Journalism isn't an easy life, especially for a woman.
Okay, everyone moans about their jobs and it has provided me with an income for over two decades -- albeit often a sporadic income -- but no-one has ever become rich while working at the sharp end of the pencil.
Because of this, most professionals have more than one string to their bow. Some write books, some write copy for advertisers, some write articles for the endless number of magazines -- paper and online - under pseudonyms. Others still have entirely different part time careers to help through the dry times.
In my case, I have had my husband Dan's large and reliable income as a fall-back, so when commissions were few, I have been able to explore other, less financially rewarding and in some cases, less legitimate avenues of my profession, as well as most recently going back to the world of academia.
Not all of these avenues were known to my husband. He did not know that I wrote the occasional article and case study for websites designed to provide online support to couples in shall we say, unconventional relationships. He did not know that, using skills obtained in my first degree then honed by real life, I had become something of a specialist in the field of consanguineous relationships -- all under carefully protected pseudonyms of course.
In particular, he did not know about my secret side-line in writing erotic stories for several online publishers. These had been based on a small number of themes, one of which was the perennially popular and, to those not involved personally, permanently perplexing problem of love and sex between family members.
Incest, as it is so often and so casually described.
Exactly how this originated I will, for the moment at least, keep to myself. Suffice to say, it was enough to give me a considerable empathy with the subject but even so, I was looking forward with some trepidation to the demands a full-on PhD programme would put on me, my family and my marriage.
Dan of course had been supportive right from the beginning when I had first broached the idea of going back to University two years ago to study for a Masters' Degree. I wasn't sure how he would feel about me remaining a non-earner for another three years at least, so I had initially dressed it up as a change to the way I worked.
"You want to go freelance?" he asked, surprised but to my relief, not annoyed. "I thought you had to go back full-time as soon as you'd finished your Masters. I thought your career depended on it, Rache."
"They're short of budget," I lied. "So it suits them too. They offered part-time but I wanted the freedom, you know?"
Dan sighed. It was by no means the first time his wife of twenty-five years had made a sudden and unexpected change of course in her life. As before, the man that I loved but didn't deserve, tried to understand what I was saying and to find a way of helping make it happen.
"It's not as if we need the money," he conceded thoughtfully. "But I thought you wanted your career to..."
"I've had second thoughts," I interrupted. "I've enjoyed this master's degree so much, I've got a real taste for academic study now."
"How long would a Doctorate take?" he asked.
"Three, maybe four years."
"And you're sure you can stick it out that long?"
"I've never been surer about anything."
Ditching my career and returning to University after nearly two successful decades in a high-pressure job in journalism had been hard work, but the love of psychology my bachelor's degree had engendered had returned almost immediately.
I was where I belonged, if not in life, at least as far as my career was concerned.
And who knows how my course of study might help the other, more difficult, more secret aspects of my life?
Everybody has secrets, but some are much darker than others. Most people lock that kind of secret away and try to get on with life; others have secrets so dark or so significant that they keep rising to the surface and will not let go.
Like most people, I have something in both of these categories.
Some of my secrets are small; a concealed inability to resist chocolate raisins; a hidden love of cheap romantic novels; a taste for exotic, sexy lingerie. Nothing serious or illegal, but given my feminist history, the sort of thing my colleagues would laugh at.
Other secrets are larger; a side-line in reading and writing erotic stories; an occasional evening's anonymous cyber-sex with a stranger when my husband is away. Nothing to be too ashamed of but which might hurt my marriage or damage my career as a serious political journalist if they ever came out.
One or two of my secrets are big; too big to be openly discussed; things to be suppressed as hard as possible for as long as possible.
I had thought my biggest secret was one of these; something I could make myself forget and get on with my life. For years this had been the case, but as I grew older and the distractions of my grown-up family had reduced, it had kept coming back to haunt me.
Memories and emotions from deep in my past had been rising to the surface more and more frequently and more and more intensely until, at the age of fifty-three, I realised I could dismiss them no longer and had to look them in the face.
Returning to University to pursue my academic studies had been intended to help with this but had backfired. Far from making my past easier to deal with, my recently acquired masters' degree in Psychology had only heightened my interest.
Instead of helping me dismiss my past, it had awakened a deep desire to explore the whole subject in much more depth. The precious doctorate I had come to desire was the next step in that process.
I knew that the subject of my research would bring me face to face with episodes and incidents in my life that would be painful.
It would bring me into contact with people who had been faced with similar decisions to those I had been forced to take, but who had chosen different paths.
It would make me question the whole of the last forty years of my life. But it had to be done, my sanity depended on it and there would never be a better time than now.
"But why incest, for God's sake?" Dan asked, genuinely puzzled. "Isn't it just child abuse? Won't you get really upset by it all? It's happened before, remember?"
I had been expecting this. My husband wasn't a man to simply accept things unchallenged and this was a big thing for anyone to accept. It was true that in the past, my journalistic investigations had taken me into worlds and places that had distressed me badly, but this was different.
I had already been to these places. I already knew what awaited me.
The real reasons for my choosing this topic for my Doctorate were long, complicated and dated all the way back to my childhood, but these could not be discussed. Instead I told my husband the same half-truths I had told my supervisor.
"There's plenty of work going on about the abuse element already," I lied again. "And it's not just children. Okay, when you think of incest, child abuse is the first thing that comes to mind; Josef Fritzl and men like him. That certainly is abuse and should be a crime in anyone's book. But that's not what I'm proposing to study."
"Go on," he said, unconvinced.
"Consensual adult incest is a real and growing thing," I explained. "There's more to it than just the issue of abuse and protection. There are real medical and social implications involved, hence the funding."
