I called Chris en route to tell him we were heading to the hospital. Judging from the background noise that enveloped his voice, I’d interrupted a boozy outing with his friends. As I pushed the stroller as fast as I could, I detailed what happened. Chris paused and then said, “You don’t need me there, do you?” I was utterly dumbfounded, and disgusted, by his reaction.
“Umm, no, I guess not,” I said, snapping the phone closed and dropping it into the stroller pocket without saying goodbye, when what I really wanted to do was scream into the phone: “Your son may have broken his foot! Your son is going to the emergency room! How can you not care?” Of course, I’d also wanted company in this terrifying rite of passage. I’d thought Chris would want to be there, too, even though Chris had been trying to tell me for months he didn’t want this life.
Marnie and Paul could feel my panic at doing this alone, and so they trooped into the ER with me. But after we’d spent twelve long, slow minutes in the packed waiting room, not a single person had approached me and my still screaming child. Marnie and Paul conferred with each other, and then took charge. Paul told me I was going to go to a different hospital in Manhattan, told me which one, and called a car service. Then Paul took Luke home and Marnie came with Zack and me. I was so grateful not to have to do this alone. In the car, Zack nestled on my lap, sleepy after his panic, my arms wrapped around him. My cell phone rang; it was Chris. I couldn’t talk to him, I was so undone and confused and angry. Marnie answered instead, and told him where we were going. After she hung up, she handed the phone back to me and told me he was coming to the hospital. The two of us started to cry together, holding hands, both of us feeling the terror of being young mothers.
When we got to the second hospital, Zack and I were admitted right away. We settled into the sterile waiting room, bathed in fluorescent lights, Zack sitting on my lap and playing with my earrings. Chris showed up about forty minutes later, bringing a dark mood with him, lost as he was in his own emotional stew. Marnie and I exchanged glances and she scooted out the door, back home to her own baby. Chris sat down and asked me all the right questions about how Zack was doing, but he was unable to look at me. When we were shown into an examining room, he stared at the floor during the entire exam and didn’t address the doctor once. I was flustered by his stony presence and he didn’t even interrupt to point out that I had asked the doctor to examine the wrong foot until after the doctor had left the room. When he told me, I had to get up and chase the doctor down the hall to explain my mistake.
Hours later, after the X-rays showed a fractured bone in Zack’s foot and the doctor applied a teeny white cast, Chris and I shared a cab back to Brooklyn. We were exhausted from the ordeal, and from the pressure of being miserable together. And so while I held on to our sleeping son and cradled the little cast on his foot as the taxi hurtled down the highway along the black river, Chris unleashed all his frustration and rage on me—for the night in the hospital, yes, and apparently for every wrong moment in our marriage. He lavishly described how horrible I was, how selfish, how everything in life was always about me, and that’s why he had to get away from me. His diatribe went on for minutes; I just stared at the dark and shining river, my heart thumping, and tried to breathe through his rant.
When he finished, I turned to him and gathered my wits, setting aside the temptation to blast him. Instead I drew on the quiet spot I’d discovered in my head since Chris had moved out, that place of calm that was bottomless like the river, and I said to him, my voice shaking through tears, “I am sorry that is how you see me and how you experience me. And I know that you do. But I know in my heart that I am a generous and loving person.” It was the turning point, the moment I realized that I didn’t have to meet anger with anger, that I didn’t have to marinate in all the terrible things he wanted me to feel. That I could choose to let go of the idea of scoring a point (when, for so many years I’d thought my favorite thing in the world was to be right, to win!) and instead focus on protecting myself. I also could see clearly that Chris was lashing out at me partly because leaving me hadn’t cleared him of his responsibilities to me and Zack, but I knew that whatever anger he was feeling about that was for Chris to deal with on his own.
In that moment of vulnerability, of being open to his anger, I sensed a strength in myself that I knew I could trust.
After I got home and laid my sleeping son gently in his crib and crawled into bed, I cried and cried. I felt so lost, as a mother, as a wife. How could it be that Chris had come to hate me so much? But at the same time, I felt I had found a little pearl in all the pain I’d been through, and I could feel it glowing in my chest. For the first time since Chris had left, I had an inkling of who I might be without him.
* * *
I was learning that divorce is not a fight, it is a funeral. It is the death of a shared dream, a fatal fall after a beautiful leap of faith. It is tempting to believe we can learn something from other people’s divorces, but we can’t, because we do not live those marriages. We can’t protect ourselves with other people’s pain, because what we think we learn through them won’t help us when it’s time to meet our own. I thought of what my mother had told me about her marriage to my father. I thought of all there must be that I still didn’t know about what had happened between Chris and me, even now, a full year after he’d told me he wanted to go. I didn’t want people to help me slam the door shut, I wanted people to help me close the door gently.
I was at the Old Town Bar with my guy friends at some point after Chris was gone, drinking beers and talking about the particulars of the divorce—the division of the house and the money and the stuff. Chris and I weren’t suing each other and so we didn’t have to follow the state’s rules for division of shared assets; we’d decided to try to come to an agreement. In fact, a few weeks before he moved out, Chris had said one night as we each smoked a cigarette in the frozen backyard, “You negotiate for a living. I don’t want to fight you. You tell me what you think makes sense.” I mentioned to my friends that maybe I was going to be able to give Chris more than we’d originally agreed in those backyard chats. Paul, a charming caricature of old-school, forties-era masculinity, told me he thought this was a stupid idea. “Be strong,” he said. “Stay pissed. Don’t get soft about him. Give him nothing.” It was a classic expression of Paul’s humor (and his romantic idea of strength), but I knew I couldn’t stick to the advice, even though Paul kept repeating it the whole cab ride home. The truth was that nothing would be able to keep me from feeling the brutal loss that had nothing to do with the house or the money or the stuff. If I managed to tuck that loss away and hide it behind self-righteousness or a made-up story about Chris’s worthlessness, it would come back at me, turning me into that woman with the rose-colored diamond, my loss all anyone could feel in me when they met me.
I could see in my friends’ and my parents’ eyes how hard it was for them not to be angry at Chris, especially when I stood before them sobbing about all I’d lost. How do you comfort someone in that kind of pain? It’s normal to want to feel something, anything, else, rather than be that close to raw grief. I could see how hard it was for friends not to try to move me to a place that hurt less, where they thought they could help me be sure, confident, where I might feel strong for a minute, even if it was false strength.
Zack’s second birthday party in August was where I watched my friends and family wage this struggle together, all at once. I had decided to invite Chris—of course! He was Zack’s father!—but the rest of the invitation list was made up of my family and the people whom Chris had considered my friends. When Chris came into the party, I saw my father’s pale blue eyes flash with anger, even though I’d warned him that Chris would be there. I loved Dad for walking toward Chris just a minute or two later after he’d regained his equilibrium and offering his hand; I know what that cost him. My mother already knew what having Chris’s presence accepted by my family meant to me, so she approached Chris and the two of them launc
hed into one of their typical lengthy rants against politicians (or dumb people or bad television or whatever had teed them off).
All the others approached Chris in their own time. My brother Scott said to me, “It’s kind of strange, you know, having him here.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s kind of strange for me, too, but it helps me.” And he nodded. That was enough for him. And it was everything I needed.
I knew that my anger would surface from time to time, but that I didn’t have to embrace it. If Chris and I were able to link arms even as we were letting go of marriage, we could both agree that everything we had done wrong in the past would matter less in shaping our lives apart than how we were going to do the right things as we moved forward. I didn’t care all that much about the furniture or the money (though Chris was right, I did have very definite opinions about how to divide everything up), but I did want to protect the emotional currency I’d earned in my marriage; I wanted to keep everything I’d learned. And I wanted to be able to pull up some of those memories and share them with Chris from time to time, to know that it wasn’t all gone forever and ever. I wanted a connected breakup. That, I thought, was the right way to honor thirteen years of my life and all that those years had brought me.
I knew that not clinging to anger was going to give me my best shot at seeing myself clearly, maybe for the first time in my life. To be me: just me, wholly me, life-size me, okay with me. I was sure that was the prize I wanted.
6
You Are Not Alone, and, Yes, You Are Totally Alone
In my darkest moments of grief, my body sought low ground. The crying often started in my bedroom, after twenty endless minutes of my staring up at the ceiling, waiting for answers to how I was supposed to cope with a falling-down house and a falling-apart life. Tears slipped out of the corners of my eyes, dripping into my ears. Then a sob would break from my chest, and I would get up and head downstairs so as not to wake my son in the next room. Sitting on the couch, I wept, my elbows on my knees; then my body would list until I was lying down in the red sofa’s embrace. But the grief was heavier still, and I would roll onto the floor, arms around a pillow, holding on to it as if it were a life raft and I adrift at sea.
On the worst nights I always ended up in the kitchen, the farthest point in the house from my son’s bedroom, except for the unusable basement. I’d start out sitting on the floor leaning against the cabinets, but I always ended up lying on the floor in front of the stove, trying to keep the sound of my racking sobs from drifting upstairs and waking Zack. Despite my best efforts, I woke him more than once. I’d quickly pack up the accordion of despair that had opened inside me to run upstairs and hold him, tell him that we were safe, we were fine, everything was fine.
The kitchen floor became my touchstone, the place my body took me when I didn’t know where else to go to try to get away from the pain. The nights I ended up lying there, I’d sometimes find myself staring at the crumbs under the stove as I cried, wondering how they got there and how I should go about getting them out. Part of my brain was hurting a hurt so deep I felt like I might be swallowed up whole into the ink spot—and yet, another part of my brain was doing light housekeeping. Dust was gathering, time was passing, my life was still being lived, and some kind of healing was happening, even though I felt I was barely surviving it all when I wasn’t at work, where I could embrace the comfort of routines, of being the one in charge.
At those moments in the kitchen, I was in full submission, a circumstance I had spent my whole life furiously fighting to avoid. Action was my anodyne, whether I was trying to keep the volatile energies generated in my childhood home from igniting into a flashover or I was getting a magazine off the ground with less time, people, or money than generally assumed to be necessary. I could suppress all reasonable needs for months at a time, driving myself into the ground so that I could drive myself toward the goal.
But in the past few years, with the help of a wise and good therapist, I was learning that needs and vulnerabilities weren’t the same things as weaknesses; I was unwinding ironclad coping devices, so that I could let in the truth that the safe place I’d always imagined I would get to in life didn’t really exist. Intellectually, I completely understood this, but emotionally I knew that I still clung to the idea that being strong makes you strong.
And now here I was, facedown on the kitchen floor for perhaps the third, fourth, fifth time since Chris had moved out. I was feeling my fragility in my bones and I could not deny it. I let myself feel how truly afraid I was. I was ready to ask for help; I was ready to beg for it. I get it now! I am human and weak and vulnerable and I can’t control what’s coming my way. I submit. I see my smallness. I am not in charge. I need help. I need help.
Please help me, someone.
But no army of friends, I realized, was going to be able to meet me here in my alone.
How could I not have known this would be so hard? Why was it that the only thoughts I’d ever had about divorce until I went through it myself had involved fighting and affairs and money and parents trying (and failing) to get along for the benefit of their kids? I was poleaxed by how difficult this all was, to have to rebuild my entire sense of self from this point right here: me lying on a kitchen floor, trying to forgive myself for not being able to breathe because I am so afraid.
My friends could love me but they couldn’t fix me. All the support and sympathy in the world doesn’t help in the painstaking work of starting over. And unfortunately my friends also couldn’t untangle my strained finances, straighten out my legal issues, or find me a plumber who would solve the flooding problem. Yes, they could give me company and comfort, but the times I was the most alone and most afraid, they were cozy in bed with their own partners.
Now that I had decided I was weak enough to take whatever help I could get, I tried to think of what my friends could do for me. At the very least, I thought they would help me rebuild my decimated social life, but even that wasn’t wholly possible. After Chris and I broke up, suddenly many of my old friends no longer fit—or, to be more truthful, I no longer fit them. What’s a Saturday night couple date with a single mom? Turns out, it’s nothing.
All the couples who’d had had children at the same time Chris and I did were each doing the I’m-dancing-as-fast-as-I-can tango, trying to keep their own marriages connected and afloat in the pressure-cooker environment of life after baby. The truth was that I hadn’t been seeing them very much since our babies were born. We had managed one or two get-togethers, and we had the photos of all the babies lined up on different sofas as proof, but as the babies went from darling lumps to high-octane toddlers, the get-togethers had all but ended. Also, a few of my friendships had been anchored with the men in the couples—with Charlie, whom I’d known since I moved to New York; with Paul, for whom I’d been a groomsman in his wedding—and apparently my having had a baby proved that I was not really one of the guys, and changed the nature of our friendships.
My single friends had been busy living their own lives during the time I was married and procreating and getting all domestic in Brooklyn, thank you very much, so they didn’t have ready-made places in their lives for me to step into. Alix, she of the old Melrose Place dinners, works in the all-consuming, globe-trotting fashion world, and Eric, my former college roommate, is gay; I didn’t have the proper credentials to join either community. My midweek dinners out with them and other single friends remained a mainstay in my life, a time when I could unload about what I was going through, while also feeling a little bit like my old self. But I was still trapped in those seemingly endless weekends.
Adding to my sense of dislocation was the geography of New York City. Chris and I had loved our house when we bought it, and hadn’t thought much about the fact that it was in a developing neighborhood, far from our friends, because—of course, we were going to live here together. And in my married life, I was always having people over for dinner and a movie, or for parties. But now, on my own, I
was tied to the house, financially and otherwise, and the house was neighborhoods away from where my mommy friends lived, so there were no impromptu playdates.
Feeling tethered to the house echoed how I felt weighed down by every decision I’d made, as if the thing I’d wanted were now deadweight anchors pulling me underwater. I kept reaching back into the past, trying to select the first decision that led me to where I was. Was I being punished for having wanted a house? Was it moving to San Francisco because I just had to launch that design magazine that put our marriage on the path to failure? Wait, was marrying Chris actually the mistake? No, all of those decisions still seemed right, but my mind couldn’t stop rooting around for the left turn that had taken me off my road to happiness. I was single, but not quite single; a mother, but no longer a wife; a homeowner who wanted desperately to escape her home. It was obvious to me that I had to set about finding new friends, but that only felt like another impossibly large task to add to my already formidable to-do list. And fixing the house remained Job One, because nothing else would move forward—not the separation, not the divorce, not finding a new place for me and Zack to live—until that was done.
I talked to seven or eight lawyers, and each scenario they painted sounded more awful than the last: since disclosure laws are vague, it would cost at least $60,000 to bring the case to trial, with no certainty that I’d win; it would be six months of paying the lawyers before the case would ever even make it to trial; and, worst of all, the only way to make a successful case was to declare the house uninhabitable and move out immediately. There was no way I could add any of this additional stress and uncertainty into my already stressful and uncertain situation, so I kept making phone calls, convinced I’d find another answer. I finally found a lawyer who handicapped the situation for me in straight cash terms: if I could fix the damage in the house for less than $100,000, I was more than likely going to recoup my expenses in the sale, since house prices were still climbing steeply in my neighborhood.
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