Divorce splinters your idea of home

Walking myself home when the house of my marriage was collapsing

Two years ago, on November 1, 2021, I began to write a novel, joining hundreds of thousands of people around the world for the annual National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) held every November.

But this isn’t the story of writing that 50,000-word manuscript. It’s the story of a woman trying to stay hidden from herself in the space where she was most comfortable hiding—a made-up world, safe and distant from her own life.

In the pages of my journal that month I was writing, “I am unhappy in my marriage. Why am I still in this marriage? I think I want to leave but I am afraid.”

In the novel I was writing, fearful me was transformed into a character who had found the courage to leave her thirty-year marriage. One day she set down the dish towel after washing up the dinner plates, walked over to her husband sitting on the couch, and said, “I want a divorce.”

I lived in this dichotomy all that month, and for many months to come. The inside-out, upside-down of it all wasn’t lost on me: I was working out in the pages of this novel what I couldn’t confront in my own life. I was crafting a story, yes, but I was also walking myself home.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash..

The House of Belonging

Home must reside within oneself first and foremost. It has taken me a long time to understand that. It is The House of Belonging that poet

David Whyte

describes in his poem of that title. After leaving his first marriage and moving into a house of his own, he writes:

This is the temple

of my adult aloneness

and I belong

to that aloneness

as I belong to my life.

There is no house

like the house of belonging.

But in November 2021, I was not ready to embrace the “adult aloneness” that would inevitably result from leaving my 33-year-marriage. For Whyte, “the veil had gone from my darkened heart,” but I was still living in that darkness, not wanting to see what was in the shadows.

The pandemic made the cracks visible

Over three decades, my then-husband and I had built several homes together. But now the metaphorical house of our marriage was collapsing. Its foundations were cracking. I no longer belonged to that house but I didn’t know where I belonged. All during 2021 and into the next year, I resisted this knowledge because then I would have to act.

My body told a different story. I was grinding my teeth, sleeping fitfully, plagued by insomnia, waking up with a headache despite having given up alcohol seven months earlier. These weren’t alcohol-induced headaches. This was a life hangover—a woman trying too hard to make things work that were clearly not working.

Fissures had appeared in our house of marriage years ago, and I would try to seal up these tiny cracks with band-aids insufficient to the task. That included the growing pile of self-hope books like John Gottman’s The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work where he urged couples to discover each other’s “Love Maps” and If the Buddha Married: Creating Enduring Relationships on a Spiritual Path, using a "beginner's mind" to see one’s partner and oneself “afresh each day as we learn to nurture our commitment to each other.” For a time I was able to lean on my natural gift of a beginner’s mind, the perpetual student.

But in that pandemic year of 2021, it was endings that consumed me. We were growing apart in ways both evident and almost imperceptible. There was little physical affection, no terms of endearment, and most wrenching, it seemed to me, a lack of curiosity about each other, particularly what was on our minds and in our hearts.

What makes or breaks a relationship

Much later, after the divorce, living alone for the first time in my life, I listened to the Brene Brown podcast Unlocking Us in conversation with John and Julie Gottman, the marriage experts whose advice I had hoped would save my marriage twenty years earlier. In their book, The Love Prescription: Seven Days, they advise couples on how to grow more intimacy, connection and joy. Brown shared what the Gottmans had discovered in their research,

“There are universal factors that make or break a relationship, that predict whether a couple will stay together happily or not. First, the couple has to stay curious about each other. Second, the couple needs to share fondness and admiration. And third, the couple needs to turn toward each other instead of turning away, [to honor their] bids for connection.”

I instantly recognized what we had lost. As we entered our 50s and 60s, I felt my ex-husband and I had stopped being curious about one another. It seemed we seldom made bids for connection or that when we did, they went unacknowledged. (You’ll notice I am intentional with phrases like “I felt,” and “it seemed” because this is my story, not his. As the poet

Maggie Smith

said in her evocative memoir about her divorce, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, “this is a tell-mine,” not a tell-all.)

Strangers in the night and the silent scream

In those many months of lockdown, confined to each other’s company more than ever, we seemed to view the world so differently, in ways that were painful to me and which challenged the values I held most dear. How had we become strangers in this way? There were so many conversational topics now out of bounds because of the arguments they ignited. The stretches of silence at the dinner table grew longer, the safe topics more sparse.

My mother lived with us then, and as her dementia progressed, she would not, or could not, engage in conversation in the way she once had, eager to share her progressive political opinions. With every attempt I made to start a conversation, she would look up from her dinner plate, reply briefly, “That’s nice,” or “Oh,” and return to her meal.

The silence of my household that November made me want to scream but the scream stayed inside. There was so much I wanted to say that I could not say—not to my husband or to my mother, not to my sister or my closest friends, not to my daughters, whom I wanted to protect despite our closeness. There was so much I would not even say to myself.

But in the thousands of words I was typing every day in my Nanowrimo novel, I had found a way to express the truth that was building inside me. I was telling myself a story and I would make my way to the ending.

I would find, at last, the house of my belonging.

Three Songs for 3D

Divorce

“Face Down in the Moment,” Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats

This song was on repeat throughout the many months I came to understand that “I was waiting for the right time/But it could take so long/While you're face down in the moment waiting to let go.”

Dementia

“To Build a Home,” The Cinematic Orchestra

This evocative song was featured in one of the final episodes of NBC’s beautiful series “This is Us” as the family gathers to say goodbye to matriarch Rebecca who has dementia. It’s a bittersweet homage to building a home for family until they leave you. But as my house of marriage was disintegrating, these lines resonated in a different way for me: “I built a home/For you/For me/Until it disappeared/From me/From you.”

Destiny

“Break the Shell” by India Arie

My destiny told me I wouldn’t always feel homeless. Finding my way home would require a splintering from the past I knew and a future I couldn’t yet see.
‘You cannot touch the sky from inside yourself
You cannot fly until you break the shell’

Discussion question: Is your house of belonging situated within yourself, intimately connected to another, or have you found a bridge between the two?

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