A Disastrous Introduction
Before we get to the disastrous introduction I need to give you a little background story. Things were really bad between The Fireman and I. Really, really bad. We’d tried so many things to try and fix our shattered relationship, but we’d grown apart too much at that point, I think.
Maybe we wanted different things in life, or maybe we weren’t well suited at all. I always thought we were, but age, wisdom, and hindsight are wonderful things.
A decade-plus later, I can see that we had virtually nothing in common aside from sex. Good sex. Great sex. But still, out of the bedroom, things weren’t great beyond the honeymoon period, in all honesty. Plus, there were all of those rumours. Were they true? Who knew?
I wore rose-tinted glasses, of course. We were going to stay together forever, nothing in the world could break us apart. We’d been through so much already, and I had no doubt that we’d make it through everything and anything thrown at us.
He didn’t feel the same.
“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” he said to me, in the middle of what was meant to have been a romantic midnight picnic. It was one of our favourite things to do as nocturnal creatures.
“What do you mean, you can’t do this anymore?” I asked. We’d broken up before, but he’d never used those words before.
“This,” he replied. “Us. Our relationship. It’s awful now.”
He wasn’t wrong, but I wasn’t having any of it. For about an hour I tried to convince him that we were better together than apart, but it didn’t make a difference. We were done. Finished. Over.
100-plus men
So, I did what any rational young’un does… and joined the military. I flirted my way through the 100-plus men to us 8 women, and got told off for fraternising twice – the first time within SECONDS of stepping foot in HMS R.
My parents broke up while I was in basic training, and my Pops went a little off the rails – and by a little, I mean… a lot. Guzzling red wine in the middle of the night. Never sleeping. Acting in non-Pops ways
They tried to keep the breakup a secret at first, but he told me that he was learning to use the washing machine, and my mother would never have allowed that. I called him, demanding to know the truth, and it all came out. Drunkenly. Suicidally.
It fucked me up a little. I PVR’d my way home one week away from passing out, regret and disappointment hanging like a heavy weight on my heart. I went home to look after my Pops. It’s not every day you need to come to term with the fact that your wife and mother of your child(ren) has been having a long ol’ affair, is it?
I was Team Pops all the way.
He acted up like a naughty teenager, drinking too much, stumbling home in the early hours of the morning, and TMI’ing his way through dinner. It was too much. He was so depressed but trying not to be.
One night, I invited Pops out with me and The Fireman. It was during one of our back-on periods, and we were still in the laughing phase. He brought his mother along so Pops could have someone his own age to talk to.
That was a disastrous introduction
Hi Fireman’s mum, this is my Pops.
Pops, this is Fireman’s mum.
I didn’t know that those two sentences would have such an impact on my life, but they did. It took a couple of weeks, but then the impact happened like a country-sized asteroid hurling down on my life.
Fireman and I had come home from a dinner date (still in the laughing phase) to a sound that we didn’t recognise.
“What is that?” I asked, looking around the bottom floor of the property, trying to locate the origin of the noise.
Fireman and I found ourselves at the bottom of the stairs, looking up, listening to…
Oh, God. It was his mother having sex.
We grabbed a couple of cans of pop from the fridge, then sat in the front garden so I could have a smoke. About half an hour later, someone came out the front door.
“Pops?” I gasped. “Tell me that you weren’t just… upstairs.”
“Umm, we didn’t realise that you two would be home yet,” he blustered.
Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off.
My Pops had shagged my boyfriend’s mum.
That was the cherry on top of everything that had happened between the Fireman and I. There was no coming back from it. Everyone, not just us, had done about as much damage as could possibly be done. We were irreversibly damaged, in more ways than one.
So, we parted ways for good. (For now.)
As did my FUCKING Pops and Fireman’s mum.
You couldn’t make this shit up.
This blog post comes next in the dating timeline: Number 8: Sailor Boy.
Thank you so much for reading my little blog today! 🖤
You can read all about The Fireman, from start to finish, right here.
If you’re in the market for something else to read, why not take a peek here:
