The only thing I ever hated about my job was having to be away from home a couple of nights a week but there are times now when I welcome it, though I would never say so to my wife, Sarah. Hearing my daughters chirp “goodnight” down the phone makes me feel bad, but then Sarah comes on with a brave, long suffering sigh and says, “Don’t worry – we’re fine” and it takes every effort not to snap at her and slam the phone down.
For nearly a year I’ve been tiptoeing round Sarah’s depression, though I didn’t start off being as unsympathetic as I sound now. We’ve been together for nearly fifteen years and we’ve always been a team, until fairly recently. Our backgrounds and personalities are scarily similar — the first child in the family to go to university, perfectionists and hard workers — and being in business together could have been a total disaster but we played to each other’s strengths, with fantastic results.
The first few years of marriage were about work, although we loved our twice yearly holidays and a couple of nights out a month. Turning 30 within weeks of each other was a significant milestone, as we could actually quantify how far we’d come business-wise not just by the healthy condition of our bank balance but by the string of awards we’d won along the way. We had always planned to have a family and now seemed the perfect time, so we were thrilled when Sarah became pregnant.
Everything was great until the 18th week, when a routine scan showed that the baby had died and Sarah had to go through a labour because she hadn’t had a spontaneous miscarriage. Throughout all that time and for weeks later we simply clung to each other, both of us unable to cope with something going wrong in our charmed lives.
We went away for a break and when we came back Sarah was soon pregnant again, but this time the pregnancy was ectopic and it seemed like our despair was never-ending. However, the next pregnancy, though an extremely nerve wracking experience, resulted in a perfect baby girl, followed by her sister two years later.
Sarah came back to work part time when our second daughter was two and everything seemed fine for about another two years after that. She’s extremely good at what she does and although we both still worked hard I thought we had the balance just about right,
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