Currently Between Husbands

Cathrine Mahoney

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781761103346
• eBook ISBN: 9781761103360
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Trust me, there is life and love (and plenty of laughter) after divorce, even when your ex is one of Australia’s highest profile sport stars.

Actually, I Don’t Like Cricket Or Blow Jobs! (And to be honest, I suck at both.) Yes, that was what I originally wanted to call this book. But then I realised that some women like cricket. Also, reading this in front of your inquisitive seven-year-old could lead to some awkward conversations. So, in stepped Currently Between Husbands to save the day and any blushes.
 
Having a relationship in the spotlight is hard enough, but in Currently Between Husbands, Cathrine Mahoney details the unique experience of breaking up with one of Australia's highest profile sport stars. Even for a self-confessed over-sharer, the breakdown of her marriage to rugby league player Andrew Johns was more public than she was used to. In her first book, the writer, podcaster and publicist provides a self-deprecating and hilarious look at her life – from fashion mistakes and early crushes as a kid growing up in Wales, to her years working with some of the world's biggest stars at Sony Music, to navigating life and love as a ‘solo’ mum, and coming to terms with hitting the big 4-0. Currently Between Husbands is the equivalent of having a chat with your bestie over a drink or two, with all the inappropriate confessions, front bottom revelations and teary moments that entails.

‘Desperately funny, fearless and full of heart.’ Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss

‘Strap in. You’re in for a fabulous ride. And you’ll be wishing (like I was before I knew her) that she was your friend. It’s a bloody good book, and I didn’t want it to end.’ Amanda Keller OAM, radio and TV host

‘My all-time favourite movie is Bridget Jones’ Diary – to anoint a real-life version is a big deal – but Cathrine Mahoney is it Bridget to a tee. I’d pay to read a post it note she wrote, let alone a book. Cathrine’s ability to be funny, clever, relatable, self-deprecating and just so loveable is unlike anyone I’ve ever met.’ Erin Molan, TV presenter, radio host and writer

CHAPTER 1 DOES MY ROCK BOTTOM LOOK BIG IN THIS?

Heavily intoxicated, sunglasses lopsided, slumped in a wheelchair. Head lolling from one side to the other as the chair is pushed through LAX. Holding on tightly to a bag with one hand, while the other is busy flipping the bird at random strangers. No, sadly this wasn’t a scene from Bridesmaids or Trainwreck; this was me seven years ago. Yes, I was a bloody mess.

They say you know when you’ve hit rock bottom. Looking back, I hit it more than once when my marriage broke down. The airport incident was certainly up there (or rather down there) with some of my lowest points…

In hindsight, washing back a Valium with swigs of vodka in the Uber en route to the airport might not have been the smartest move! It was February, my husband Andrew Johns and I had separated in the previous December. Everything about the break-up was raw and surreal. I kept looking at my left hand in a panic, fearing I had lost my engagement ring, only to remember…

I was in LA for work and had spent the last ten days busying myself with meetings and in complete denial that my marriage was over. I also believed my husband when he said that the woman staying in our family home, who was visiting from the US, was just a friend. But we’ll get to that…

Packing up the hotel room I noticed the half empty bottle of Grey Goose vodka next to the TV. I decided to bring it along rather than leave it at the hotel – ‘Waste not want not!’ as my mother often said. Although in this case I am sure she would have rather I left it. I popped a soft drink from the mini bar in my hand luggage, ready to act as a mixer. The ride out to the airport was 45 minutes and I planned to have a cheeky drink or two. The trip had been full of entertaining and parties and, quite frankly, as I was about to head back home to ‘reality’, I wanted to be numb.

As I hopped into the car with two of my colleagues an email pinged in my inbox. It was from my lawyer. For those of you reading this who haven’t gone through the trauma of a divorce, it’s a bit like going to war. Going to war against the person you once loved the most in the world. It’s brutal. Every time I read correspondence from the ‘other side’ it was like getting winded. I couldn’t breathe. My lawyer had forwarded on the first of many emails from my ex’s team. Those emails never got easier but the first one knocked me for six.

I’m an anxious flyer at the best of times, but my anxiety was through the roof once I had read and re-read the email. My doctor had given me Valium, and I planned on taking one once I was on the plane. Without really thinking about it I necked a swig of vodka straight from the bottle and washed the pill down right there and then. I didn’t want to face the mess my life had become.

The drive out to the airport was bonkers enough without the added buzz of self-medication. Somehow, we had scored a rather unusual Uber. We had ordered a Tarago, but the driver arrived with what was basically a nightclub on wheels. As well as the usual soft drinks and refreshments you came to expect with an Uber there was a full disco light system and mini mirror ball set up. Only in Hollywood, hey.

Sia’s Chandelier was playing through the sound system. The three of us were singing at the top of our lungs, with our hands in the air. Well, I had my hands in the air. I was clinging on to the last few moments of joy and silliness. I figured I had till we landed back in Sydney to ride the high of the trip and avoid all thoughts of what lay ahead. The more my mind crept back to the lawyer’s email, the more I drank to block it out.

It was a military operation weaving all our suitcases through the airport full of other travellers and finally to the Qantas check-in desk. I started to feel a bit wobbly, and I sat down on one of the cases. And that’s the last thing I remember…

There is that split second or two when you come to after a massive one, still half asleep and completely oblivious to the night before. Warm and safe, enveloped in the bedcovers. My body started twitching out of its slumber, my eyelids half opened as the morning light washed over my face. We had been away from home for ten days and, having slept in a few hotels, I didn’t think anything was odd about waking up in another strange room. Then, suddenly, my eyes were wide open and I was drinking in my surroundings. Um, I should have been on a flight.

I tried to lift my head off the pillow but as I did, I realised I had the headache to end all headaches. It was so bad I had to close one eye and focus with the other. I was lying in a king-sized bed. From the crisp white linen sheets and soft pillow, I could see there was a bathroom door to the right of me, and straight ahead an internal door to what I presumed was a lounge room. I moved my head much more slowly this time and looked down at what I was wearing. I was in a pair of grey oversized airline pyjamas that weren’t mine. OK, what the fuck has happened? Fear took over, my heart started pounding so hard and fast that for a second I thought I was about to have my first panic attack.

Now, as this particularly horrific incident was over seven years ago, I can almost laugh about it. Almost. When you have made an absolute A-grade tit of yourself, suffering from an alcohol-induced amnesia is a blessing. You can cringe as your friends detail your actions, but as you can’t remember a thing, you can almost fool yourself into thinking it didn’t happen.

But it happened.

What was relayed to me about that night was as follows: By all accounts, after we arrived at LA airport and checked our luggage in, I appear to have ‘checked out’. According to my friend Maggie (and embarrassingly some iPhone images back up the story) this is what happened next…

It was like I had been hypnotised. ‘As I count back from ten, you’ll go to sleep…’ and I was out. Except no clicking fingers could bring me back from my self-induced coma. I went floppy and became incoherent, just as we were given our boarding passes and passports back at the check-in desk. (That’ll be the Grey Goose with a benzodiazepine chaser I’m tipping!)

In a nutshell it seems that the vodka (I may have had more than one swig on the drive to the airport…) and Valium together crash-tackled my brain and faculties. The combination rendered me a stumbling, stuttering, blancmange of a human. I lost the use of my limbs and ability to speak just as we were about to queue up for the security check. My quick-thinking colleagues commandeered a wheelchair, explaining to airport staff I was pregnant and feeling unwell. Maggie had the foresight to put my sunglasses on me as I sat paralytic in the chair. I then appeared to do my best impersonation of Elizabeth Taylor (wheelchair-bound Liz, not the young National Velvet starlet) meets Bernie from Weekend at Bernie’s. I have no idea how I made it through all the armed security guards and the stand-up X-ray machine without getting carted off and arrested, but I did.

For those of you who’ve been to a US airport you’ll know first-hand that they are quite scary places! Very scary, actually (and rightly so, they take their airport security seriously!). The police and security guards all carry guns and I’m always petrified going through the body scanner section, even though I know the worst crime I might be committing is not wearing matching socks. So how on earth I got through this set up in such a wasted state, without being detained or having a cavity search is beyond me. God only knows what I was saying! And what was with me randomly flipping the bird at poor unsuspecting strangers?! What a knob. Apologies to anyone reading this that I gave the finger to at LAX airport that evening. And it got way worse.

We were lucky enough to have access to the Qantas lounge, an impressive space that had just recently opened at the airport. Into the lounge, sans wheelchair, we all went. The girls found a quiet area and plonked me down in the hope no one would notice the state of me.

Once safely inside the airline lounge things took a turn for the worse, or rather my stomach did. Again, I have no memory of any of this, but at some point I must have lurched into semi-consciousness and indicated I needed the loo. I managed to lock the door of the disabled bathroom and hurl the contents of my stomach all over thousands of tiny white marble tiles, and all down my clothes. I would imagine it was around this point it became clear to my friends and the airline staff I probably wasn’t well enough to fly, and I – like many planes before me at LAX – found myself grounded. This is also the part of the story where the oversized grey pyjamas come in and my outfit comes off. Again, I am incredibly grateful for my vodka-infused amnesia.

I am also grateful to the airline staff who were able to arrange flights to Sydney the following night (Qantas, thank you).

Somehow, I am presuming with the aid of the wheelchair, my friends were able to get me out of the airport and safely to a hotel for the night… To end this highly embarrassing chain of events, once in the hotel my friends undressed me and put me in the shower to wash the vomit out of my hair. I am still mortified even writing that sentence.

I spent that next morning in LA in tears. I was so ashamed of my behaviour. I felt sick to my stomach and the guilt was crippling. I couldn’t believe that I had caused so much drama. I then thought about my young son back in Sydney. I had to lie to my parents who were helping look after him and say I’d had food poisoning and threw up in the lounge and then wasn’t allowed to fly. I felt like the world’s worst mother and daughter.

24 hours later I sat in the same airline lounge, but this time I was cowering into my peppermint tea and hoping none of the staff from the day before were working. The anxiety about returning home to my broken life crashed over me.

CHAPTER 2 ANNE AND PETER: A LOVE STORY

At this point in the book, you know my marriage has failed (the book title was a bit of a ‘spoiler’ I guess), that I am lucky not to have a lifetime ban from LAX or be on a global airport-lounge ‘watch’ list and that I don’t do blow jobs. And that’s about it.

Let me fill you in on a little more about my life pre-divorce. It may give you some idea of why I still believe in romance and still want my happy ending.

My parents, as I said before, are called Anne and Peter Mahoney. I thank the universe regularly (maybe a little less regularly between the years of 13 and 17) that I was born to them. As I write this book they recently celebrated 50 years happily married, a real ‘couple goal’ these days. Neither of them have ever been between husbands (or wives) – such an inspiration.

Although they grew up only a mile and a half from each other in Sunderland (a city in the north east of England) Anne and Peter never crossed paths until fate, and The Righteous Brothers, brought them together in October ’65. Peter was 17, in his last year at Bede Grammar and a mad Sunderland FC fan. If he got the grades at A-Level he was off to Aston University in Birmingham to study to be a Civil Engineer. Anne was 16, a working girl (not that sort of working girl) spending her days as an audit clerk at a chartered accountants. She had been a keen netball player.

It was a chilly Saturday night and Anne and her friend Jackie had just arrived at the Sunderland Polytechnic for the weekly dance (discos didn’t hit till the 70s). Enough money for a cider each, the girls had already discussed that if one of them was offered a drink they would ask for two vodka and limes; sadly no one asked. Cider it was.

Peter, there with mates, had spotted Anne a few weeks prior while he was on the top deck of the bus and she was walking with friends. Seeing her again across the student hall’s dancefloor he knew he had to approach her. It took him a few songs and a pint before he made the bold move of asking her to dance. Dressed as the fifth Beatle, in a suit, white shirt with skinny tie and hair in the classic moptop style, he walked over to where Anne and Jackie were standing. Anne was in a dress she had made herself (she was and still is quite the seamstress) – a mini with short puff sleeves – and she was happy to dance with the handsome and very tall (six foot four) young man when asked.

And as The Righteous Brothers belted out Unchained Melody and sang about hungering for the special ladies’ touch, a hungry Pete went in for the kiss. (I am using some artistic licence at this point – details from those present were a bit sketchy.) And according to one half of the pair dancing, it was love at first sight.

After their second date, Peter (who was wearing a rather cool jumper, apparently) wanted to know if Anne was reading to start courting? He had two or three other young women on the back burner but was keenest on Anne. Was she in? She was.

No messing around with Peter, by the end of week two of the courtship he wanted to know if she would marry him. Not a down-on-one-knee full-blown proposal, more of an ‘Are you in for the long haul?’ type question.

Pete did go down on one knee for the full-blown proposal experience a few years later on Christmas Eve, and Anne said yes!

The couple were married the following year in the church they had both been baptised in as babies. Their wedding night was spent in a B&B in town, in a dodgy bed that sank in the middle. Very romantic. My investigation also uncovered the details that the happy couple hadn’t waited till their wedding night to consummate the union. That boat had long since sailed. I also got clarity that Dad was Mum’s first and that it was ‘more or less the same for your father’. Again, strangely, details seem a bit sketchy here…

So, what is their secret to notching up over 50 years together since they said ‘I do’? Is it Dad’s incredible dancing and taste in knitwear? Is it Mum’s sewing skills or the fact that she’d had no other relationship to compare it to?

It seems that it’s a combination of things. The old cliché of ‘opposites attract’ plays a huge part: Dad has his feet firmly on the ground and Mum is more ‘up and away’. Mum has a glass overflowing whereas my dad doesn’t even have a glass at all at times! It is Dad’s intelligence and quick wit that still has Mum in stitches. For Dad, it’s Mum’s positive outlook and happy nature. If it was left to him, they wouldn’t go anywhere or see anyone – Dad at times would be happy to be a hermit. But once Mum has suggested a day out, restaurant, holiday or even moving from one side of the world to the other, Dad’s got it booked and sorted almost immediately.

In short, they are best mates and haven’t once thought of being with anyone else in the world.

I loved learning more about my parents’ romantic beginnings and continued marriage success. I also wondered if my ability to fall for someone instantly had been genetically passed down to me by my dad – after all, he knew Mum was the ‘one’ after the second date.

Could be. Though it seems that while we are both fast love-fallers, Dad has just been more successful with where he fell.

Quick disclaimer: after reading this chapter my folks were concerned their marriage sounded ‘too perfect’. To be clear, it isn’t, and my mum said she even threw a kitchen chair at my dad once! Blimey Anne.

CHAPTER 3 WHERE DO I COME FROM?

I popped into the world at 2.30am on Christmas Day, in Durham hospital in the north east of England. I am very grateful my folks didn’t let the festive birthday influence my name choice. I could have easily been a Holly or Carol, but Anne and Pete opted for Cathrine. Yes, Cathrine, that isn’t a misprint – there’s no ‘e’ in the middle. My birth date and name have been two well-worn topics of discussion for me over my lifetime. In the case of the missing ‘e’ (that sounds like a Sherlock Holmes story) my mum said she didn’t want the ‘er’ in the middle of my name. I have paid dearly for this choice; incorrect plane tickets, bank cards and myriad missing emails. And disclosing my birthday is generally followed by: ‘Oh, the same day as Jesus!’ To which I respond: ‘We have similar hair but I don’t have the beard… although more facial hair as the years pass.’ Then there’s: ‘Do you hate having your birthday and Christmas on the same day?’ (No, I don’t.) And if I had money for every time someone asked, ‘Do you get...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Does My Rock Bottom Look Big In This?
• Chapter 2: Anne and Peter: A Love Story
• Chapter 3: Where Do I Come From?
• Chapter 4: Puff Balls, Perms and Heartbreak
• Chapter 5: She’s Like The Wind
• Chapter 6: Dry Humping, Mix Tapes and Chafing
• Chapter 7: Pick’n’Mix and a Cherry Pop
• Chapter 8: Ooh, Ah, Cantona!
• Chapter 9: John Snow Changed My Life
• Chapter 10: Hands, Knees and Boomps-a-Daisy
• Chapter 11: Worth The Wait
• Chapter 12: Technically It Was 12 Weeks
• Chapter 13: Chest Rubs and Posh & Becks
• Chapter 14: Front Page News
• Chapter 15: I Am The Resurrection
• Chapter 16: Getting My Gollum On
• Chapter 17: Is She or Isn’t She? (She Isn’t)
• Chapter 18: The Most Important Playlist Of My Life
• Chapter 19: Up The Duff
• Chapter 20: We’ve Got A Squirter
• Chapter 21: What’s Your Dog Called?
• Chapter 22: The Hokey-Pokey
• Chapter 23: Should I Buy The Shoes?
• Chapter 24: Don’t Look Back, You’re Not Going That Way
• Chapter 25: Up, Up and Away…
• Chapter 26: Mrs, Miss, Ms – Who Am I Now?
• Chapter 27: Learning To Cry Without Making A Sound
• Chapter 28: Sandy, Oh Sandy
• Chapter 29: The Pink Taco Almost Rides Again…
• Chapter 30: Netflix And Refill
• Chapter 31: This Is Not A Self Help Book… I’m Still In Therapy
• Chapter 32: There’s A Bond Girl In My Bath
• Chapter 33: Hans Solo Parenting
• Chapter 34: A Dead Ringer For Tom Hardy… If You Squinted
• Chapter 35: Missionary In A Moonboot
• Chapter 36: I’ll Be Home For Christmas
• Chapter 37: Swiping, Stockings and a Sonnet
• Chapter 38: No Balaclavas
• Chapter 39: Picking Up At After School Care
• Chapter 40: The Thing You Love About LA Is You
• Chapter 41: Happy 40 Not 40th
• Chapter 42: I Want Fucking Fireworks…
• The ‘Currently Between Husbands’ Playlist
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright