Recently, I spotted my ex-husband sitting in his car outside our local chemist. Curious, I stepped into a shop doorway and watched him, his fingers tapping the steering wheel as he sang along to the radio.
Suddenly, his face cracked into a smile as a glamorous woman with red lipstick and a bouncy, expensive-looking bob approached his car.
Mesmerised, I watched as he jumped out, popped her bags in the boot and opened the passenger door for her. I swallowed down my jealousy, although I couldn’t help noting that he had never performed either gesture for me.
As the engine started, they smiled at one another in cosy complicity before he pulled out into the traffic.
Seeing their intimacy made me seethe, even though we’ve been divorced for a year — so you might assume I was spying on my ex and his mistress.
But no, the woman in the passenger seat is his mother.
She’s also the reason we are no longer together. Because devastatingly, when I told Dan he had to choose me or his overbearing mother, he picked her over me, our child and the life we shared.
You might think it wrong of me to ask him to turn his back on his own mother, but believe me, only enormous provocation had driven me to that ultimatum.
The crisis came after weeks when he’d barely spent a night at home, as he was dancing attendance on his mother. He’d even moved many of his clothes and belongings back to her home. So one night, as he headed for the door, I told him: it’s her or me. I am still utterly dumbfounded by his response.
She kept her son on a tight leash
Looking back, alarm bells should have rung on our first date in 2018, when he told me that despite being in his late 30s, he still lived at home running his parents’ farm.
Tall, with chestnut brown, floppy hair and a muscular physique, he was utterly gorgeous and at the time I found his admission endearing. I blushed coyly when he mentioned that, as a bachelor, he had insisted on an upgrade to a double bed.
We met at our village’s Christmas fair in Dorset, where he’d provided the farm animals for the nativity scene.
Having recently left a career in TV drama in London to work from home as a scriptwriter, I was a single mother to Edie, then four, with dreams of finding love and having more babies.
Fast forward two months, and we were seeing one another a couple of times a week. I explained to Edie that Dan was Mummy’s boyfriend, and he started staying over regularly.
A month later, I met Linda, his beautiful, extremely competent, know-it-all alpha mum, who kept both her husband Peter, a lovely ebullient man, and her son on tight leashes.
At lunch in the family home, Linda was very keen to point out how valuable Dan was to the farm and garden centre they owned. The spaces between her carefully worded sentences made her meaning clear: she was warning me that Dan was always going to be just as much a part of her life as he was mine.
She also commented on my smart scoop-neck top, amused I’d wear such a thing to a wintry country lunch. Hinting I must be chilly, she pointedly added another log to the fire. Was she undermining me and questioning whether I was cut out for country life? I think so.
She had already asked why I hadn’t taken my shoes off at the kitchen door. With each perceived transgression, I could feel her marking down my score card.
Driving Edie and me home, Dan gushed about what an amazing businesswoman and mother she was, “just like you!” But my confidence was rocked.
After that, I invited Linda and Peter to tea, but kept being put off. Whenever I popped in to see Dan at his home or on the farm, Linda would shoo me away, pointing out Dan had a delivery to unpack or a call to make.
On the rare occasion I mentioned his mother’s rudeness towards me, Dan would gently defend her, suggesting I was taking things too much to heart.
We’d been together for over a year when I discovered I was pregnant. Dan immediately went down on one knee and asked me to marry him. I was unable to believe my luck at finding the man of my dreams.
Linda thawed slightly when she found out she was going to be a grandmother, announcing she would open a savings account for her “mini me”.
When I was six months pregnant, Dan finally moved into my home. We never argued about his dilly-dallying, but my friends openly joked he’d be the last person in our village to see his child if he didn’t get a move on.
We meshed together our library of books, vinyl and (how romantic!) garden equipment. Edie was delighted to have Dan permanently in her life.
My mother-in-law did attend our low-key, register office wedding. She looked impossibly glamorous and insisted on being in every photograph, to the point where the registrar joked it was hard to tell who was the bride.
By then, I was seven months pregnant and not in the mood for her behaviour. She would turn up unannounced at our home after Dan had moved in, leaving trugs full of vegetables, telling me that I needed to eat healthily for her grandchild.
When our daughter Tilly was born, Linda made sure she was in the hospital for the first cuddle before my own mum. She reminded us this was her first grandchild, as if Tilly’s arrival was any less of a celebration than Edie’s in my mum’s eyes.
Meanwhile, Dan was determined to make a go of things as a family and launched a business as a landscape gardener.
During that first year as a family of four, life was blissful. The only niggle was that every time Dan got a call from his parents, he went straight over to them.
The children were so young and each had their own needs, equally as important. Whether it was an after-school club or a mother and baby group. Often, I’d have to abandon whatever I was doing to make sure the children were looked after while Dan rushed off to his mother.
It’s like I’m in a waking nightmare.
He was a good father to both girls. He’d spend hours with Edie, fuelling her fascination with the farm donkeys. He adored being hands-on for Tilly’s night feeds, too. But if there was an “urgent” need back at “home”, he’d go.
Sometimes it could be for hours, mending this fence, or helping with that animal. Whenever I accompanied Dan, Linda would make it clear I wasn’t welcome or needed. I’d be warned, “Dan will be here for some time” and encouraged to go home.
On almost every occasion, Dan would stay for the supper Linda made for him. I’d get texts telling me Linda had rustled up something “amazing” and I’d often be in bed asleep by the time he crept back in.
As for our scheduled Sunday visits to the in-laws, which Linda insisted on in order to see her granddaughter (note the singular — she had no interest in Edie), I was so miserable there that I gradually stopped going. Linda is one of those martyr women, expecting praise for the work they’ve done or the food they’ve cooked. But if I offered to make something to bring over, I’d be told it wasn’t necessary.
Discussions around childraising were also difficult. I was cheesed off to be asked about Tilly’s potty training and told how I ought to be doing things Linda’s way. Eventually, Dan started visiting her every Sunday with Tilly while Edie and I stayed at home.
In every other way our world was perfect, though. Our sex life was fantastic — we were back to being intimate at least three times a week. We didn’t argue, and we were on the same page about the girls’ education. Occasionally I’d dream about us moving away, but I knew Dan would never leave his mother.
Then, not long after Tilly turned three, Dan’s father died of a heart attack. Linda was distraught and when Dan suggested he stay with her for a few days, I agreed.
She’d been married for 40 years; of course Dan needed to support her through the initial grief. He popped home for a few hours each day in the first week.
During the second week that petered off to every other day. A month later he still hadn’t returned home. Dan said he wanted to stay until the funeral at the end of the third week — fair enough. After that, if I asked when he was coming home, he fudged the answer.
One evening, furious at yet another night without Dan, I left a childminder at home with the girls and drove over to the farm.
Peeking through the living room window, I saw Dan sitting in “his” chair in front of the TV. Linda had got his digital streaming subscriptions set up for him again.
I walked in past a stony-faced Linda, noticing the kitchen table set for two. Dan shifted about looking guilty. I demanded Dan return home with me and even said I’d pack his bags. I stomped up the stairs — but in his bedroom, I got the shock of my life. Far from living out of a suitcase, his shirts were all ironed and hung up. Underwear filled the drawers, PJs were under his pillow.
In the bathroom, his toiletries were all laid out, his washbag out of sight. It seemed very much set up for a man with no intention of moving back to his home and family any time soon.
I was speechless, blaming myself for letting things get this far. Linda was furious with me, and ordered both Dan and me out of her home.
She told me I had no idea what it was like to lose a husband. I’m afraid I laughed in her face and told her I did, because my husband had been Awol for a month. Dan, dumbfounded, followed me to the door. I hated the fact he’d never defend me in front of his mother. On the way home I ranted and raved at him. He just looked out of the window.
What was once a froideur between Linda and me became outright hostility. Dan moved back in with me, but I’d catch him making secret apologetic calls to his mother. Whenever I tried to talk to him about it, the walls went up. It was exasperating.
When I pleaded with him to see things from my perspective, he’d ask me to see them from Linda’s. When I asked him to think about our children, he’d get very tearful. Yet he still went to his mother’s, if not every day then one in two.
Three months later, Dan said his mum needed help with a leak in the guest bathroom. By this point I was sick of the secrecy; Dan tiptoeing around his mother, then me, careful not to provoke an argument with either of us.
As he got his coat, I told him, “You’re going to have to choose, you can’t keep doing this.” Dan looked at me with utter horror.
I refused to listen to his claims that I was being “silly” — that his mum wasn’t the “other woman”. He quietly protested that I was being selfish, that his mum did very much need him right now. After he left, I texted him in a fit of pique, “Good riddance, don’t bother coming back!”
I hated the fact that he never defended me.
I didn’t know it at the time but he’d spent his last ever night in our home. I refused to concede defeat, telling Dan he couldn’t set foot back in the house until he agreed to put us, his family, first. Meanwhile, Tilly cried about missing Daddy tucking her in each night. Edie comforted me, telling me she didn’t like that “horrible” woman, his mother.
One year on, our divorce is through. Dan has settled back in at his parents’ home, as though he never left. It feels like I’m living in a waking nightmare.
At first I blamed Linda for destroying my family, but I now blame Dan for being so weak. And yet I admit, if he turned up on my doorstep tomorrow asking me to forgive him, I know I would.
Dan keeps his distance, passing pleasantries while doing the handover with Tilly. She sees her father one evening each week and every other weekend. But she lives with me, because I will not countenance Linda having any serious involvement in raising her.
Even though Dan redefines the meaning of “mummy’s boy”, he’s a good father and I’m determined Tilly won’t lose her dad over this. Still, I know she looks forward to coming home and moaning about the tiny food portions Linda gives her.
I’m more than a little embarrassed I lost my husband to his mother. Finding love again is the last thing on my mind and if I do, I’ll want to know about his relationship with his mother, too.
As for Dan, there aren’t any other women in his life — just Linda — and I imagine that’s exactly the way his bloody mother likes it.
As told to Samantha Brick. Names have been changed.
