How to lead a double life

If it sounds complicated, it’s because, like much of 21st-century family life, it is. When my ex and I agreed on separation and divorce in 2000, the process was largely civilised and amicable. By the time we went our separate ways, my ex had a girlfriend and I was several months into my relationship with Carsten, a fellow writer whom I met at a literary festival in Ottawa, and who is firmly settled in Denmark. As neither Carsten nor I could uproot because it would have involved either abandoning our children, or kidnapping them, cue a logistical conundrum: how do we manage to spend the maximum time a) with our children; b) as a couple; and c) as a step-family? We agreed that the one thing we had working to our huge advantage was the fact that we are both writers. Being self-employed, we are freer to travel than most people and our work is portable. Swiftly, a series of mental Venn diagrams began to configure themselves and, as the mists cleared, the phrase “international commuting” had written itself in vaporised aviation fuel across the sky, courtesy of easyJet. Back on the earth’s crust, the boys had by now settled into their own weekly house-hopping regimen: after some negotiation, my ex and I had decided that the fairest option for all concerned was the increasingly classic broken-family solution of dual residency: a week with Mum, a week with Dad, with changeovers on a Friday. Carsten had a similar, longer-established arrangement with his own ex, though with a different ratio of days and a Wednesday handover.

And so we all began to live in new ways. Reflecting on it at the time, it struck me that many people live split existences. Couples who are unable to live together often spend years commuting to and fro, and children who go to boarding school must feel that their lives are divided. Thousands of people who come to Britain from other countries to find work are forced to be apart from their loved ones for long periods. And, needless to say, all shared residency children live two lives: one with Mum and one with Dad. All parents of those children also have two lives: the life they share with their kids and the life they have without them.

Now aged 17 and 11, the boys’ nomadic existence has become a matter of routine. “So where is home?” I asked my older son recently.

It’s a question I have asked myself often. “When I’m here, it’s here,” he said, after some thought. “And when I’m there, it’s there.” Simple, really: home is where you are.

Nevertheless, having two of my loved ones in one country and the other two in another is hardly ideal. I didn’t exactly sit down and plan my life to be an eccentric mess. Like everyone I envisaged a romantic dream with a perfect work/life balance and a cherry on top. But if I’ve ended up having a bit of both, I’m not complaining because somehow, against all odds, it works and has done for nearly six years.

Carsten, who is less free than I am to travel, still comes to London at least once every two months, and my baggage is not in Hong Kong, and there’s never the danger of being stuck in a rut, although my diary looks as if I’m planning the invasion of a banana republic. And when it comes to the carbon footprint I’m developing, I’ll need to plant several forests over the coming decades to neutralise the destruction I am helping to wreak, climate-wise.

Long before I began to lead my split existence, I was fascinated by stories of men who managed to have two spouses and two sets of children, with neither family knowing anything about the other’s existence until death struck, then boom: the secret exploded like a dirty bomb. What if the über-compartmentaliser accidentally left something he shouldn’t in the wrong home? I always wondered. Where did he spend birthdays? Thankfully, subterfuge isn’t called for in my own divided life — good grief, it’s complicated enough already — but there are logistics galore. As well as being intrigued by the notion of men (and it was always men, for practical reasons to do with pregnancy bumps) leading double lives, I was also fascinated by people who described themselves as “dividing their time” between countries X and Y. And sometimes, also country Z. It seemed impossibly glamorous but also highly unlikely. How did they manage it? Now, speaking as one of them, and from the thick of it, “glamorous” is not the first adjective that springs to mind. It’s a lifestyle that doesn’t leave much room for spontaneity or manoeuvre. It means having extremely tolerant friends who can’t really count on you, it means confusing your paper boy, it means saying no to invitations, and it means booking family holidays nine months ahead. It means never being able to commit to anything, work-wise, that happens on a weekly basis, eschewing pets and fantasising about having a clone who can go to the parent-teacher evening in London while you hold a dinner party in Copenhagen. But the single most marked feature about it is the organisational skills it demands: mine are now so well-honed that I suspect I could step in at Military Command Headquarters somewhere and not shame myself.

My diary is cross-referenced and zig-zagged and colour-coded to the point of insanity, and I know the schedules of several budget airlines by heart. I have a rough idea of which clothes I keep in which country, and try to keep a good stock in each place, along with a hairdryer and a toothbrush-charger, but I have never mastered the art of travelling with nothing more than a passport. Because Britain and Denmark have separate currencies, I have two wallets, and continue to pray for the euro.

In London I shop once a week (doing it online from abroad saves the trip) and in Copenhagen, while the bike rules, it’s a more frequent (though shared) ritual, with interesting Nordic food choices. I am now quite a connoisseur of rye bread and smoked fish and can dangle heavy shopping bags from the handlebars as I bump across charming cobblestoned streets. Slowly, with time, these different states have created their own sort of routine, but never enough for anything to become so humdrum that I’d take it for granted. Mornings in London involve a 6.45 start and a scramble to get the boys to school. In Copenhagen, it’s a nice lie-in, with breakfast in bed when Carsten comes back from the school drop-off. Part-time parenting certainly has its up-side. I’ve also picked up a new language, a whole new set of friends and colleagues, and acquaintanceship with a culture I barely knew before, despite my having Danish roots.

People are always informing us, knowledgeably, that the reason our relationship is so romantic is precisely because we don’t live together all the time. Well, it’s not a statement we’re able to put to the test, but if a genie appeared offering a wish, we agree that we would both go for the all-living-together-with-the-three-kids-in-one-country option.

In the absence of a genie, however, I point sceptical critics of our lifestyle in the direction of the Central London monument to the animals — pigeons, donkeys, horses, dolphins, cats and dogs — that were recruited for wartime service and lost their little lives in the process. Its caption reads, baldly: “They had no choice”.

Our circumstances are somewhat different from those poor martyred beasts: we are, after all, talking about love, not war. But the imperative is similar: what else can we do? And as Carsten and I prepare to enter the seventh year of our long-term, long-distance relationship, we see no reason why it shouldn’t continue to function successfully until the kids have flown the nest and we adults can finally live together on a permanent basis. And, in the meantime, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it is that I prefer making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear to a mountain out of a molehill.

And to be honest, I love it. What I love most of all are the occasions — and because of different school holidays they amount to no more then a few weeks a year — when the people that I love most in all the world: my boys, my man, and his daughter, are all together, with me, under one roof. Whose roof it is, or where, doesn’t matter.

But that, for me, is home.

My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time, Liz Jensen’s latest novel (Bloomsbury, £12.99), is available at £11.69: 0870 1608080, www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy