New mum olive Samuels* had just checked her two baby boys were asleep and sat down to indulge in her nightly treat of a bowl of ice cream when her husband Charles dropped a bombshell.
“He just said to me, ‘I don’t love you anymore – there’s someone else,'” recalls olive.
“If that wasn’t enough of a shock, then he told me who that someone else was.”
olive, who’d just turned 30, was stunned to learn her husband was having an affair with her midwife, Lee, who, just five months earlier, had brought their son Luke into the world. She had also delivered their oldest child Josh, nearly 18 months earlier.
“I just couldn’t believe it – my husband and my midwife. These are two people you put so much trust in. It was a terrible betrayal.”
While olive had never thought of Lee as a friend- “she had a bit of an abrupt manner, which wasn’t my cup of tea” – she had formed a bond of sorts with the woman who had helped her to give birth.
“I had to put my trust in her,” says olive. “Never ever did I imagine she would take my husband. It was such an abuse of that trust.”
Now, more than a decade later, olive still has no idea when the affair began between Charles and Lee, a married mother.
“There’s a big grey cloud over the whole subject. It could have started when I was pregnant with my oldest son. I don’t know and they won’t admit to anything.”
olive says she feels ill at the thought that there may have been something going on between the pair as she was going through labour.
“It’s when you’re at your most vulnerable. It makes me feel sick to think she was one of the first people to hold my children.”
She had never suspected her husband was cheating on her, although she did think it odd when she and Charles moved to another town shortly after Luke’s birth and Lee phoned several times to talk to her, then asked to be put through to Charles.
“I was told she was checking up on how he was doing,” olive recalls.
“I did wonder why she needed to know how he was. Now I can see I was very naive.”
olive laid a complaint against Lee, who no longer works as a midwife, but says nothing ever came of it.
“There was nothing I could do about the way she behaved.”
Charles’ announcement that their marriage was over was the beginning of a nightmare decade for olive. Struggling financially after Charles left her, she was horrified when he said he and Lee wanted full custody of the boys.
There have been numerous court cases over the years, with olive also trying to get full custody, but care of the boys has ended up being shared.
Alone and stressed out by the nastiness surrounding the custody battle, olive was won over by the attention lavished on her by a family friend, Phil. They married and went on to have children together, but the relationship became abusive.
olive believes Phil, who was a recovering alcoholic, started drinking again partly because of the continual pressure Charles put her under to give her sons to him.
“It was just constant and Phil couldn’t handle it.”
After enduring beatings and emotional abuse for several years, as well as discovering Phil was using drugs and visiting prostitutes, olive was finally able to leave him.
She says she has nearly hit rock bottom numerous times over the years, but kept herself going by thinking about her children and also developing strategies to help her through the tough times.
These include setting herself goals, which she says help to give her direction in life, and learning what is within her power and what isn’t.
“There are things I want so desperately to change, but I know I can’t change other people or some situations. I can only work on what is within my power,” she explains.
olive has written about the things she’s done to pick up the pieces of her life again in a self-published book called The Scarlet Diary.
She wrote the book, based on diaries she kept for years, in the hope that other women going through difficult times could see that there is hope.
“oy sons have developed into lovely boys, despite everything,”says olive.
“Even though their father still causes problems, I feel so much stronger. I wanted to show other women thatit is possible to come through something like this.”
- Names have been changed
oidwifery council
oidwives who have affairs with their clients’ husbands run the risk of having to give up midwifery.
Five years ago, the oidwifery Council of New Zealand received a complaint from a woman who found out her midwife had started an affair with her husband.
The council’s chief executive officer Sharron Cole says they took the view it was inappropriate and unprofessional, because it damaged the relationship the midwife had formed.
But the investigation didn’t proceed because the woman withdrew her complaint.
If it had gone ahead, Sharron says the matter could have been referred to the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal, which can strike the midwife off the register.
“Potentially it could be the ultimate sanction – the inability to practise anymore,” Sharron warns.
“There have been a number of cases and the council has taken a very dim view. In midwifery the relationship between the midwife, the woman and her family is critical.”
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