Well, here I am on night 500. It’s another unkind one, so I do fun things like look up exactly how many it’s been. Sometimes it feels like it’s only been a few months, other times it’s like I’ve always been here and I’m not sure how many unkind nights I’ll have to get through to feel okay again, but it’s apparently more than 500.
Google say that on average, it takes one year for every five, which means all I’ve got to do is make it roughly 430 more nights and I’ll be golden. However, I’m thinking that it probably takes longer for this kind of divorce- and I’m not all the way divorced, so maybe I shouldn’t have even started that clock yet.
Typical divorces are very different from what I’ve been forced to go through. In most cases, the couples tried, sometimes even after infidelity, to work it out because they each recognized that their marriage had value- and when you’ve got children, marriage always does. I’m sure all divorces are difficult and take time to heal from, but moving on is going to be easier in any case where your spouse didn’t make extra sure to emotionally kneecap you on his mad dash out the door and into the arms of a workplace homewrecker; so eager to burn our lives down that he started his over with someone else before leaving.
I’m sure this time he’ll do it right.
There’s a popular belief that there are five stages of grief. People think that you hit each one like a checkpoint and then *poof*- you’re cured! If you’ve ever grieved over anything, you know what nonsense this is.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Sure, I’ve been to each of those several times, but a snippet from my own process has me going through ‘rage’ as opposed to ‘anger’. Not to mention hollowness, dissociation, dread, anxiety, regret, massive disappointment that I would have never thought possible to have in another human being, and just feeling so hopelessly lost. And I don’t feel them in any order. There is nothing linear about the grieving process. In fact on really dark days, I feel all of them at once.
I was a stable person in my marriage. My husband did not have to talk me down from panic attacks or wrap his arms around mine to comfort me while I cried on the floor in the fetal position. Because before this…. that wasn’t my life. It wasn’t my life because I knew I had the tether of him there. For me, knowing I had someone there to catch me if I fell, even if I didn’t fall often, was an immensely stabilizing force. That’s what love is.
But now, I’ve been falling for 500 nights. I still get up every day. Only sometimes those hooks in my heart are tugged a little harder. Walking around with that added weight dragging on me will build up a different kind of strength, but I still have nights like this.
I have my own interests. I can enjoy my own company. Still, sometimes I still reach for the comfort of my partner. I’m a single mom now (Thanks! I hate it.) and when things are too heavy and I need someone to lean on or when things are bright with the girls and I just instinctively still want to share these moments with the father of my children, I reach…. and I’m met only with my own shadow. That’s when I’m having to navigate not just being alone, but loneliness. I was alone a lot in my marriage because of our schedules, I am fine with being alone, but I’ve never done well with loneliness. Loneliness is a cutting thing and it cuts me down in all kinds of little ways.
My husband once looked me in the eye and declared:
“I can’t be the only person in your fucking life!”
It’s probably not that unusual for your spouse to be your lone social outlet when you’ve got young children. I’ve seen this quite a bit in divorce support groups where the woman had devoted herself so long to the household, to the kids and to her husband, that she didn’t even realize how many resources she didn’t have for herself once suddenly in need. My husband understood why I didn’t surround myself with friends. He understood that it was hard for me to get close to people because he had been the same way. I was his only confidant too. Was. Remember, he left only after he’d spent months building an Amanda Mullen based social life.
I can’t be the only person in your fucking life
He said this after he walked out, when I was trying to make him understand I needed him to start really talking to me; that his just visiting every day, forcing me to make agonizingly meaningless small talk while he nonchalantly shredded my heart apart one layer at a time, then ducking out at bedtime to maintain the bad illusion that nothing was wrong for the girls’ sake was destroying me. He said this to me knowing well that he had been the only close person in my life for our whole marriage
I can’t be the only person in your fucking life
Thanks Love, for letting me in on that newly gained wisdom on your way out. I’m sure I can guess who inspired it.
I’ve never made friends easily and like romantic relationships, friendships have to just happen organically over time- you know, that thing moms are always complaining they have just too much of? And like romantic relationships, the older you get, the harder it is to find them because the more people are spoken for. Everyone already has their core friend groups long established by middle age.
When I had my daughters, my focus, my time, went into them and I didn’t have much space to forge new bonds with other adults. Single, childless people couldn’t really relate to my life, but it turns out I didn’t have much in common with most other moms either, other than the fact that we had all gestated small folks- and that alone is not basis for a close connection.
I wish I’d somehow been able to at least nourish the casual friendships I’d had before, I’d always meant to, but I never found that time. Then suddenly, time ran out while didn’t even know I was supposed to be watching the clock. Luckily, it turned out that I had many genuinely good people in the periphery of my life that came running when they heard me calling for help after my daughters and I were dumped directly into a crisis.
A bunch of people I sort of knew had offered to be there for me if I ever needed to talk- another kindness, but have you ever poured your weeping, bloody heart out to a casual aquaintance ? Maybe it’s just how I am, but I can’t do that and not ultimately feel worse about myself. You could argue that that’s what this blog is, my venting to strangers. But I write it in the hopes it finds someone who might need to read it, someone who could relate, someone who might be on the verge of making a devastating mistake and who might rethink it because they connect with what I’m going through in a way that makes them reconsider.
The difference between writing a post and calling a half stranger up whilst hyperventilating in the corner of my room hoping my children won’t walk in is that here my thoughts are focused…. more or less. And that I am not as vulnerable.
My long winded point is that while my therapist sometimes has to remind me that I’ve actually come a long way on this “healing journey”, I still have too many of these nights without anyone that I trust that can be there for me- so all I can do is ride them out. But it hurts. I want to heal, so I don’t pretend it doesn’t, but when I have to close my daughters out because I don’t want them to know how much pain I’m still in, it feels so isolating.
So, some cynical advice to any isolated stay at home moms on this unkind night is that I know it’s hard to make friends as an adult in the best of circumstances, but try. Sign up for the PTA or something, or a book club (those are real things, right?) or even just lightly join a cult- I’m pretty sure joining a cult is a surefire way never be lonely. In fact I think not having close people in your life is the very thing cults prefer in new members, so maybe I should start looking into it too. Perhaps there are brochures at my local library- this is New Orleans after all.
You can never truly be sure that your husband is going to always be there- even though you both literally took vows swearing to do exactly that. You can never know if maybe he’ll come down with a sort of dyslexia where those promises are concerned and mix up that bit about being there in sickness and in health with fleeing from you and your children just as an actual plague comes to town. You can never know what might take him from your life -a midlife crisis or an incredibly basic, opportunistic coworker, but if you’re lucky enough, maybe he’ll just drop dead before anything of the sort happens.
Either way, you’ll be glad to have those cult buddies established beforehand.
