Holly had a rough time with contraception – she was allergic to latex, plus the Pill or anything hormonal didn’t seem to agree with her, so she figured a tubal ligation might be the way to go. Her husband had planned on getting a vasectomy after they had their second child, but after an interesting set of circumstances happened, she went ahead with the tubal ligation… only for him to tell her eight weeks later that he was leaving her.
Welcome to the Divorce Diaries. In our past instalments we’ve covered everything from when you’re most likely to divorce to whether they’re contagious to whether being on the contraceptive pill can effect your chances! and have now spoken to dozens of women – including one whose husband announced he was leaving her to have an open relationship with a 19-year-old, another who was quite literally ghosted by her own husband and one who discovered the real reason her husband divorced her was because he had a baby with her SISTER.
If you have a topic you’d like to discuss, share your thoughts, experience or advice about, drop a line to alice@capsulenz.com.
Holly* knew she’d struck it pretty lucky when it came to love.
She’d met Curtis the day she same day she graduated from university.
“He was celebrating too and we met on the dance floor – one of those gross bars with a sticky floor,” she says. “But it was one of those really instant ones. Like ‘BAM’, we saw each other and that was it – we were a couple and inseparable from then on.”
Holly and Curtis seemed perfect. They loved the same things and just seemed to be so in sync with one another. Their careers were quite different, but also really complemented each other. They never had a fight, never argued and felt united on what their goals were: they did the OE together, bought a house, got married and had two children.
“It’s weird, but that night we met we asked each other all the big questions, like how many kids do you want – we both wanted two,” she says. “That was always the dream. Ideally a boy and then a girl, and somehow that’s exactly what we got.”
Of course their lives weren’t always just smooth sailing – there were tough spots: Curtis’ dad having a long illness and eventually passing away, plus a couple of bad financial decisions and that made for a couple of stressful years.
There was another small niggly problem – contraception.
“It’s a strange one, yes, but contraception was a bit of an issue between us,” says Holly. “I’m allergic to latex, so can’t use normal condoms. There are some alternatives, but, honestly – particularly when we were in our early 20s, the alternatives weren’t particularly good. And they’re expensive.”
Holly had tried going on the pill a number of times, but found she experienced pretty awful side effects.
“I tried different types, but they just don’t seem to work for me,” says Holly. “They really affect my mood – I get dark, depressed or quite anxious on them.”
This didn’t leave Holly and Curtis with many good options – so the plan was, after they had their two children Curtis would get a vasectomy.
When Holly was pregnant with their daughter, he made an appointment with his doctor to start the wheels turning. He’d just met with his GP when Curtis’ older sister came over for dinner with her partner.
Curtis and his siter, Casey, were particularly close. And, like Curtis and Holly, Casey had been with her partner, Olivia for around a decade so the four of them knew each other well.
At that dinner, Casey and Olivia said they had a massive favour to ask Holly and Curtis.
They desperately wanted to have kids of their own. They’d been investigating their options and had been going over it for a long period of time. Their favourite option was for Olivia to carry the baby with the help of a sperm donor – and they’d love that donor to be Curtis.
“It totally made sense and I was happy with the idea from the get-go,” says Holly. “If they couldn’t have a baby together this was the next best thing. Casey and Curtis are so similar in so many ways – there’s a few siblings but those two were like two peas in a pod.”
And so, they agreed. Curtis would put off having a vasectomy.
“He’d had a good talk with the GP who had suggested waiting until the baby was born – and ideally waiting a couple of years to make sure it’s what we really wanted,” says Holly. “I got that we should wait until she was born but we were also both adamant two was enough. I hoped that we could get the vasectomy done pretty quickly after I had the baby and that it would be enough time for Casey and Olivia to get their baby.”
A few months later, Holly gave birth to their little girl and Olivia was in the midst of trying to have a baby.
“Yip, it was weird at times,” says Holly. “They were doing it turkey baster styles and the whole thing was… pretty strange. We didn’t tell anyone about it because it all felt a bit weird – beautiful and right – but also felt a bit weird saying that your husband was trying to get his sister-in-law pregnant?”
Eventually, Olivia was pregnant. But, Holly could feel the idea of Curtis getting a vasectomy slipping away.
“When I look back, it all made sense what we did at the time,” she says. “Olivia and Casey are amazing people, they’re great parents. It was obvious they were going to want more kids. So it didn’t make sense for Curtis to get a vasectomy. And I felt that I was the reason why we weren’t using other types of contraception – I felt like it was my fault – so I put my hand up to get my tubes tied.”
Holly went to several different appointments, feeling like she was really having to convince everyone that she was certain that she wanted a tubal ligation. But finally she was booked in for the surgery. She was 32 and their youngest was now 17 months old.
“I didn’t love the idea of having surgery, but it definitely felt like the best option,” she says.
She took two weeks off work, but ended up stretching it to three because her energy levels were so low – something that wasn’t all that surprising given that they had two young kids at home.
Curtis was helping out, but not as much as she’d like. If she was honest with herself, things didn’t feel perfect between them, but she was acutely aware that they were in a tricky part of their lives: their kids were only 18 months apart and they had their hands full.
“If I’m totally honest, that probably played into the decision to have the tubal ligation,” she says. “Our sex life had already taken a serious hit having two little kids – it felt like this might make it something that could make it easier.”
It was two months to the day since having the operation, when Holly came out of the shower to find Curtis sitting quite awkwardly at the table in the kitchen. He’d just got the kids to sleep while she was in the shower. She quickly put on some PJs and went back to the kitchen to see if everything was okay.
It wasn’t.
“He was in tears,” says Holly. “He said he hadn’t been happy for a while, but it had come to a head lately and he needed to make some big changes. He wanted to divorce.”
To say it came as a massive shock to Holly, is an understatement. She was floored. Completely blindsided.
“Yeah, I think I was so blindsided that it just didn’t register,” she says. “I didn’t really take it in, I was quite emotionless. I thought it was a response to what was going on. That phase of life is lovely but so exhausting having such little children to look after, and having to work hard to keep a roof over everyone’s heads. I thought he just needed a couple of good sleeps and he’d be back.”
But Curtis didn’t come back. A few nights away to get some sleep turned into a full week, and then three and then, three months had passed.
Holly started to realise this was permanent.
“I did the classic steps of grief,” she says. “The shock and then the denial and then I went headfirst into anger. It was rage.”
Holly’s red hot rage was primarily over the fact that he had left her and the kids – it wasn’t what she signed up for, suddenly being a single parent. He had the kids every other weekend – she’d miss them desperately when they were at his house, but would feel full of rage and resentful when she was solo parenting the rest of the time.
But, a rage in her was also simmering over the timing of things.
“He left me two months after I had my tubes tied,” she says. “Two months! I was only 32. I know I’d only planned on having two kids, but that was my plan with him. The two of us having two kids together. I was completely freaked out. I didn’t want to be with anyone else, but then I had those thoughts of, how am I going to be with someone else? What if I meet someone new and they want kids of their own and I can’t do that?’
Holly found herself constantly googling ‘reversing a tubal ligation’ in the middle of the night.
“Everything I read said that it was possible, but your chances are higher of it being successful the sooner you try the reversal,” she says. “I’d be lying awake doing the mental maths, working out if I should just get the reversal right away to keep my options earlier, but then, that’s mental? Also how do you go through major surgery on your own with two kids. F**k, I was so angry.”
Holly confronted Curtis about it several times, asking him why he let her go ahead with the surgery when he was obviously having doubts about their relationship.
“He’d say that he thought those feelings would pass,” she says. “Which doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s like, either you ended things after only a very short time of feeling like the marriage wasn’t going to work – which feels rough. Or, worse, you were feeling like the relationship was over, but you still let your wife get a tubal ligation so that she wouldn’t be able to move on and have kids with someone else.”
She’d accused Curtis of just that once and he’d immediately shut down the conversation. “He told me I needed help and was crazy,” says Holly. “That was when I finally got it together that it was over and that he wasn’t the person I thought he was. He’d left me with so little explanation, left so suddenly. I did a lot of therapy that year and saw that how I was feeling was only natural given the situation he had put me in.”
It’s now 10 years since Curtis left – and Holly’s life looks a lot different.
“Everything is different,” she says. “I’m different – but I think in a good way. I have a completely different job – I’m a small business owner after I started up a new hobby during Covid that took off and now I’m working for myself. I have a new husband who ended up quitting his job and we run the business together. And… I’m a mother of three. We needed to go through IVF in the end, but we had a little girl together last year.”
Holly had their baby together a few months after she turned 41 and the whole family is besotted with their little girl.
“The older two absolutely love her to bits,” she says. “They’re the best big siblings. I worried about being an older mum, but it’s honestly been a lot easier this time around. My body has taken it a lot harder, but emotionally it has been a breeze compared to the last time. I don’t know whether that’s because I’m more patient being older, or that I knew what to expect and I just know babies better now – or whether it’s that my partner this time around is so much more hands on. Maybe it’s a combination, but it’s better.”
Holly says that for her mental health she keeps contact with Curtis to a minimum still. “It has been a difficult decade with him,” she says. “He was overseas for quite a big chunk of it and I haven’t always been impressed with his decisions. Our communication has been difficult, but I’ve shielded that from the kids, pretty well I think. I’ve made sure I never say anything negative about him in front of them.”
She has kept up a surprisingly close relationship with his sister and Olivia. Their children are close-ish in age and have remained close – something Holly really wanted to foster and continue for them.
“They have a lovely relationship,” she says. “When the time was right, I told them that their cousins are technically their half-siblings – they have such a special bond. It just gets very interesting if they have to do a class project on their family tree!”
Holly says she was keen to share her story because she’s had the luxury of some time since her divorce, and she wanted to put her story out their so that anyone going through it, might feel a little less alone and might feel a bit of hope.
“I was 32 when I was going through it, with an 18-month-old and a three-year-old – and a tubal ligation!” she says. “I knew no one my age going through a divorce, let alone anyone going through it with young kids or any of the other dynamics. It’s the most alone and broken I’ve ever felt. Some days putting one foot in front of the other felt impossible. It does feel like that for a while, but it does get better. You wake up and you realise you haven’t cried for a while, or obsessed over the things that were consuming you. One day you feel genuinely happy. And life honestly just gets better from there.”
*names have been changed
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