Dialogue: Moving on need not bring guilt

By ROANNE PARKER

A good friend sidled up to me, homing in along the handrail that I leaned upon. "Can I ask you something personal?" she said. I considered briefly. This was part stalling technique and part genuine concern. We locked eyes and she laughed.

We leaned out over the rail. The view from the deck stretched away past the paddocks of Kumeu and up to the ridge that splits the wild west coast beaches from the lifestyle blocks.

Clouds hung low and grey and rain splattered through the sun umbrella the way it drips from trees; 50 drops of rain becoming one funnelled plop. Always a surprise, even when you're expecting it.

The party continued inside, one 1-year-old turning two and one 2-year-old turning three and lots of dads trying to get the wheels on the new red trike to turn without sticking. "You are going to have to find another washer," one opined helpfully.

I wasn't even supposed to be there. We were supposed to be sailing. I even had a written invitation, but it was blowing 25, gusting 35, with a north-easter about as unpleasant as it gets. Not to mention that rain.

"It's horrible, isn't it?" my friend said. "It reminds me of France, all this cloud."

I told her that I could not remember it being this wet last year, but I know I said that last year, too. She said that she hoped Christmas would be nice. Then the small talk was finished, and silence hung as low as the sky.

I was stalling because it seems that since I have survived most of the tribulations of living in Generation X, and some that really belong to W and Y as well, I seem to have marked myself out as the agony aunt of Auckland.

Everyone I know seeks me out when their babies won't sleep or their morning sickness is rampant, or their partner is being a pig or they've just engaged in extramarital felicity.

I love a good chat, but I don't think my own disasters are necessarily qualifications in family therapy. I'm always worried that my well-meant advice will backfire horribly and I will have to open the garden shed as a doss-house for my victims. It's just lucky that I don't know more people.

"So what's up?" I asked my friend. She poked the tip of her shoe through the railing, and frowned. "I was just wondering if it was hard to decide to leave your husband and wreck your family and forever disadvantage your children (and have you booked them into Mt Eden Prison yet since they're sure to turn out to be career criminals), and when do you get your state house?"

No, she didn't really say that. What she said was, "Do you ever feel guilty that you didn't stay married?" Ouch. While her question was barb-less, I was more than happy to fill in the gaps. I've wrestled with this issue for the past three years.

I had a furious argument with a redneck talkback host last year. He stated that mothers these days seldom thought twice before they packed their bags and left their poor husbands wondering what hit them.

He said that women now had no conscience and selfishly expected happiness of their own, not like in his mother's day when all it took to put a sparkle in her eye was the sight of rows of sparkling whites flapping in the breeze every Monday. Now they go off and find themselves.

I stopped the car and rang him up. I was so indignant as I tried to make the point that I had never met a woman with children who made a frivolous decision to become a single mother.

He blustered on about a friend of his, salt of the earth, who came home one night to find his family gone, and then he hung up on me.

Back to the soggy deck. "Why are you asking?"

"Because I've seen it from the kids' side. My mother never married my father, and she's still guilty after 28 years. I don't understand why."

My glass was empty and it was cake time. I picked at a few splinters and tried to count the baby trees growing below. I couldn't think what to say. So I told my friend that right at the start I decided that I never wanted the kids to have to choose which parent came to their 21st, and everything else I did was based on that.

Making your own guilt your kids' problem is shabby, because if the kids have to move on, so should the grown-ups. And it should not take 28 years.