So this is why, when people worry about me getting hurt again, when they say I’m compromising and that I’m going to get burned, I say, “No, no, don’t worry, this is just a four. On the pain scale, you know? If The Husband having an affair is ten, then nothing anyone else can do will ever hurt me more than a four.” And I believe myself. You can’t keep breaking a shattered glass. So I don’t stop putting myself in the way of hurt. I don’t stop calling The Man with the White Shirt, or texting him, or seeing him.
I mean, I stop for a bit, and then I don’t. We manage a few days, sometimes a week without contact, and then we’re right back where we started. And we go on like that, until he pulls away again and it feels like a four. But it’s nothing compared to The Husband’s ten.
So I don’t care. I’m not afraid to love because it might hurt. I will take the pain because it comes with moments of beauty. I know when it comes to love, there’s no such thing as zero on the pain scale. I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PROTECTION
AT NIGHT
For the first few weeks that I’m alone in my new place, I wander around it like a ghost. At night, I can’t sleep at all, even if I take two sleeping pills with three rum and cokes. I try all kinds of combinations, all kinds of things, but the emptiness of my bed is too much for me. I toss and turn, I get up and pace. I cry and cry. I arrange two big pillows beside me so it will feel somewhat like my six-foot-two husband is there beside me. A pillow husband. I’m pathetic.
The nights Birdie is here with me, I don’t drink or take any pills. But then no amount of pacing or husband-replacing pillows helps. And it is on those nights, in those early days of the separation, that I eventually go into her room and lift her into my arms and carry her, heavy as a sleeping child — which is heavy, by the way — and bring her back to my big empty queen-sized bed. I tuck the blankets around her, and make sure her stuffed dog, Pasta, is in her arms. I look at her small face, brush the sweaty hair from her forehead. She has only just turned five, and she will not remember any of this. She won’t remember what it was like to live with both her parents.
In our new life together as just the two of us, we’ve been exploring our new neighbourhood. Picking wildflowers under the expressway, having picnic dinners in the park. Even though I’m sad and in shock at my sudden part-time family of two, these moments with Birdie are unexpectedly wonderful.
And I’m grateful. I know I’m lucky. To have this beautiful child, and this nice apartment. So many people have it much harder when their marriages end. They don’t have the support system I have. The good job with good pay. I recognize what I have. That I’m able to grieve with a roof over my head, the skyline outside my window, my child who still has two parents who love and care for her.
In my bed, Birdie breathes heavily beside me, just like her father did, and finally, finally, I am able to fall asleep.
PREPARE YOURSELF
The very first night I’m alone in my place, really alone, without Birdie, makes me unhinged. I am crazy crazy crazy by 8:00 p.m. Why am I here, alone in this weird condo? Where is my husband? Where is my child? Why aren’t I with them? That they’re across the street is making me more insane. She’s so close to me, but I can’t see her, can’t kiss her forehead goodnight. My baby. My own baby. It feels like everything has been taken away from me, and now so is my own baby, half the time. I am near hysterics now. I didn’t think it would be so bad; I thought I would just unpack and it would be fine, but instead I am pacing, shaking, crying, crazy.
I decide to call my friend The Bright One. She’s been through it. The difference is, she never really let on how bad things were or what was happening. She was proud and guarded, in stark contrast to my oversharing, tell-anyone-who-will-listen strategy. Right now, she patiently listens as I bawl my eyes out and then even though it’s late on a Tuesday night she offers to cab over to my place. I’m practically begging her to, let’s be honest. There’s a caveat though: “My hair is only half done,” she says. “I wouldn’t just leave the house like this for anyone, all right?” I laugh and say thank you a million times over.
When she gets to my place, we go straight to the washroom so she can finish putting her hair in. I sit on the toilet freaking out while she calmly listens, twisting the small braids in, one at a time, slow and deliberate, just like the way she speaks to me. She isn’t going to be easy on me.
“You need to prepare yourself for this,” she says. “Prepare yourself. You need to have these nights full of things to do. Planned. Because you will always feel the hole when she’s not here. You’ve got to fill that hole with other things.” She’s twisting her braids, and everything inside me is twisting with them.
The Bright One can be tough sometimes, but she’s also one of the biggest-hearted people I know. She’s funny and smart and everyone loves her, everyone. But I understand the difference between what we project, and what we harbour. Everyone loves her, but still her heart was split open, still she battles the monster Loneliness day in and day out. She’s the only person I know that really has any clue what this feels like for me.
So no matter how tough she is on me, on this night or for the next few years, I listen. To her, I always listen. From here on out, I plan. If Birdie’s not with me, then someone else is.
Sometimes that someone else is The Husband. The Ex-husband, I mean. We still sleep together. A lot. For a long, long time after we separate and divorce. Yeah, I know. Remember the red and blue stickers? The day we move out and end our twelve-year relationship? It doesn’t really end that day. It will never really end, maybe.
All of my boxes, with the red stickers, aren’t being delivered until the next morning because I want to paint. A few of my friends come over to help. We order pizza, paint the bedrooms, and talk about relationships. The Husband is across the street moving into his own apartment and Birdie is staying with close family friends for a few days until both our places are set up and ready for her.
When my friends leave around 10:00 p.m., I’m alone in my new empty apartment. I have one of our old camping mattresses and I’m trying to blow it up, but it keeps going flat. I just stare at the thing. What the fuck am I supposed to do now? Just sleep on the hardwood floor? Right at that moment, my phone buzzes. It’s The Husband. His move has gone well and he’s wondering about mine. I say the air mattress is fucked. Five minutes later, he’s at my door with beer and a mattress pump. There’s no fixing the thing though, and we sit on the floor with our backs against the wall, drinking as the mattress slowly deflates in front of us. He tells me to come spend the night at his place. And I do.
Just this morning, two moving vans took away all of our things, and now here we are, the two of us, walking across the street from my new place to his new place. Here we are, climbing into our old bed together, surrounded by boxes with blue stickers on them. Here we are, spending the first night of our separation. Together.
My boxes will be delivered and unpacked the next day, and over time we’ll make two new homes for our separate lives and for our now-divided daughter. But we will keep finding ourselves in each other’s beds. For years. Our legs, like our lives, still wound together.
I know. It’s not the Empowered Woman’s Clean Break you were hoping for. But it’s us.
SUPERCONNECTORS
It’s June 2012. I’ve lived alone for two months, and my place is coming together. I love it here actually, set up how I like it, neat and tidy, no cupboard doors left open, no toilet seats left up. Out every window you can see the city, and out the bedroom windows, the CN Tower looms huge in front of us, all lit up with different colours at night, the rumble of commuter trains a new melody.
It takes me ten easy minutes to walk to work each day, thirteen in heels. Not having to take public transit anymore improves my life by a million percent. We are downtown. In this way, I feel normal again. I’m in the right place again. Physically, anyway. Mentally, spiritually, I’m still trying to figure out which d
irection is up.
I was domesticated for so long that I have no idea what people do for fun, which bars or cafés are cool, where to go dancing. My reference point for all that is, like, 2002. So I start to hang out with The Superconnectors. You know them? Those friends you have that are connected to all kinds of people and different scenes, because they’re open and fun-loving and curious and just totally, completely great. I’m lucky to have a few of those friends.
One is a woman with a big laugh. She’s always laughing, and you can hear it from miles away. She’s like walking electricity, powering up everything and everyone she touches. So I hitch myself to Big Laugh as much as I can. I recognize an old me in that energy, a me that once was. The other superconnector is a guy I’ve known for a long time, the one I call Forever 21. He’s freewheeling and fun-loving and seems to know everyone in the city. His stories are always about crazy adventures in far-flung places with interesting people.
Forever 21 always knows what’s happening on a Friday night, and he will take me there, throwing me into all kinds of spontaneous situations. The best thing about my friendship with him is that we’re just friends. There’s no expectation of romance, no drunken fumbling we’ll regret later. As the year goes on, there are plenty of times we will sleep in the same bed like cousins at a sleepover. He’s my pal, my brother.
In these early days of June, the weather is already really hot. One Saturday afternoon Forever 21 texts me saying he knows a bunch of people that are hanging out in the park, so let’s go! We hop on our bikes, stopping at the beer store on the way. Then we sit in the park with a collection of people I’ve never met. We drink, we talk, we throw a Frisbee around. We smoke and eat and drink some more. All. Day. I’m really confused by this. They all seem to be in their thirties like me; don’t they have anything to do today other than drink in a park for seven hours, just hanging out like we’re twenty-one? But no. They don’t. Or if they do have errands to run or laundry to do or other shoulds, they don’t care. They’d rather enjoy this first real hot day of summer.
Enjoy. That’s not something I’ve done in a long time. Enjoy something. I know that sounds crazy, but honestly I just spent, oh, all of my life not enjoying things because of all the other things I should be doing. To just sit in a park at age thirty-seven instead of crossing things off a list … this is big for me. Huge.
Forever 21 is beaming. That’s what he does. He looks like he’s enjoying himself all the time. Being around that kind of energy is powerful for me. I grew up with a lot of negativity, in a culture and in a family where should was the primary driving force, where criticism and advice, followed by complaint, was the main style of communication. And then there was the guilt. It’s on this day, in this park, with my friend and this group of total strangers, that I start to realize the importance of having positive, bright forces in my life. People who are enjoying things.
The rest of the summer is an awakening for me, and I’m not just talking about when I finally, in late July, begin to sleep with random men for the first time in my life. It’s an awakening that I can let my list-making, constant planning, and guilt fall away a bit. I go with the flow a little more.
Forever 21 says, “Let’s just go to a soccer game!” and I say, “Right now? But I’m not prepared!” and he says, “Whaddaya got to be prepared about? Let’s go!”
And we do. We just up and go see a game with two of his friends I’ve never met, after we just spent seven hours hanging out in the park, and you know what? I have the best time. One of his friends at the soccer game, The Lawyer, becomes one of my friends, too, after that. A few of the other people from the park that day become my friends also, especially one woman, another superconnector, The Traveller, who sparks an epic trip to New York City. I meet so many wonderful people over the next year all because of her. Eventually, she will be the reason I meet The Man with the White Shirt. She’s a tough cookie who’s soft on the inside, and she becomes a confidante and coach and sister to me. These superconnectors remind me how to have fun again. They teach me how be to be spontaneous.
And that spontaneity is also making me a better parent. The more time goes on, the more relaxed I’ve become, and Birdie relaxes with me. I’m a lot less do this, do that. We ride the ferry out to the city’s islands while she wears a Supergirl costume. I teach her how to use chopsticks in the noodle place up the street from her school.
She shouts “U-turn!” pretty much every time we’re in the car, because I always manage to drive in the wrong direction, or get lost, so used to having The Husband as navigator. But instead of stressing it, I laugh at myself. She laughs with me.
I leave dishes in the sink at night and play with her instead. If she takes forever to get dressed in the morning, I make a game of it instead of yelling at her to hurry up. We are feeling breezier. Her temper tantrums disappear. She becomes more of a little pal and less of a little pain in the ass. I don’t want to make too big a deal of it, but being around the three superconnectors has taught me something that’s totally cliché, but no less amazing — don’t sweat the small stuff.
There’s a moment that symbolizes this awakening period of my life more than any other. It’s 2:00 a.m. on a hot June night. We are leaving one dive bar to go to another. It’s me and Superconnector 1 (Big Laugh), as well as Superconnector 2 (Forever 21) and one of his friends. The two guys have bikes, but Big Laugh and I are on foot, wearing summer dresses.
“Hop on the back!” shouts Forever 21. So of course Big Laugh just bunches up her skirt in one hand and hops on to the back of the other guy’s bike like that’s just a normal thing to do. I stand there dumbly, worried I’m too heavy for my friend to pedal. Worried about weaving through the traffic of the downtown streets. Worried about the logistics, since I’m wearing a dress. Like he senses it, Forever 21 shouts, “I got ya, no worries!” with a smile as wide as the continent. With trepidation, I sit, side-saddle on the back of his bike. I tuck the skirt of my dress up under me, put my arms around his waist, and off we go.
And this is the image I will have in me forever, the feeling: the dark 2:00 a.m. sky, the cars going by, the streetcar rumbling past. Behind me, my friend is cutting the night with her big laugh, enjoying the crazy moment. Wind on my face as the bike weaves through it all, heading to somewhere, I don’t even know where, and it’s okay.
It’s okay not to know where I am going.
Still,
sometimes I miss seeing a man’s razor nestled in beside my toothbrush.
YOUNG AGAIN
When you have a kid, this thing happens where you start making friends with other people who have kids. Being a parent is the common denominator. Your single friends become these frivolous people who talk about completely abstract things like dancing in a bar until 4:00 a.m. Or all of the movies they’ve seen in movie theatres. And they always seem to be complaining about how “tired” they are.
To them, you’ve become a boring shell of the friend they once knew. A parent-zombie who posts three-hundred identical photos of your baby on Facebook and pushes a ridiculously huge and unnecessary stroller around, and talks about the cutest thing your kid said for like, a half hour. This is why the natural progression of domestic life is to allow your closest single friends to fall away while you quickly make friends with people who know the real meaning of tired. People as boring as you. People with kids.
Now that I’m single, the strangest thing has happened. Although I’m still a mom, I’m only an on-duty mom for half of the week. The other half it’s like I’m twenty-five again. Part-time parent, part-time partier. Most of the new friends I’m making, the people I spend my spare time with, are other single women. Oh, you had your soul ripped out by the love of your life? Me too! Let’s drink and work on each other’s online dating profiles!
I also hang out with a bunch of single men. We all trade stories and advice, commiserate, drink. A group of us go to New York City together and stay in a tiny East Village apartment. We sleep a combined total of seve
n hours over three nights, go to amazing restaurants, art exhibits, plays, bar after bar after bar. We shop. We smoke. We do whatever we want. It blows my mind. This is how it is with childless people in their thirties, I’ve discovered. They live exactly like I did in my twenties! And now so do I, half the time.
The other half of the time I’m with our old friends with their intact marriages and multiple children. And I’m the single one with my only child. My parents’ generation had a word for women like me — divorcée. Whatever you call me, I feel like an outcast now, a fifth wheel. I’m a pity party, table for one.
Everything in this scenario is familiar — here we are in my friends’ house just up the street from the house we once lived in, that one there, the one with the red door. We were a family there once. Now I’m a divorcée over here. Don’t look at me too long or you’ll turn to salt.
The kids are going wild, running all around the house. The adults talking and laughing in the kitchen. Wait though, something’s missing, what feels different? Oh yes, The Husband, The Ex-husband. He would have been here. He should be here. Instead this scene is like a “Spot the Difference” photo at the back of an old magazine. I overhear the kids in the other room. “Where’s your dad?” asks one of them, and Birdie’s voice, tough yet nonchalant, “Oh, I don’t know. At home I guess.” The kid, unsatisfied with Birdie’s response comes to me and asks, “Where is he?” I answer honestly — “I don’t know” — and my heart sinks into the ground. That’s the only thing that’s different here — the absence of him. Well, I’m different, too. I’m a shelled-out version of who I once was, a shadow. Look at me here breathlessly recounting dating stories, regaling the room with all of the cool places I’ve been going and the things I’ve seen now that I’m a free agent with joint custody. Now that I have all the time in the world.
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