped even though they love the person they’re married to, they still hanker after freedom, adventure, the unknown.

You should be proud that your mum loved you so much. And that you loved her. All the other things that happened shouldn’t and don’t change that. You wouldn’t miss her so much if you hadn’t loved her. And it’s okay to love someone even if they do bad things.’

I was so robust, so confident in my opinions and sense of self for the first time in years, that I had enough resources left over to bolster up someone else.