What does a good divorce look like?

My amicable divorce took intention, hard work and a willingness to step into both my power and my vulnerability. Here are the 7 steps I took to help set me up for the outcome I wanted.

My friend Joanie turned to me as we relaxed in the hot tub the other night under a star-studded, palm tree-fringed Palm Springs twilight sky. “I wanted to tell you that I am proud of you, how well you’re doing. It’s not even been a year since the divorce was final and look at you!,” she told me.

What did she see in me? I wondered. If I exuded a calm and centeredness, it was hard won and continuously nurtured. I have grown more in the past two-and-a-half years than I have in all my 63 years of life. If my young adult daughters were to ask me now, “When did you become a grownup?” I might answer: in November 2021, in the depths of the pandemic. That is when, quarantined in our household of two, uncomfortable knowings began to push their way into my conscious mind, tiny thorns that would not stop pricking the deepest parts of me.

It is no coincidence that around this time I began a novel in which the main character is a woman who has left her thirty-year marriage to finally embark on a life of her own choosing—pursuing her own destiny free of any external expectations. Or so she thinks. That kind of freedom is hard to attain, especially after a lifetime as a caregiver and helper, a woman who puts others first. My protagonist’s journey is not easy, nor is mine. Yet when I see the sturdiness of my divorced self reflected in my friend’s eyes, I am also amazed. How in the world did I get here?

On March 29 it will be a year since my ex-husband and I signed our divorce papers before a clerk at a local UPS store, a prosaic ending to a 33-year transatlantic courtship and marriage that I described in this essay last year.

Divorce is an unraveling. The hardest part is putting yourself back together again.

If I trace the steps in which we achieved the often elusive Amicable Divorce, I find a variety of ingredients. Some are due to my natural leaning towards not wanting any unnecessary hurt, for me or for him. I think we both wanted kindness over cruelty, compromise over combativeness. This was going to hurt no matter what. He didn’t want the divorce and I was leaving my life as I knew it, 34 years with the same man.

I don’t want to sugarcoat what was at times a tense process over five months until we reached the point of the Marital Settlement Agreement. There was resentment, anger, and suspicion of motives as we retreated to our respective corners with our lawyers. Yet we never required mediation. We could meet and talk face-to-face and work out the financial agreement ourselves over our property and investments.

But just as I stepped in at various points in our marriage to try to save the troubled dynamic and imbalance between us (me as the breadwinner, sacrificing my dreams, my ex not seeming able to launch his own career), I took the lead in the divorce as well. I initiated many of the most uncomfortable conversations about how to divide up our assets because of course it wasn’t just stuff we were talking about, not just the money. It was what we valued about us and the life we had created. Could we end this with love, respect and compassion for one another? I believed we could. So I took my non-confrontational self and made her stand up for herself, time and time again. I acknowledged our messy emotions, left space for them, but remained dry-eyed and focused. No screaming. No tears. We weren’t like that as a couple for most of our marriage anyway, so this part is not surprising. Still, if there were ever a time for the fights and the tears, it would have been then. We didn’t go there. We held steady.

As I reflect back on the last year, here are 7 steps that helped me get to this point. It was opening myself up to a period of unparalleled self growth and discovery where I began to know things I couldn’t unknow. This is when I began to believe in my capacity to initiate a divorce and come out of it okay—more than okay.

1. A series of sessions with life coach Molly Patrick, founder of Clean Food Dirty Girl in the winter of 2021 and early 2022

2. The yoga therapy retreat I attended in Hawaii in March 2022 with Michelle Andrie of Ageless Move More, and returned to just last week.

In Hawaii, embracing a sense of wonder

3. The Bigger Yes course with

   Laura McKowen
   (which she is running again this April, recommend highly), dedicated to understanding your deeper callings. A powerful assignment in this course peeled back the final layers of My Knowing.

   The Knowing

4. A wise and compassionate therapist named Susan who I met with several times during the spring of 2022. This was the first time in my life I took advantage of mental health therapy. I won’t ever wait that long again.

5. The Whole Soul Way program with founder Deb Blum, interviewed by me here. I learned how to use my own internal guidance system to navigate my divorce and understand myself with a depth and clarity I’d never experienced before.

6. The constant support of my women friends. I was surrounded by so much love and compassion. They were my ballast through all of it.

7. The loving support of my daughters, my family and my ex’s family. I had hoped that the closeness between my ex’s family could be maintained and I am so grateful that it has which I write about here.

This list tells me that my openness to growing and changing, my confidence in my ability to use my voice in ways I never had before, and taking advantage of all the wisdom and support I could find set me up to create what I had wanted from the start: to end my marriage with love and compassion for both of us. My ex met me on that journey. That was a key ingredient, too, and one I am grateful for as we navigate this new territory of friendship after three decades as husband and wife. Our paths have diverged but we will continue to find common ground, not least in the love we have for our daughters.

Amicable comes from Latin amīcābilis, meaning "friendly," and amāre, "to feel affection for" or "to love." Amāre has a number of English descendants, including amiable ("friendly, sociable, and congenial"). This etymology strikes me as just right. Somehow miraculously, we maintained our affection for one another throughout. That I am “amiable Amy” surely has something to do with it, too. This month, as we exchange What’s App reports of our respective travels—he in Colombia, me in the Western United States—our connection of 34 years becomes more layered. We’ve landed in new relationship territory where I believe we will thrive in ways we never could in our marriage. I am curious to see what unfolds.

Resources

There’s a growing “divorce corner” on Substack where I feel witnessed and held. Here are a few compatriots whose clear-eyed, honest vulnerability—and humor and badass bravado—I appreciate.

Lyz Lenz: The Brave Women of Divorce list must begin with journalist Lyz Lenz, who writes the Substack

Men Yell at Me

and is the author of the recently published This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life, which is getting a big buzz right now. I am in the middle of reading it and keep nodding my head in recognition.

I loved

Steph Sprenger

of

The Reclamation Era

‘s review of the book, “An American Ex-Wife Gets the Flu.” Steph writes: “This book, at this exact moment in my life, was the definition of a lighthouse. If a book was capable of holding my hand and guiding me through an angry mob, it would be This American Ex-Wife. “

Also, check out

Sara Fredman

of

Write Like a Mother

and her insightful interview with

lyz

in this piece, “Once I got out, I realized all the things I wasn’t saying.” And have a listen to this great conversation between

Virginia Sole-Smith

and

lyz

, “Is "Mom Rage" Actually "Marriage Rage?"

Cindy DiTiberio:

Cindy DiTiberio

writes

The Mother Lode

and has started a fascinating series called The Divorce Diaries, where women who have gone through divorce share in-depth details of the why and the how of getting divorced. For so many of us, once we make the decision to divorce, we’re faced with the murky unknown: how the hell do we start this process, how much will it cost me, please tell me I can survive this. These women pull back the curtain and reveal it all.

Colleen Crivello:

Colleen Crivello

writes

DOUBLE TAKE

,

“chronicling the many unexpected phases being a woman, a wife, an ex-wife, a mother, a lover, a girlfriend, and a friend” has a series of terrific interviews with women about their divorces, including this one with

Stephanie Danler

, “It All Happened Exactly As It Was Meant To” and with

Leslie Stephens

, “I Had To Leave My Marriage To Learn How I Could've Saved It."

Maggie Smith:

Maggie Smith

who writes

For Dear Life with Maggie Smith

and her memoir, “You Could Make this Place Beautiful.”

Finally, I can’t wait to read Leslie Jamison’s Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story

Question for readers: If you have experienced divorce, was it amicable? What ingredients enabled you to achieve that? If not, what would you have differently?