Dad on the town.

When your (recently separated from your mum) dad tells you he misses intimacy with females of his age it’s time to do something drastic.

Run under a bus, vomit into the nearest bin, take a shower and scrub yourself with bleach or….grow up and face some hard facts.

Last night, in a fairly rare exchange of telephone communication I have to admit that it took a lot of guts for my dad to tell me that he’s considering getting back ‘in the game’, and he’d like to have a relationship with another woman.

Wooah there, I thought selfishly whilst I tentatively bandied the idea that maybe, just maybe it was a little bit too soon?

“Not really” dad told me bluntly. “It has been a fair while since me and Lynn exchanged anything more than an affectionate cuddle.”

Now I’m not a selfish person, and given the circumstances surrounding my parent’s separation (i.e the fact that it was driven entirely by my mum) I think my dad is well within his rights to find himself a lovely new lady friend to spend time with. I guess the burning issue here is, when is the ‘right’ time. For dad it’s now, and in many respects that should be the end of it.

I can’t help feeling for my mum though. In many ways I still believe that her decisions to force her husband away have been driven to an extent by mental illness. I can’t help thinking that when the time comes for Dad to find a lady at the local bridge club it’s going to hit mum like a steamroller in the stomach and she’s going to realise that the man she was married to for 37 years is beyond her reach. I hope this doesn’t happen of course, but I can’t help feeling like it’s one of those things you can never prepare yourself for.

We’ve all had it, a boyfriend who you were totally over who you suddenly discover through a friend has got married, or engaged, or worse, he’s got a younger or prettier girlfriend than you. You try and pretend you don’t care. Really hard as all of a sudden something which at times, you might have quite fancied having back is gone forever. Gulp.

One of my friends has recently broken up with a girlfriend of 34 only to bag a 22 year old blonde, giggly, hair flicking girlfriend. I just know if she knew she’d be sick as a dog.

Why is it that we always want what we can’t have? The eternal question.