From Brilliant Programmer to Bad Waitress
Starting from scratch after escaping coercive control
In the ashes of my life, I started again. It’s bitter to start from zero in your mid-thirties. Less than zero, really. As you discover when you become one, society, and most men on the dating scene, have a low regard for single mothers.
I’d gone into marriage a high-earning self-employed freelance programmer, earning £750 a week. I came out with three small, troubled boys, and a gap on my CV the size of Alaska. In career terms, deskilled. Rusty coding languages weren’t going to help me now.
I had one tiny form of income, which D had tried to eliminate as soon as I landed it the year before I left him: two hours a week, in term time, teaching creative writing at the local university. He’d noticed the confidence it gave me. He started talking about us moving to Chesterfield, where he had worked since our firstborn was five months old, away all week, leaving me to raise our son (then two more) all alone.
He brought home the Chesterfield property pages, showed me four-bedroom houses wi…
