Thinking About
Divorce is All the Things
My story attracts, and deserves, mixed reviews
I’d be hard pressed to name anything in my life that elicits the kind of inconsistent feedback divorce seems to prompt.
- Wait, you did what by yourself? Amazing.
- I’m really sorry, how awful.
- Oh my God, I’m so jealous.
- How are you really? I cannot imagine.
- Not gonna lie — that sounds fantastic.
Bizarrely, the above statements are all ones I field in reaction to the same thing: the depth and detail of joint-custody parenting three human beings.
By some estimates, I am slogging through the hardest job imaginable and might not live to see tomorrow. By others, I am walking on sunshine — the luckiest woman alive. I used to think the varied assessments depended on me and how I represented any particular sliver of my (yes, complex) day-to-day family life. Because some slivers are indeed gut-wrenching, and others magnificent.
I’ve since come to swallow, five years into my reshaped world order, that the reactions have little to do with me. Instead, they refract whatever the person sharing them might be feeling, or brushing up against, in their own leisurely Saturday morning or acute pang of anxiety.
I trade stories about life and love and kids and duty most often with women who are also mothers. Immersive sharing is our ritual. We speak to one another with a transparency I suspect feels so necessary because our always-on selves are plenty mired in digital exchange and detail coordination, so who needs more of that?
From our trusted she-peers, we crave crass jokes and unedited truth.
The real talk also keeps our eyes open at a time when we’re tired — damn tired. Emotionally tired. Biologically tired. Generationally tired. Ready for 1000 days off, followed by another 1000 — even though days off won’t erase what Kelly Corrigan reminds is always being written: “Try as you might to have it go down otherwise, you are doing things right now that shape and misshape your children. Oh well.”
As will surprise no one who’s been both, tired and married can make a fierce cocktail. All of my friends are tired and most are married. So I suppose it’s no wonder they stare down divorce through our conversations with a mix of awe and fear, trying to assess whether my planet is salvation or prison. Would they feel differently about the peaks and valleys of last week or next year if they lived here too?
On the one hand, I get days to myself. I also get a brain to myself and a life to myself and a schedule I can uphold with reasonable precision. I travel light without guilt, and craft rules and rituals no one else can erode. I know my children in an uninterrupted, remarkable way. On the other hand, I hold worry alone. I fix the leak. I talk to the bank. I carry the sleeping kids in from the car. I drive the mountain pass. I read the fine print. And I go to sleep every night hoping the glow of tomorrow in my three favorite hearts outshines the legacy of fracture.
I suspect divorce would attract less consideration if marriage was a bit more fail-safe. With a 50/50 shot of falling out of the sky, it’s amazing so many of us board the flight to begin with. And yet, that skyrocketing ascent sure is fun — so too the intoxicating promise of the journey.
As Laura Friedman Williams recounts of her own marriage, “I was happy, I thought, though in hindsight I think I misunderstood complacency for happiness.” Ah yes—happy, complacent, check, check. Don’t we confuse those two states of being in so many realms?
I smile at the mixed reviews of my life that show no signs of slowing. I also don’t hate them. In truth, I largely agree with the wonder and worry friends toss my way. Divorce really is all the things. Everything that is hard and lopsided about the life I now lead sits adjacent to everything that is rich and textured and wildly free. I didn’t want my last story to end this way, but it did. And now blank pages of a fresh book slowly fill. To wield the only pencil for this one is scary — and incredible.
