As people might or might not have noticed, I’ve barely been around for the past several months. I’m pleased to say that there is a positive reason for this; after almost a decade of knowing the marriage was over, and thanks to a great deal of financial and practical support from my mother, I have finally been in a practical position to leave my husband. So, we are currently separated and I hope to sort out the divorce in the coming year.

We split up over what might be called irreconcilable differences. The difference in this case was that he thought it was all right to be constantly critical of me and regularly blow up over little things, and I didn’t. As differences go, that one is pretty irreconcilable. For various practical reasons there was a huge delay between me realising that the marriage was over in all but name and actually being able to leave. This was not a good situation, but not as bad as you might be imagining, as a) I knew I would find a way to get out eventually and b) about half way through the decade of time that all this took up, I finally hit the point where things were bad enough that I was ready to get the hell out of there absolutely regardless of what it took and what the practical difficulties were and, what do you know, when I told him I was going to leave him it suddenly turned out that actually he could bring himself to make long-term changes in the way he treated me. How ’bout that. After that, the marriage was bearable enough for me to stay for the remaining years until the situation with our children was such that I was in a better position to leave.

Anyway, this August I managed it. I’m living in rented accommodation for the time being, with our younger child (now 17); my husband is still in our house with the 20-year-old. The eventual plan is to put our house on the market after quite a bit of prepatory work has been done and to buy separate places with the proceeds. There is still a tremendous amount to sort out both literally and metaphorically, but I’m ending this year in a much better place (also both literally and metaphorically) than that in which I started it, and I feel that, whatever else I have or haven’t done, I’ve accomplished the most important thing I had to do this year.

Quite open to questions if anyone has any. Either way, I wish you all an upcoming year of positive things, even in the face of all the odds.