Blog No. 343 - Beyond Exhaustion – Part 4: Another Marriage, Another Disaster - 20 November 2025

 Beyond Exhaustion – Part 4: Another Marriage, Another Disaster

- 21 October 2025 - 

The 1980s for me were some of the more stressful years of my life. 

Well, most of my years were tough in their own way.

1981 was the year when I bought my first home in Adelaide. It was a rundown house on Morgan Avenue, Daw Park. It came from a deceased estate, and it really was very rundown. I had saved up $800 (equal to $3,845.41 in 2024) but the purchase price for the house was $26000 (equal to $124,975.74 in 2024). You see, the advantage of the old days was the lack of computers to keep track of every single financial transaction you ever made. I borrowed $8000 from a credit union, and $6000 from the bank as a personal loan. It was simple to convince them to lend me this money - I lied. The bank never knew about the loan from the credit union and the credit union never knew about the loan from the bank. I never once defaulted on my repayments, and the personal loans were paid off in 4 years.

A playground behind my old house on Morgan Avenue. The playground is new.

The house had once been used as a dairy and it was in terrible shape. The grounds (1/4 acre = .101 hectares) once had a stable and had been covered entirely by bitumen.  The bitumen was disintegrating. To get rid of the bitumen,  I picked the whole yard and created a garden, getting tonnes of soil dropped off in the driveway.  I then spread across the backyard with a wheelbarrow and shovel.

The house itself was also in a terrible state.  The floors were Baltic pine wood and drowned in stuff called easywax. Easywax was a mixture from the poverty of the Great Depression in the 1930s.  Boot polish was melted over a flame and mixed with kerosene and then spread over the floors to create a polish.  The easywax was on the floor in the hallway, 3 bedrooms, and the lounge room.  I hired a sanding machine to polish the floors and the sandpaper sheets the machine used to sand the floor (wrapped around the machine drum) disintegrated as soon as any heat developed.  The easywax melted, wrapped itself around the sandpaper and then the sandpaper fell apart.  I had to replace the sandpaper about every 2 minutes until the easywax had been removed.  Then I could concentrate on sanding the floors properly.  Sanding off all the easywax was not an easy job. 

The paint on the walls and ceilings in every room was decades old. The walls demanded I give them fresh new paint. I complied with their demands.  

I did all of the renovation work while working full time.

The house I used to live in. Photo taken from Google Maps. It is in a better state than when I first found it. I loved renovating Morgan Avenue.  I was doing it to create a home – and I had never had a home in my life before.  Within 6 months after I finished the renovations, the wife began agitating to seek and move to the eastern suburbs of Adelaide.  I had too little experience in life back then (1986) to work out what it all meant.

****

I married for a second time in 1980.

I should have known better.

I did know better.

Whatever damage had been done to her,

I lacked the power to make it good.

I vaguely knew something terrible had been done to her.

I mistakenly believed I could repair that terrible thing.

I believed focused love could repair all damage.

I was too young to know otherwise.

She was too young to know otherwise.

Some terrible things cannot be repaired in this lifetime.

Some terrible things must wait for the next lifetime,

Perhaps, even several lifetimes.

At her insistence, our son was born at home.

My mother in law insisted on being present.

It was a normal desire.

But I should have refused access,

I knew how she would behave.

I was not strong enough to keep her away.

Sitting in a chair in our bedroom,

She smoked cigarettes non stop.

She glared at me non stop throughout that interminably long night.

Apart from glaring and smoking,

She did nothing.

The midwife was so competent.

She knew exactly what had to be done.

She did all the work.

It was a completely normal birth until the very end,

Until our son left his world and came into ours.

Our son was born just before 4.00 am.

He moved his head and looked at me,

He responded to my voice,

He already knew it.

I had been told new born babies could not see or hear.

My son could definitely see and hear,

From the very moment he was born.

My son knew me.

He kept looking at me,

My son looked at me non stop while his mother kept bleeding.

The bleeding had to stop.

It would not stop..

If the bleeding did not stop,

The mother of my brand new son would die.

He kept looking at me while his mother kept approaching death,

While his mother galloped ever closer to death.

Would she live or was she dying?

Finally, the magic injection worked.

Miraculously, the bleeding stopped.

My mother in law promptly ran away.

She was not happy that I had nearly killed her daughter.

The midwife’s job was complete.

The baby was born. 

The mother of the baby was in good health.

The midwife followed my mother in law’s cigarette haze.

The midwife also left.

I could not run away.

My wife was exhausted

As well as my wife, I had a brand new, exhausted baby to treasure.

Consequences follow everything that happens.

The home birth of my son had consequences.

Eventually, my wife had escaped death,

Eventually our son was born safely.

One immediate and obvious consequence was a chaotic mess.

There were blood soaked sheets,

There was a blood soaked plastic sheet;

It had failed in its intended purpose.

It was supposed to protect the mattress from the blood stained birth.

The mattress was awash with blood.

I coaxed my wife onto a clean mattress.

She slept the sleep of exhaustion.

In the interval while our new son temporarily stopped crying,

I started working frantically.

Although I had not given birth,

I had been up all night.

Although I was exhausted too.

I could not stop.

My work had just started.

I gathered bloody sheets

I washed them in the concrete laundry trough.

I stumbled through that day

I stumbled through the days and months that followed.

Shadow wrapped itself completely around my life.

The grip of the Shadow Lands grew stronger.

Saying goodbye to complete exhaustion;

I said hello to totally pointless, complete exhaustion.

My wife blamed me for her close encounter with the other side.

It had been my fault.

I should not have let it happen.

I should have done something.

She had demanded the home birth,

I had merely made the arrangements.

I had made sure the home birth could happen.

She might have demanded a home birth,

But it was my fault she had nearly died.

Her pain and suffering had been caused by me.

Why had I let her down so badly?

I was trapped in a loveless marriage.

Tainted by bitterness from an older, untreatable wound,

A wound buried at an unreachable depth in her past.

Her bitterness was so strong.

She demanded I leave.

She screamed at me to leave.

She threw steaming hot cups of coffee at me,

Screaming that I should leave.

She kept repeating the same demands.

Why did I not do as she demanded?

Why did I not get out of the house?

Why did I not get out of her life?

She already knew I could not leave.

My son needed a father.

I could not desert my child,

I could not let this happen for a second time.

****

The  photo shown here is not of Morgan Avenue but of Kyeema Avenue Cumberland Park.  My wife’s parents lived at Kyeema Avenue and it was only about 4 kilometres walk.  They never helped with anything and my wife never went there except with me.  The in-laws were superficially okay but I disliked them a lot.

I suspect my wife disliked them a great deal also, but she never told me why.

Graduates exiting from Elder Hall at Adelaide Uni. This is likely a side exit, and not the main. The architecture is beautiful. The photo was taken in 1983 by someone that isn't listed, the copyright is under © University of Adelaide. They should really credit their photographers!

In 1983, I started part time studies in law at Adelaide Uni. I worked full time, studied law part time and kept up the house renovations.

I paid an electrician to completely rewire the house because the electrical wiring was badly in need of replacement.

The water pipes in the house were corroded and leaking.  I paid a plumber to put in new plumbing.

The roof leaked and I paid a roofer to replace the roof with a new tin roof.

It was such hard work to take a wreck of a house and single handedly make it brand new.  I got zero physical help from my then wife.

I was young then and I knew no better.