I was shaking, I was so angry and so completely humiliated. “It isn’t goodbye if the other person doesn’t know it’s goodbye,” I said, crying. I kept backing up the stairs, desperate to get away from him and find some way to protect myself. I started throwing out rules. I told him that he should start sleeping in the guest room, and that we wouldn’t be having dinner together anymore, and I asked when was he planning on moving out, now that I knew he was already gone.
“I don’t have any money to move out,” he said. “I need a few months to save enough money to rent a new place.”
If I’d had the money to give him I would have run to the ATM to get it and thrown it at him. I didn’t have it; what I had was a credit card bill for a romantic weekend away that would have covered his first month’s rent. I couldn’t believe I was being left by a husband who wouldn’t quite leave. That night I lay in bed in the dark and cried jaggedly, deeply, feeling something dark in my gut break loose with the cutting finality of his rejection. As I cried, I heard Chris moving around the house, collecting the blankets and pillows he’d need to make his bed in the third-story guest room.
Time began to move very slowly, even as each day passed in an instant, crammed with the pressing requirements of being a mom and running a magazine and trying to figure out how to fix the house. I started living by what I called the Rule of One like a fervent convert to a new religion: You can do only one thing at a time, no matter how much you have to do. Every day, many items on the gigantic list of Things That Must Be Done—calling plumbers; calling my insurance company; calling lawyers to find out whether I could sue my house’s previous owners if they had misrepresented the property; figuring out where to get the money to start fixing the house; finding a lawyer to talk to about my divorce; finding a nanny agency and hiring a new nanny for my son, then firing the new nanny—went undone, even though I was desperate to move everything forward. My workdays were made up of back-to-back meetings, and it was a challenge to squeeze in any of these phone calls. For both better and worse, tomorrow was another day, and that day was coming no matter how much or how little I had accomplished.
I wheeled Zack into the office with me for a few days in a row, sneaking him through the lobby and rushing his stroller into an empty elevator so that no one outside of my staff would see him with me. One of those mornings, I ran into the vice president for human resources in the lobby, and I wasn’t surprised when I got a phone call from her later that day, reminding me that one of my benefits as an employee was emergency day care. I thanked Ruth (a genuinely wonderful person, and the person I had on my radar as someone to call if I truly reached some kind of limit with what I was going through), but admitted to her I hadn’t had time to do all the preregistration paperwork that one must do in order to take advantage of that benefit. I added those tasks, which included taking Zack to the doctor for an exam (oh, God, when was I going to have time for that?), to the to-do list.
I stayed sane with the Rule of Two, for keeping conflicting thoughts in my head at the same time: I am a mess/I am okay. A lot of things are falling apart/A lot of things are going fine. I am totally incapable human being/I am a perfectly capable boss.
That last one was a doozy. I struggled mightily with the feeling that I was unworthy to run the magazine because my life was in such disarray. It’s not that I thought I had to turn in my Capable Person card just because my marriage was failing. I knew I could still lead—but would people want to follow? I motivate my teams by selling them a shiny new bandwagon, describing the larger goals that drive the content they create as a way to inspire them to really connect to the mission, and get them to ride along with me. But who was going to follow me, with the shape I was in? Hello there! I’m dying a painful death by a thousand little cuts. Want to be on my team? I tried to keep reminding myself that the team didn’t know (and didn’t have to know and didn’t need to know) what I was going through, but that gave me a different headache, of feeling inauthentic. As a live-my-life-out-loud kinda girl, not being able to talk about this complicated, challenging, gigantic struggle with my editors—especially the editors who edited and created all the content about sex and love and marriage—felt creepily fake.
I needed to figure out how to be at peace with this conflict. And I found my inspiration in a surprising place: in having been fired from Marie Claire.
I had been devastated to lose that job for a host of reasons: I loved the job and had brought a lot of passion to it; I had never been fired before and thought, of course, that it said terrible things about me; I hated feeling that I had been misunderstood by the boss who fired me; I hated feeling like I had been disliked by the boss who fired me. But since it wasn’t a hostile or hurried termination—I hadn’t been escorted out of the building that day, but had instead been given time to wrap things up and try to find a new position—I’d had some time to work through my initial disbelief and embarrassment. My company wanted to try to find a new position for me, my team was sorry they were losing me, and on my last day my boss said to me as she was walking out the door, “Go be an editor in chief.” Okay, so maybe I wasn’t getting fired because I totally sucked. But it was still hard to handle.
As I was packing my boxes on that last day with my assistant, Holly, my mind was tick-tocking like a metronome in pairs of thoughts:
I disagree with a lot of what my boss said about me in firing me . . . but she made some points that I need to think about and learn from.
This whole experience has really hurt my feelings and made me feel like a loser . . . but I will not let it change my hard-earned sense of what my skills and talents are.
I find all of this extremely embarrassing . . . but I am very proud of the way I handled it with my company, the staff, and my boss, with dignity, directness, and grace.
In fact, I was the one who went to my boss after she’d written a less-than-flattering performance review that described a person I didn’t recognize as myself and said, “It’s clear you need to move on. Let’s talk about how we’re going to do this.” I was in no position to change the writing on the wall, so I didn’t see any point in trying to fight it.
My assistant, Holly, and I had become close in the three years we’d worked together, and on my last day, as she helped me tie up loose ends, she was crying. I looked up at her and said, “I’m going to miss you, too! I’m sorry I’m not crying anymore. I’m just realizing that this is all fine, and I’m going to be fine. That’s where I am right now.”
The day I walked out of the Marie Claire offices, I didn’t feel defeated at all. The fact was, my boss and I were not a good fit. And in the work world, the boss gets to be in charge of the fit.
I had been petrified about finding a new job, and petrified about being able to pay my bills. But I also felt that in the firing I had started to take possession of who I was. I could accept that there was truth in a lot of the justifications for my firing, and some not-necessarily-truth, too, and that I didn’t have to exist wholly in either one. And now, less than a year later, I could shake my head in wonderment that my firing—which I thought had been the Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Me—had taught me a lesson I needed to help me survive the Actual Worst Thing That Had Ever Happened to Me.
In the end, my firing had been a master class for surviving my divorce. So namaste, Lesley, and thank you. But even more than that, my firing had been the beginning of my learning who I really was. The last thing I said to Holly before I left the office was, “I’m starting to get the sneaking suspicion I might be turning into the person I’ve always hoped I might be.” Someone who could be honest with herself and others. Someone who wouldn’t get stuck in life’s hard stuff. Someone who trusted herself, and trusted life. An optimist.
That learning experience hadn’t made me a genius, however. Even though I was starting to be able to see and accept the big picture of my life—Chris and I were going to separate, and I had a lot of big problems on my plate—I still took mental vacations to Denial Fantasyland,
that wonderful place where nothing bad happens. Chris and I had tickets for a huge reunion concert for the Pixies, one of our favorite bands. Even though I now knew definitively that we would not stay together, I was sure I could handle going to the concert with him, because a handful of our friends were coming, too. And also because Chris and I still were living our day-to-day lives in much the same way as we had before he moved upstairs to the guest room. I didn’t cook dinner for the two of us anymore, but we had an amicable enough flow to our weeks: two nights a week he went out with friends or worked late, and two nights a week I could do the same, attending events for Redbook, staying at the office for late meetings, getting to have a dinner out with friends so I could talk about the confusion of this here-but-not-here life Chris and I were living. The schedule was a way for us to test out being separated and start sharing the child care, and having some scheduled time apart had seemed to lighten our load a little. It felt familiar, like our days of being the “least-married married couple,” the days when it felt like our marriage was working.
A few days before the concert, Alix said she couldn’t come, and I wasn’t able to find another friend to come with me. Which meant that I would be going to the concert with just Chris and “his friends,” Bill and Voelker. I hadn’t seen either of them since the barbecue in May. When I asked Chris if he’d told them both what was going on between us, he said, “Well sure, yeah, of course.” Oh, God. Telling my friends was one thing; it had been my secret to share. But to be with people who had heard all the reasons why Chris was leaving, straight from him? I felt panic rising in my chest. But I just pushed it down. I wanted to go to this concert—I loved the Pixies! It was probably my last chance ever to see them live.
The day of the concert, I sat at work, watching the hours tick down to showtime. But as I thought about being at the concert and listening to the sound track of the years when Chris and I first fell in love, I knew I couldn’t do it. I called Chris up at work and told him I just wasn’t going to be able to be there with Voelker and Bill and keep it together. Chris felt really bad, and tried to talk me into going. He said they’d be fine and would know not to say anything to me about our imminent breakup. This made it worse; it made me feel like a charity case. I told him I was sure and that he should come by my office and get the tickets.
When he walked into my office at the end of the day, I started to shake a little. Chris was wearing his long winter coat and sporting a goatee that he’d started growing at some point after our anniversary. He’d also begun growing his hair out after a few years of keeping it short. He looked so much like the young guy I fell in love with, it made my heart ache. Something in my brain’s compartmentalization was breaking down; I could feel something tearing in my Pollyanna outlook that maybe there was still a way to save our marriage. I started to cry as I stood up and walked toward him with the envelope of tickets in my hand. Chris just said, “Oh, don’t do that,” quietly and gently. When I got to him, he reached out his arms and wrapped me up in them and let me sob, my face pressed against his black coat.
“It’s so hard,” I said. “It’s so, so hard. I don’t know how to do this.”
He said, “I know, I know. It’s hard,” and smoothed my hair. He wasn’t trying to erase me. He was comforting me, as he always had. It was exquisitely painful, to have him take care of me and be hurting me, both at the same time. But I couldn’t step away from him. I needed his kindness; I wanted to be able to let go with grace.
Chris and I agreed we would tell his mother we were breaking up when we were in Illinois for the holidays. Even though I knew we’d be delivering bad news, I couldn’t wait to go out there with Zack, now that he was old enough—sixteen months and walking—to experience all the excitement of Christmas, instead of just chewing on wrapping paper while he sat in his bouncy seat. And I was looking forward to a week’s break from the dead run of work.
I was also harboring a last secret Fantasyland wish: that Chris’s mom was going to be able to snap her fingers and say some magic words that would make Chris change his mind. I trusted Barb and felt very close to her, and not just because she knew Chris as well as I did. Open and loving, she had always made me feel like I was a part of her family. Just two Christmases earlier, Chris and I had surprised Barb with the thrilling news that we were all of fifteen or sixteen days pregnant and the three of us had hugged and cried in her living room. She’d put her arms around me and declared, “I’m going to take such good care of you!” I wanted her to be able to take care of me now.
We had a wonderful Christmas, enjoying the chaos of six cousins, Chris’s two sisters and their husbands, and wrapping paper flying everywhere in the delightful gift-opening melee. Later on Christmas Day a powdery white snow started falling, and all seven kids lined up on their knees on the couch, looking out the window at the flat Illinois landscape as it donned its holiday finery. I dressed Zack in his navy blue snowsuit, and Chris and I took him outside for his very first sledding adventure, riding in the cherry red plastic sled his grandmother had given him. I captured the whole sweet moment on video. And later that day I took the last official family portrait of the three of us, reaching my arm out to get us all in the frame: Zack in his striped sweater, Chris with his new goatee, and me, uncertain and trying my best, still, to believe that what the camera would capture was real.
The vacation wound down, and Chris hadn’t said anything to his mother yet, even though all the nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles had disappeared. As he and I drove through our final round of errands the night before getting on the plane to go home, Zack at home with Barb, I asked Chris if he was going to say anything. “Yes,” he hissed back at me, irritated. When he said it, I felt my last hopes deflate; I hadn’t realized I’d had my mental fingers crossed that maybe being with his family and all the kids together had made him rethink his decision. We drove back from the drugstore in silence, walked in the door, took off our coats, and sat on the couch while Barb gave us the updates on Zack’s activities of the night before she’d put him to bed. I sat there, hearing my blood pound in my ears, looking at my lap, waiting for Chris.
“Uhh, Mom, we have something we need to tell you, and it’s not good,” he began. As he went on speaking, Barb started to cry. She said, “But you two? You two always talked. I never thought it would be the two of you to break up!” I started to cry, too. Because I realized then, as Chris sat next to me and stared at his folded hands on his knees, trying to find the words to explain, that it was really ending. No fairy godmother-in-law was going to be able to wave her magic wand and make it all okay.
When we got home from Illinois, I printed up our family portrait—in an act of denial or defiance or wistful regret, I’m still not sure which—and hung it on the fridge; it always made Zack laugh when he saw it.
I wasn’t able to bring myself to tell my parents for another few weeks. We had been to see them for the holidays before going to Illinois, but I just played my role and so did Chris. At night after I’d put Zack to bed, I would pick up the phone to call them, and then set it back down in the cradle. Then Chris picked a move-out date, the first weekend in February, and I couldn’t delay any longer. I called my mother on January 17, my thirty-sixth birthday. It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so the office was closed. I was home with Zack, and I had just put him down for a nap. I picked up the cordless phone, dialed her number, and sat down on the same stairs I had backed up when Chris told me he was done trying. When my mom picked up the phone, she wished me a happy birthday, and I said thanks, trying to steady myself.
“Mom?”
“Yes . . . ?” she said cautiously, sensing something in my voice.
“Zack’s fine and I’m fine, but I have to tell you something,” I said, my voice shaking.
“Yes . . . ?” she said, getting concerned.
I opened my mouth and tried to speak, but instead I cried in an open-mouth wail, as I hadn’t for months.
My mom just said, “Shhhh, shhhh, there, there
, baby. It’s okay. You’re okay. Tell me what’s wrong.”
In my family, we have a history of saying exactly the wrong thing at just the wrong moment because we are so busy being clever. But when my mother sensed something big was happening and reflexively comforted me as if I were still a small child, I wanted to crawl through the phone line and curl up on her lap, to get back to that place in time where you believe your parents can make everything okay for you.
I managed to get out the words. I managed to tell her how little I knew. I remembered to ask her not to tell my brothers yet, and to tell my father not to be angry at Chris, that it would put me around the bend to feel that, because I still loved Chris, I was worried about him, I needed more time to decide what I was thinking. This was all already hard enough without having to do the work of assimilating anyone else’s opinions, at least until I had my own.
She told me they would do anything they could to help me, and I believed her. She told me that I would be fine, and I tried to believe her. I hung up the phone and slid down the stairs and lay down on the couch and stared at the wall for an hour, feeling in my gut, as I hadn’t before, that this was really going to happen. Chris was going to leave me. And leave Zack. And leave the shell of our life and the shell of our house behind. I would be left there, listening to the echoes of our dreams.
Chris was slated to move out February 5, but I was scheduled to fly to London earlier that same week to attend a three-day management conference of our parent company, Hearst Magazines. I had been asked to make a presentation about what I was doing with Redbook. It was an honor to be asked to present, and a little high-pressure, too. I wanted to impress everyone in the room with my vision; and my audience would include not only my boss, Cathie Black, but also three former editors of Redbook, including the woman who’d fired me from Marie Claire.
I settled on a theme that felt both safe and true. “Reinventing Redbook: Changing Everything and Changing Nothing.” I concentrated on explaining that Redbook’s core mission hadn’t changed, but that the women the magazine served had changed dramatically in the last decade or so. I crafted a PowerPoint presentation that showed some of the changes, and mentally I prepared for the trip, which would be the first time I was away from Zack since the night I’d left him in Maine with Chris. I would be away for four entire days.
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