The Pesky Kids

Fucking Facebook. Every time I think I have just about got my life back together, some bastard do-gooder on Facebook upsets the apple cart, and I spiral down, down, deeper and down. 

Let me take you back 2 years, 20th February 2013, Tesco’s car park, Glynneath. 
We’d just done the weekly shopping when Daniel turned to me and told me he was leaving me. There I was with 90 quid’s worth of groceries in my trolley and the boot of the car open and there he was with those saggy jeans walking away and getting in a car with that bitch Stacey from number 73. I took my wedding ring off right there and then and threw it at the car. It made a satisfying ping as it hit the windscreen but they didn’t stop. She just kept driving with my husband in her passenger seat, while my tears fell onto the tarmac and the ice cream melted in one of the bags.

To be honest I didn’t miss him, I was glad he was gone. To start with I thought I missed him but I didn’t, I missed life. There he was gallivanting around with a bleached-blonde Barbie while I was getting the kids ready for school and cleaning up their puke.  He was getting some, while I was doing sums. He was having a life while I was still playing housewife only without the husband.

Anyway I survived; I even started getting smiles off men in the Post Office. Maybe I wasn’t consigned to a life of loneliness after all. But then this Facebook nonsense started.

Someone had found my wedding ring in that damn car park and was desperate to reunite it with its heartbroken owner.

‘I can only imagine what this poor woman must be going through separated from her precious wedding ring like that. Please Facebook friends, share this picture and let’s find the owner.’ She wrote on her wall alongside a photo of my ring.

Of course this tugs on the heartstrings, everyone assumes that the narrative the finder has attached to the ring is the truth. It’s what they want to believe, so they share and share and around once every two weeks my ring pops up on my news feed, stabbing me in my heart and trampling on my green shoots of recovery. I contacted her and fair play she took the photo down, but when a photo goes viral you lose control, so it still pops up time and time again reminding me of what I had and what I lost.  I know she was only trying to help but she’d got it wrong, so wrong.