Our history

OK. I promised a post briefly summarising the walk we've had as a couple. Actually, I don't know how brief this will be, but I'll try my best.

Graeme and I met in 1993, and I knew instantly that he was the man for me. It took me about 9 months to convince him that I was worth dating. But we started dating in 1994. After dating for years, our relationship turned destructive for reasons I don't really want to get into in such a public space as this, and we broke up in 1997. After 6 months apart, we got engaged, and 6 months later we were married, in April 1998.

On honeymoon I became very ill, and proceeded to be incredibly ill for about 9 months. During these 9 months I developed bronchitis, then pneumonia, then pleurisy. The GP I was seeing basically told me that I either had to have bed rest at home, or be admitted into hospital, because if I didn't I was going to die.

Between the problems we'd had before we broke up and the stress of my illness, our marriage basically fell apart before it even started. Because my parents are divorced, and I've seen first hand what a divorce does to a family, I decided that if our marriage wasn't going to work, I'd rather get divorced early (ie after 9 months of marriage) than have kids and THEN have to get divorced. Graeme persuaded me to try marriage counselling, which we duly did, and it saved us (obviously, as we're still together!). While it didn't sort out our issues, it did give us a means of communicating with each other that enabled us to start to rebuild the trust that had been broken by our break-up. The other life-saver for us was that roughly 18 months after our marriage (in Feb 2000) we left South Africa for London.

This is not because there is anything wrong with SA, but because we needed to be in an environment that forced us to rely on each other, that took us completely out of our comfort zones and left us with absolutely no security other than God and each other. We left our families and our friends, and arrived in a city where we knew no-one, with no jobs and nowhere to stay. We also had the "joy" of supply teaching in a culture that is just different enough from SA culture to be completely disorientating. (Unless you've done it yourself, you won't believe the stories we could tell, so I won't regale you with any now.)

By the middle of 2000 we had both changed careers. Graeme was working in IT and I was working as a PA cum worship leader for my church. During 2001 I went through a course of particularly harrowing counselling and Graeme had a short course as well. It was necessary work, but Graeme didn't find it particularly helpful. I found most of it helpful, but it left me in a place that wasn't good. It helped me to forgive others who had hurt me through my life, but it didn't help me get to a place where I could forgive myself for my own actions. (Odd that I found it possible to accept God's forgiveness but not feel able to forgive myself...) So we both finished that feeling let down and isolated.

One day, when I have the courage to face my demons publicly, I'll write a book about it, because I think there are lots of Christians who need to know that even Christians sin, even Christians get it wrong. Christians can still be drug addicts, or prostitutes, or murderers, or child molesters. Just because we're saved does not mean we're sorted. It means we're on the road to being sorted, but some of us are just taking longer to get there than others. I think there are a lot of people who need to hear that. And I want to extend to them the kind of forgiveness and love and welcome that I doubt I would have received from most of my Christian friends if they knew what I'd done at the time... Anyway, that's off the topic....

Since then, as I've worked through the forgiveness issue, I found myself back working at various schools that required a lot of love on my part. Eventually, suffering from depression, I went for another bout of counselling, which helped fix the depression and made me realise that my job was killing me, and by proxy, my marriage. After being physically and verbally abused by some of the kids I taught, I resigned and moved to my last school, which was much better. Graeme was going through some personal stuff at this time as well, which I don't feel I can share - I'll leave that for him at another time.

One of the reasons my job was killing me and us is that I believed it was the wrong job. I had started to pursue the possibility of becoming an ordained minister in the Church of England. This is something I have wanted since I was a little girl, but till then, I had never dared to share this dream with anyone.

Anyway, everything went very smoothly until the last hurdle (selection conference), at which I was told that I wasn't suitable, for reasons that (even now) I find very hard to accept. I can't begin to explain how that affected me. It's the closest I have ever come to losing my faith, and it was touch and go for a long time. Because I hadn't shared the fact with many people that I was trying for ordination, our grief over my rejection (euphemistically called non-selection) was very private, and therefore all the more intense. As Graeme was struggling with his faith too, it wasn't easy for us to cope as a couple. At the time that we got the news about my non-selection, I fell pregnant with Janel. Trying to cope with that, on top of dealing with this massive rejection and the resulting faith fall-out was tough to say the least.

In the midst of all this, Graeme's family went through a rough time as his great-aunt, uncle and gran all died within about a year of each other. I sat the death-watch with his great-aunt. Saying that now sounds so benign, but it was one of the most harrowing events I've experienced. Graeme found the death of his gran particularly difficult as he couldn't attend her funeral.

But by the grace of God, we got through what was a very difficult period.

Then we fell pregnant with Zoe, and lost her... She's not the first child we've lost. We lost another one several years ago, at 8 weeks. We don't know the sex of that child, but we decided to name 'him' Malcolm. Losing a child... well, there just aren't words to describe how tough that is, so I won't try.

This post comes out of a comment I made about how tough a road we seem to have walked, rather than what an incredible experience our marriage has been. So if I've made it sound like our life has been a living hell for the last 14 years, be reassured that it hasn't. We've had times of joy - like watching Nellie grow up - this just wasn't the place to express them.