Zack literally pulled me out of living life just in my head, and brought me down to Earth. He had me crawling around on my hands and knees with him, grooving on the patterns in the rug, playing peek-a-boo from behind the sofa, making toys rustle and toot and click. For Zack the world was a wonder, and when I was with him I found the world wonderful, too. His utter joy in the simplest of things—the beep as a cell phone’s numbers are pressed, water pouring from the tap into the sink—led to giggles bubbling up out of his chest, his gigantic blue-green eyes (just like his father’s) turning toward me, sparkling with mischief and delight, inviting me to be with him in his happiness.
The only time that Zack knew was Right Now, and in those evenings on the living room floor with him I learned that the comfort of Right Now was always there, no matter what else was happening around me. He taught me that I could set aside my grief, set aside my worries from work and choose to be where I was that second: on the living room floor with a little creature I loved beyond all reason. No matter how big the events were that were unfolding in my life, they didn’t have the power to erase the pleasure of a million small joys and discoveries that were brought to me by my little boy every day. Those precious moments, though small, weren’t fleeting; they were like down—small puffs of delight and joy that when collected together created a featherbed, a buffer between the hard stuff of life and me.
As Zack got older and more expressive, I was able to live more fully in all the small moments we shared, and soon it became impossible not to notice the small moments in my own life. Picking up a perfectly ripe pear at the deli. Running into a friend I hadn’t seen in a while on the sidewalk. Catching the subway train waiting and with the doors open when I ran into the station, running late. I started sending a thank-you into the universe every time I caught a lucky break or enjoyed a simple pleasure; it was a humble and yet very powerful way to keep me from falling into the self-fulfilling fantasy that everything in my life—the house, the fire, the divorce—was wrong.
When Chris had first moved out I would keep reminding myself that I had it good: I had a great job, a good career. I could support my life financially without Chris. But those things didn’t comfort me. They represented stability; peace was something entirely different. Taking Zack’s lead and getting small turned out to be where the comfort I’d been looking for lay. I started to experience that even the very worst of days were peppered with small gratitudes. I started making a list at night as I lay in bed: Today I finished a memo for work that had been weighing on my mind, really loved my outfit (never underestimate the power of looking good and feeling good), ate a delicious sandwich, read an article written for the magazine that just nailed the point I wanted us to make, found the perfect lipstick, made it home on the subway in thirty-eight minutes flat. Anytime I caught myself thinking I am cursed when another piece of bad luck found its way into my life, I would immediately practice some gratitude, to shoo away the sense that bad luck was all I deserved. To this day, I send a little thank-you to the heavens every time I fumble a glass when I’m unloading the dishwasher and it doesn’t shatter.
As Zack thrived, I had to accept the simple truth that I was succeeding as a parent and that I had protected him from the worst of my grief. It was clear that Zack had made it through my hard year believing that the world was filled with people eager for the pleasure of loving him, even if he hadn’t yet met them. Sitting on my lap on the subway, he would unself-consciously reach his arms up to the stranger standing in front of us, asking to be picked up and spreading smiles among the other passengers. At the playground, he would walk up to children who were crying or upset, and he’d gently lean into them, as if to comfort them. In restaurants, he’d look around until he found a table nearby with people who would flirt with him. It was like being out with the mayor of Park Slope, except that the mayor was in diapers. But Zack’s big personality and endless interest in people reminded me that the point was to connect. His irrepressible spirit started to pull me from my shell. He reminded me that I could be living life’s rewards every day, if only I were brave enough to do it.
That summer, Chris’s mom, Barb, had come to stay with me. When Chris and I broke up, I had emphatically professed to Barb that I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, give her up, and not just because of what she meant to my son. Barb is practically a professional grandma, with six grandchildren who’d come before Zack, so having her around for a week was going to be a treat for both Z and me. I was always happier when there were people around to help me enjoy Zack. Plus, I might even be able to sneak out to the gym one or two mornings when she was there, leaving the two of them to enjoy breakfast together.
Of course, Barb was here to spend time with her son, too, and so I carefully created a schedule of who would be with Barb on which evenings and which weekend days so that I wouldn’t have to be with Chris too much. I was planning for the four of us to have two dinners together and one big outing to the Prospect Park Zoo. What I didn’t expect was that Chris would be in the house seemingly nonstop, sitting on our old sofa, helping himself from the fridge, and just generally enjoying the comfort of his old home. I found myself retreating, by running errands, or disappearing into another room when he was around, and feeling pushed out of my own life. Why was it so easy for him to step back into the way things used to be? If he still found it possible to spend this much time with me, why had he chosen to destroy our lives?
Because leaving hadn’t destroyed his life. I had to keep reminding myself that the end of our relationship wasn’t going to affect us both the same. That he had left because he felt he had to, because he wanted to leave. That he’d felt he couldn’t be who he was around me. So why shouldn’t he be comfortable and happy now?
It was hard to see that being free of me had allowed something in his spirit to rebound. People often asked me if Chris was dating again, but I didn’t obsess about that so much. Chris + Some Other Person = Happy isn’t where my anxiety lived; Chris - Me = Happy was much more difficult to accept.
I had to remind myself that I would just be living different pain if he had up and disappeared, and walked out of my life for good. So I did my best to just wince and then let it go, and instead focus on all that his presence—and the three of us together—was bringing to my son. I tried to find the place where I could get comfortable in this strange new normal, and just live our connected breakup.
Later that week, the four of us—me, Zack, Grandma, and Chris—drove off to the Prospect Park Zoo on a sunny summer day. I found a parking spot right outside the zoo (thank you, universe), Zack was completely entranced with the sea lions and the baboons, and I took photos of everything we did, all afternoon long.
When I loaded the photos into the computer a week or so later, I was struck by what I had captured: a photo of Chris, six foot two, holding hands with his tiny son as they headed into the baboon enclosure, faced away from the camera. At first I wanted to cry; the photo was so sweet, and I felt again the loss of the family I thought I would get to have, sharply, just under my breastbone. But then I caught myself: I had been there to share in that moment. It belonged to me as much as it would have if Chris and I were still married. What more did I want?
As I sat at the computer, I scrolled back through photos of the three of us when we had all been living together. I was looking for the photos that captured how Chris was there, but not there, with us but not with us, when we were all together. In one shot, Zack is crawling at Chris’s feet in a wide-open field in Prospect Park, green grass stretching out in every direction. But Chris, his back to the camera and his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, is staring up and off to the right, away from Zack, and not turning to me even though I’d been calling his name. In another, Zack is walking in Gregg and Melissa’s backyard in a tiny track jacket, the white-blond fluff of his hair blowing in the wind; Chris is off in the distance, looking up into the trees at nothing in particular, wanting to be somewhere else. And now I had to get used to the opposite: Chris w
as here and present with Zack in a way he’d truly never been when we were still together.
And what mother wouldn’t choose that for her child? I decided right then and there that if Chris had the ability to be deeply connected to only one of us—Zack or me—then he had picked the right one.
The conventional wisdom on creating a so-called amicable divorce is that you “do it for the kids.” I was constantly reminded of this by the people who, after hearing that my ex’s mom was staying at my house, or that my ex moved in when I went away on a business trip, instantly chalked up our arrangements thusly: “Well, of course you guys are trying to get along, for your son.” Every time I heard that, I felt my blood heat up and rush to my face. I started responding sharply (probably too sharply, but I was reaching the point where I had stopped caring what others thought about my divorce):“No, I’m doing it this way for me.”
It was for me: to heal me, to help me. I was tired of the fact that people didn’t know that this was the real work of divorce, the hidden work that no one talks about because people are much more interested in knowing whether your spouse had an affair. I’d met plenty of people who thought they played nice with their ex-spouses, but you could still smell the bitterness on their breath, catch the hostility in the occasional snide comment. And children are like Geiger counters; they can sense the presence of feelings long before the feelings are expressed. Pretending that all was good with Chris and me wasn’t going to be enough. I believed Zack deserved to decide for himself what he thought about his father, without my casting my own emotional cloud over their relationship, and I knew that the way to allow that to happen was for me to put my quest for peace first, in the same way that you’re supposed to put on your own oxygen mask first in an airplane emergency, and then turn to those who depend on you to help them with theirs. This was a small certainty that was taking root in my life, after I’d had to give up on all my old ones. And so I held on tight.
Armed with this bit of wisdom, I resolved to get good at something I hadn’t been very good at in our marriage: accepting the ways in which Chris and I were different. We thought differently and so we would parent differently. I had to accept that the world did not hinge on whether Zack’s fruit got cut exactly the way I would cut it, let go of the fact that Chris didn’t take Zack to the playground as often as I would like, accept that he had ushered our son into the world of superheroes a year or two too soon for my taste. (I discovered this when Zack, standing in the hallway of our new apartment, said, “Meanwhile, back at the Hall of Justice . . .” and then whooshed down the hall to his bedroom, flapping an imaginary cape behind him.)
I didn’t like to have to admit it to myself, but I knew in my heart that if Chris and I were still married, I’d be picking fights about why he should do things my way. Now that we weren’t married anymore, it was easier for me to see that Chris didn’t have to be me, didn’t have to follow my plans. I was humbled to realize I’d learned to be separate from, and therefore more generous toward, my husband only after he’d left me. It took the prospect of divorce to change my idea of what a marriage should look like.
I started to accept that Chris’s definition of success and mine were unrelated, and that neither one was wrong; realized that the fact that I like to play within the rules of corporate structures and he doesn’t, doesn’t mean I’m right; got over the fact that his idea of a fun Friday night, beers with friends at an East Village bar, was not mine. I found dozens of places in our relationship where I had apparently been waiting for Chris to be more like me, although, at the time, the story I told myself was that I was waiting for Chris to grow up. One by one, I let all those expectations go, and started to see Chris as who he really is. And then I forgave myself for getting it wrong. I saw that I had been consumed with writing the story in my head of what my life should look like, and had been racing like hell to get to that safe place I always imagined was waiting for me. I’d just neglected to tell Chris that I’d signed him up for this race, too. And when he didn’t take the baton I handed off to him, I didn’t wait for him. I raced ahead. I’d been staying connected to the idea of “our marriage,” instead of doing the more complicated and ambiguous work of staying connected to him, especially because it was hard to be connected to someone who’d x-ed off large “no access” zones in relation to his own work and his unfolding sense of self. I couldn’t know what those years had felt like for Chris, but I could piece together that what he had been asking for was solitude, and solitude was not at all what I wanted from marriage. I was starting to see where we’d begun to lose each other, and starting to see why our marriage had worked until, quite suddenly, it didn’t.
I’d spent the last five years waiting for Chris to “catch up” to me. Maybe he had been waiting for me to slow down, or maybe he had been realizing that he was happier with me ahead of him, leaving him to himself. Maybe when I slowed down after Zack was born and wanted more of Chris’s life was when Chris became sure that he couldn’t live with me.
It was hard to have to keep living these reasons and answers—or, more accurately, living the questions—but it was better than having no answers at all.
* * *
One sunny Sunday afternoon in September, after weeks of people trooping in and out of our home, we finally got a bid on the house that we could accept, from a couple who would wait until January to close (relieving us of the need to pay the flip tax). The price was lower than what we’d listed for, but it would pay for all the repairs, repay my parents, preserve the money that Chris and I had put into the house in the first place, and give us a very small profit. It meant that Chris and I could begin moving forward with the divorce in earnest, now that we had pulled ourselves back from the brink of losing everything we had saved together.
And—joyous delight!—I could finally start looking for a new home for Zack and me.
Now that I was a single mom, I was finished with fringe neighborhoods, and I started looking in an established area of Park Slope in Brooklyn that had restaurants, fish markets, and dry cleaners. I fell in love with one specific block, with its double-wide street, wide sidewalks, and row of grand limestone apartment buildings on either side. It was just one block from the public elementary school, and two blocks from the park in one direction and two blocks from the playground in the other.
And so I stalked all the open houses for this block, making sure I was the first to arrive each time. I wanted an apartment on either the first or the second floor, and one that needed absolutely no work done to it. I was finished with home renovations.
Then, one Sunday, I walked into the apartment I could call home. All the apartments in these limestone buildings were laid out more or less the same, so it took only seconds for me to check room arrangement and confirm that this apartment was in amazing shape, having clearly been lovingly renovated by the young couple who were selling it now. I approached the real estate agent and told her that I was as ripe a buyer as she was ever going to get—with a house in contract, a preapproved mortgage, and a strong personal motive to find my new home as soon as possible—and that I was going to bid that way. I bid almost ten percent over the asking price, happy to pay more to make sure that I got the apartment.
After I had placed the bid, I went home and found Chris and Zack playing in the green backyard. I told Zack all about our new house and said I couldn’t wait to show him the long hallways he would be able to run up and down. Chris was happy for me, happy that we were moving forward and were going to be able to be rid of the house, too. I had gotten used to the way Chris was rooting for me and it didn’t feel strange anymore. I sat under the pergola, feeling good, looking up at the evening stars. “What day is today?” I asked, so I could do the math on how many weeks it would be before Zack and I could move. Chris looked at me strangely for a second. Then he said, “Today is October first.” I sat forward with a start. Ah. Our wedding anniversary.
I had forgotten! Earlier in the week, I had been dreading the approaching date, but it
had snuck up on me over the weekend. It seemed impossible that only a year ago Chris and I had been away together, attempting to save our marriage. I winced at the memory of the awkwardness of that weekend, which Chris misinterpreted as my being hurt about remembering what today was, flashing me a lips-turned-down smile. But I didn’t bother to correct him. I was too delighted that Zack and I were going to move out and into our very own place, just the two of us. My new life was about to begin.
8
Grief Is Not a Mountain,
It Is a River
I had assumed I would survive my divorce by lacing up my hiking boots and conquering it, as if it were a mountain to be summited. When Chris first made clear that he was really leaving, I had comforted myself with the mantra “left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot,” to remind me that I had only to take one step at a time. I assumed that I would climb up to the peak with determination and will the way I’d attacked everything in my life, make my way to the apex of the hard stuff, and then start my slow victory walk down the other side, feeling better and stronger with every step and every passing day as the grief loosened its frightening hold on me. I thought I would heal on a predictable arc, one that heads gently down, down, down, a little less pain every day.
I believed that I was now cresting the summit, since I’d found both a buyer for the house and a new apartment for Z and me. Any moment, my life would start to come together as Chris and I finished with the details of coming apart—finalizing the separation agreement, filing for divorce, checking items off the list of legal undoing—as if real estate had been the only thing binding us together. I started to feel confident and strong. I started to believe that, a year later, I had almost made it.
I was back in the swirl of planning the annual Redbook Heroes event—the same one I’d had to prepare for in Maine the year before, at my friend Tina’s wedding. But now I had fifteen months’ of running the magazine under my belt and I was working with a fantastic team, many of whom had been at the magazine when I got there. The changes we’d made to the magazine—adding style, complexity, honesty, more powerful photographs, and more and more stories from real women—were being very well received by readers and advertisers alike. I was ready to take the stage at Heroes and I felt I’d earned my spot at the top of the masthead, because now I knew the magazine, its readers, and our business inside and out.
Falling Apart in One Piece Page 17