The Night My £50,000 Celebration Became a Six-Year Argument

Or, How to Put Yourself First (if you're a woman) and Still Stay Married.

“Hey, love, are we swimming or drowning?” Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

The night I won over £50,000 in PhD funding—one of only 7 creative writing PhDs funded across the entire UK that year—I booked a babysitter and a table at a country pub to celebrate.

I’d spent six months perfecting my 500-word application. The reward was over £100 per word. A friend in the poetry world had heard someone say, “There is NO WAY they’re funding Ros Barber. She just isn’t good enough.”

But they did fund me.

My husband, Paul, had fallen ill with chronic fatigue. It was his relapse, the first time he was well enough to take a new contract, that made me realise I’d have to step up. The relapse was worse than the initial illness. A ten-minute walk was too much for him. A ten-minute conversation would exhaust him for 24 hours. He couldn’t get up and down stairs without a stick. I realised it was likely that he’d never work again. I needed to up my game and my earning potential. So I’d come up with a very ambitious Plan A: get a PhD, and then university tenure. But the PhD would have to be funded. There’s no way, with three teens/tweens, a two-year-old daughter, a chronically ill husband, and zero maintenance from my ex, that I could afford to do it otherwise.

In the three months I’d waited for news, my Plan B and Plan C for keeping us afloat had both fallen through. This PhD wasn’t a luxury; it was survival. If I didn’t do it, we’d lose the house. And then the beautiful fat envelope from the Arts and Humanities Research Council arrived, saying I’d been successful. Our next three years were secured, and hopefully, the future.

But that night, as I raised my glass, Paul said: “But what about me?”

What was meant to be a celebration turned into an argument, and we ended up leaving without even ordering food. He didn’t want me to do the PhD. He knew it would take my time and attention away from him. He wanted me to nurse him. But I’d be a hopeless nurse, and we both knew it. He was scared. Chronic illness is terrifying. And he’d been programmed by the patriarchy to expect his wife would put her needs aside for his.

We argued for the next six years.

Women are trained, from early in childhood, to put others first. Male “others” especially. I had noticed the disparity very early, and baulked at it. I was a tomboy and didn’t accept being treated as less than my brothers. I didn’t understand why I was given dolls: I had no interest in babies. Feeding fake babies with little fake bottles, dressing them in bonnets, what’s the point? I wanted the Matchbox car set, rollerskates, and trousers to lessen the chance of grazed knees. Climb trees, learn woodwork: these (and writing and reading) were what I was called to. Not cooking, cleaning, and sitting looking pretty. Though I did learn to sew, to make my own clothes.

My first marriage, though, trapped me into service. The term didn’t exist until 2007 (some nine years after my escape)— coercive control. Through a series of deceitful manoeuvres, the man I considered (at the time) my best friend, pushed me into a traditional role I had never agreed to. First, he tricked me into falling pregnant (having said he was infertile after cancer treatment), then he persuaded me we would co-parent, 50:50. Reassured I could continue in my lucrative, interesting job, I went ahead with being a parent, though it had never been part of my plans. Then when push came to shove-another-nappy-on-a-bum, he started to ignore me, feigned some kind of breakdown, then took a job on the oil rigs, hundreds of miles away for weeks at the time, giving me no choice (after two disasters with childcare) of becoming a full-time Mum.

My independence vanished. Trapped entirely in domestic servitude, the dreams I’d harboured of becoming a writer dissolved. Being a writer was the reason I’d trained as a coder in the first place. The plan had been to contract my services six months a year and the other half to write. But the minute I was experienced enough to set that kind of price, he baby-trapped me, and suddenly the only thing I was expert in was getting luminous shit-stains off babygros. Once you’re behind the handles of a buggy, everyone treats you like you’re low IQ. The dullness of NCT coffee morning chatter was killing my brain cells, so they might have a point. But for all the ways my ex tormented and undermined me, for all the ways I took on domestic duties to minimise his punishments and smooth, as best I could, a deeply depressing non-life, the me that knew I deserved freedom and respect never totally vanished. She was in there, deep inside, rattling the cage.

When I got to the point that I realised leaving was a life or death decision, I finally escaped. Eight years of not writing. A lucrative career crashed into the mud. I started again from scratch, on minimum wage, as a single mum. Started writing again.

The story of what happened next was published this summer in the New York Times. A friend became a lover, then husband number two. We connected with depth: the real deal. And then, when our daughter was three months old, he fell ill.

It’s hard to express the despair I felt when he started to demand that I give up my dreams yet again. That I give up this hard-won, extraordinary gift of £50K in funding, the chance to write the book that might be my breakthrough as a novelist, a dream I had harboured since girlhood. That I give up, at the same time, the dream house we had manifested while in love in Costa Rica (since for sure, we would lose it), the secure home of all four of my children. This was a lose-lose, because for sure, had I given up all that, I’d have hated him for it.

You don’t ask the person you love to give up what they love. It’s as simple as that. This is what marriage number one taught me. If you ask such a thing, you are shooting yourself in the foot. Love might not die then, in the moment of surrender and sacrifice. But resentment will turn it gangrenous, and one day you’ll wake up to find it missing.

You don’t ask a woman who despises gender-based roles to take a gender-based role she’s not fit for. Womb or no womb, I’m not temperamentally equipped to take care of other people.

Those were hard years, the four years of my PhD and the two and a half years after. I gritted my teeth and kept going, against the backdrop of his illness and growing anger that I was never giving him what he felt he needed (more time with me). I appreciate how awful that illness was for him. How much pain he was in. I can only imagine how constant pain can gnaw at you, can distort your personality. Illness is an interesting driver of personal growth, though. Both for the person suffering and the people they are close to. For him, it raised insecurities he had long masked. He had never, before he was ill, made this kind of demand. Chronic fatigue is a literal form of disempowerment, and here I was, gaining power every day through my competence and grit (and eventually, new letters to my name). Childhood disempowerment — the result of being repeatedly beaten when young — was surfacing to be noticed and healed.

On my side, the growth that resulted was just as profound. I had never been emotionally self-sufficient. I had always needed another human to lean on or offload on. For years, it was my mother. An hour on the phone every day at 6pm. By the time she died, luckily for me, I’d transferred my emotional dependence onto Paul. But now his illness meant he had to withdraw. I was unsupported, with a lot on my plate, and sinking fast.

Which is why, when hunting for solutions to Paul’s illness, I was desperate enough to try what looked like the weirdest of things. We’d already thrown cash we didn’t have at various therapies and supplements. And then, in July 2007, in an alternative health newsletter, I saw this video about Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). The first time I read the free manual and tried it, I got a surprising result. My plan had been to try it with Paul, but he wasn’t willing. I get it. He was already wrestling with supreme disempowerment, contrasted to my increasing empowerment, and now, what, I was going to HEAL him?

So instead, I started using it on myself. On my feelings of frustration, sadness, and anger at what we had become. I learned, as soon as arguments began, to swallow my responses, take myself away, and tap. And what surprised me was that every time I felt despairing, on the edge of throwing the towel in, I’d tap through my feelings towards him — absolute rage, at times! — and find, underneath, only love.

Everything in my system that screamed “this is my ex, all over again” could be quelled with tapping. That wasn’t true. That was fear, and old trauma. This was definitely different and, in fact, a way to work through the pain that my first marriage caused. Eventually, the work that I did on myself made a difference. With a series of hard lines drawn, he had to accept that I loved him, but my writing life wasn’t negotiable. Six years of conflict finally ended. We had some rebuilding to do, but we’re still together.

That PhD became The Marlowe Papers. Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. Longlisted for the Women’s Prize. £75,000 advance. The success of that novel got me a tenured position at Goldsmiths, University of London: my dream lecturing job. I taught creative writing there for a decade, until the English department was reduced by half last year. It was a wonderful job and a precious, stabilising income.

You can love someone deeply AND refuse to be derailed. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is hold your ground. That refusal can lead to growth for both people. So if someone you love—even someone who’s suffering—asks you to give up your dreams to manage their fear, the answer is no.

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Over to You

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