Divorce is an unraveling. The hardest part is putting yourself back together again.
A wife at 29 and divorced at 62, the question became: who am I now? The shedding of the skin I wore for so long has been the hardest and most vital work I've ever done.
We stood in the UPS office, signing copies of our Marital Settlement Agreement presided over by a blue-uniformed clerk notarizing our signatures. This, I thought, is where it ends, 33 years of a cross-cultural, transatlantic marriage.
It was a little over six months from the day I told my ex-husband I wanted the divorce. A half year of the unraveling of our marriage, with the inevitable hurt and lashing out, resentment and accusations, the bargaining and negotiations, the reckoning with the past.
I moved out a month after I initiated the divorce. When I went to meet with him at our house—the house he had agreed to purchase in a buy-out—I felt a strange sense of dislocation, the stranger knocking on the door of her own home.
You chose this, I reminded myself, time and time again, when a small scared voice inside me whispered in alarm, “What have you done? We’re all alone out here. We don’t know how to do this.” I have come to know this younger part of myself very well over the past year. I reassured her I wouldn’t abandon her to make him feel better. I would fight for a fair deal. I would stay true to myself and to the intention I carried from the beginning: to complete our marriage with love and compassion for both him and myself.
That day I signed the official document attesting to “a marriage irretrievably broken” (which seems so lyrical for a legal document), I knew we had been breaking apart—unraveling—for years. I did not feel supported in all the ways I felt I should be supported in our marriage, and the weight of that betrayal—which was also a self-betrayal—eventually became too much. I would either sink to my knees or get up and find the door.
There is my version of the story and there is his version.
And then there is the story of us.
Two people from different countries who fell in love when they were young, married, had two beautiful daughters, traveled the world, lived in three countries and had a good life for a lot of years. Because of what was good between us, and because of who I am, a woman who didn’t give up on her marriage or anything else, I held on for many more years than I should have. I realize that now. Behind the “good enough” was something very bad: extinguishing my own light to keep the home fires burning.
The day we signed the divorce papers I turned to that day’s entry in the poet Mark Nepo’s Book of Awakening, which has become my most important spiritual text. In the entry “What Keeps Us From Shedding,” he wrote:
“When we cease to shed what’s dead in us in order to soothe the fear of others, we remain partial. When we cease to surface our most sensitive skin simply to avoid conflict with others, we remove ourselves from all that is true. When we maintain ways we’ve already discarded just to placate the ignorance of those we love, we lose our access to what is eternal.”
I needed to shed my skin—all the layers of the self I thought I needed in order to be the “good wife,” “the loyal wife,” the helpful, ever considerate, hard-working wife and mom who never, ever gives up. I spent decades turning away from what I didn’t want to think about: that in never giving up on the marriage, I was giving up on myself.
I was falling prey to what
who writes the Substack so aptly described in her incisive examination of divorce, “Blue Marriage and The Terror of Divorce”: “Women have been taught, through various ideological machinations, that if there is something wrong in their lives it is almost certainly their fault, and if it is their fault, they must personally seek ways to fix it….But unless we collectively begin to understand divorcing and living as a single person in this world as not just survivable, but authentically generative — that fear will continue to discipline so many women into staying in situations that offer them financial stability and social standing but otherwise degrade them. And those decisions, as desperate and personal as they seem, simultaneously prop up existing hierarchies — particularly when it comes to patriarchy, heteronormativity, and power.”I did not stay in my marriage because of financial stability—I was the one supporting us financially for most of our marriage—nor social standing, but I certainly felt the fear Petersen describes. For reasons connected to my family of origin, to being a child of the 1960s and 1970s, to my own nature, I handed over too much of my power to my ex-husband.
“People do realize that being single is an option — but, depending on their background, they are often abjectly terrified of it,” Petersen writes. “Why, in a culture that ostensibly celebrates strong, independent women, does this fear remain? It’s about money and keeping things together for the kids, of course — but it’s also about a lot more than that.”
For me, part of the dissolution of our marriage was a gradual but growing divide in our values, our politics. As I discovered from
who writes the fabulous Substack “Men Yell at Me,”this seems to be a thing that mainstream newspapers are opining about: decrying liberal women who won’t partner with conservative men as a dire threat to the institution of marriage. “Women [are] being asked to martyr themselves on the cross of heterosexual marriage in order to prop up the status quo,” she writes. “What women risk by being partnered with men who don’t share our political beliefs is more than just uncomfortable family dinners. We risk our lives.”There is the political and then there is the personal. In untying the knot of my own marriage, it was of course the personal I had to return to again and again. Who was I saving by ending this marriage? I was saving myself.
There is a Mary Oliver poem I read often during those months we were hashing out our marital settlement, when I felt scared and lonely and overwhelmed, reeling between the divorce and taking care of my mom with dementia who now lived with me. In the moments I needed to be reminded why I was doing this, Oliver’s poem “Moments” became a manifesto:
There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.
Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?
There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.
I was done being cautious. I would let the unraveling happen but I would be the one pulling the threads, weaving a new tapestry. By the time we stood in that UPS office, any venom we felt toward each other in the preceding months had vanished. I saw a man who would find his own way in life now and with whom I would always be connected because of our daughters. We were two people with our individual desires, needs and wants, none of of which were bad or wrong but simply what they were. We were two people who had walked part of our lives together until our paths diverged.
In coming to a place of compromise, we had achieved what I had earlier despaired of—an amicable divorce. I put a lot of work into that outcome. I walked headlong into the kinds of conflict I had avoided my whole life. I spoke up for myself and I did a damned good job of it.
I was proud of myself. I was proud of us. Love and compassion had survived the battle, and for that I was grateful.
Questions: If you have experienced divorce, what were the biggest fears leading up to the decision to divorce? Were those fears borne out or are you happier because of that decision?
BONUS FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS: Here is my voice-over version of this newsletter.
Three Songs for 3D
Divorce
“Past Life,” Maggie Rogers
“Maybe everything's just turning out how it should be
Maybe there's a past life coming out inside of me.”
Dementia
“Worry No More,” Amos Lee
“Oh, worry no more
There's an open door for you.”
Destiny
“Tapestry” by Carole King
“My life has been a tapestry
Of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision
Of the ever-changing view”
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Oh yes, this all rings true. I was afraid of losing my friends (I didn’t), of losing my beautiful house and garden (I did, but rebuilt it), of judgement (not much). I didn’t think my divorce would be brutal (it was) or that I would fall apart after (like whoa). But I am grateful every day that I did it because my life now is infinitely richer, more honest, more loving and more mine.
Ooof. This resonates hard. My divorce finalised last week. Met him at 24, am now 50. Shed has been my word this year and I’m still reverberating from all of it. I feel empty and sad but know without question it is the right thing for me. Thank you for all of this, am googling books mentioned now - and Maggie Rogers is my favourite 💛