Anatomy of a separation

Nobody knows when the time is right to separate. If you have children, you tend to push this thought to one side anyway. You raise the pain threshold, swallow a lot, even accept your own unhappiness. And always ask yourself: How much longer? Will it never end? Will I ever be happy again? You hold out for the children. Because any other solution would be just as unsatisfactory. Because even separated, you still have the children together. There's no easy way out.
I split up anyway, after a long period of suffering. Years of relationship crisis. Because I was constantly stressed and unhappy and this stress made me ill. I still wasn't going to give up - until one day he said: «I'm moving out.» I was relieved. I would never have dared to take the step myself. Now I could follow his decision.
We shared childcare equally and the children took it in their stride, even enjoying having a second home. I was also fine for a while, even blissful. Freedom, sweet, sweet freedom. It was like a breath of fresh air entering a room that hadn't been aired for over ten years.
Little by little, reality sank into my magically enraptured rush of freedom. It became clear that we would never manage an amicable separation. We were constantly arguing via email and chats. I tried to cope with daily life, my job, my children, my friendships. And to keep the peace. But a break-up without bad feelings is probably like trying to cut a body without it bleeding. Only possible with a corpse.
Both my children were very keen to strike a balance. When they talked about their father, they emphasised that they liked us both just as much. But sometimes I secretly wondered whether they might have liked him even more. The feelings of shame were now occasionally compounded by jealousy. He was probably even a better father than I was a mother to them. But I knew that such thoughts were poison and made no sense, so I tried my best not to let on.
I protected normality in the hope that normality would eventually set in. But that took time. And numerous problems emerged: As my friends all stuck by him, I had to create a new environment for myself. Synchronising my social life, my working life and my life as a mother and single person proved to be more difficult than I had thought.
The pressure, the fear of failure, the shame and the feelings of guilt - I was able to overcome all of these over time. Except for one thing: a fundamental, irrevocable feeling of failure. The grief for my broken family, which will never be whole again. Was the separation right? I think so. I'm better off today than I was before, and I don't want to go back. The children are happy and so am I. After all, that's one advantage a separation has over a relationship. Relationships start to crumble at some point, but a separation always gets better, from year to year.

Michèle Binswanger

A graduate in philosophy, she is a journalist and author. She writes on social issues, is the mother of two children and lives in Basel.