Falling Apart in One Piece

by Stacy Morrison

  As I shopped for an outfit to wear at the event, I noticed I’d lost about fifteen pounds without really trying, as if I were shedding an old skin. After a year of frozen dinners (at least they were organic) and two glasses of wine (Hey, it’s got heart-healthy polyphenols!) at the kitchen table while I read manuscripts every night, I had started figuring out how to take care of myself in my life alone. Although I had cooked dinners for Chris and me almost every night, as soon as he moved out I found I couldn’t conjure the energy or enthusiasm for it. Even just making an arugula salad—something I could eat seven days a week—seemed like too much effort and time when there was so much on my daily to-do lists. I started running on the treadmill again, and I quickly came to rely on that physical energy outlay as the best kind of stress reliever—yes, even better than pinot noir—even if I managed to fit it into my schedule only once or twice a week.

  All those small steps toward taking care of yourself are like the first soft, green undergrowth that shows up on a mountain after a forest fire. I marveled at how good it felt to feel good, like a rush of pure oxygen, as if I hadn’t taken a deep breath to the bottom of my lungs in a year. And it’s possible that I hadn’t in all those days of being clenched up, willing days to unfold, waiting for time to pass.

  And then out of the blue, the Internet age ushered in the perfect first postbreakup boyfriend: an e-mail appeared in my in-box from a former not-quite-lover from college. He had contacted me on a whim after fifteen years—on his fortieth birthday—no less, and I was instantly seduced by his potent recollections of my both my freewheeling, younger self and our brushes with sexual adventure. He was in recovery from alcoholism, and we bonded instantly over doing the hard work of rediscovering who you are at life’s midpoint.

  We went from long e-mails to late-night phone calls and then all-day-long text-message volleys. I carried my phone with me everywhere, like a teenager, surreptitiously peeking at it during meetings, feeling a surge of delight every time there was a message from him. I took photographs of myself to e-mail to him, wearing a green T-shirt and a big fat grin, and in the pictures I could see that being excited about him—and the way he made me excited about me—had put a sparkle, a sense of lightness, back in my eyes.

  We had marathon phone conversations at night—after Zack was in bed and the day’s allotment of manuscripts had been read—talking for hours about life and love and chance and changes, and we tumbled easily into a fantasy of being together even though we lived thousands of miles apart. Talking with him felt as if I were being reintroduced to the younger me, which was both heady and poignant: I couldn’t believe how far I had drifted from my sense of myself as an interesting, engaging, and attractive woman. And not just in the aftermath of Chris’s leaving me; I’d lost touch with her years before. Sometimes when I got off the phone I would cry for having managed to lose my best idea of myself.

  I felt a lurking desire to taunt Chris with my new relationship. I would let him catch me whispering into the phone as I walked in the door at night, or I’d rush to the kitchen table to pick up my phone and read a new text message with a big grin on my face. I wanted to hurt him to see just one second of regret in his eyes. But I never got a payoff for my efforts, even when I intimated that I might need “a weekend to myself” because an “old friend from college” might come to visit. Chris was happy for me, and happy for himself; I could see him shrugging off more and more guilt. I wanted to pinch him sharply, to let him know he wasn’t living by the rules: I was supposed to be scoring points here! But he kept lobbing back my volleys with genuine goodwill.

  It took me a few days to realize there weren’t any points to be scored, unless I was trying to live the story of divorce that everyone had been offering to me all these many months. But I reminded myself that that wasn’t what I wanted.

  Halloween was coming up, and Zack was old enough to trick-or-treat for the first time. Our neighborhood does Halloween to the nines: houses are decorated, neighbors sit on their stoops cradling bowls of candy, and a Halloween baby parade of hundreds marches down the main drag, with thousands more people lining the street. I couldn’t wait. I am sure I was more excited than Zack. But in the previous weeks, as I’d been making Zack’s costume—he was going to be Bamm-Bamm from The Flintstones—I’d been feeling sad about doing Halloween with Zack alone. From my experiences in the past year, I knew that trying to hook up with paired-off parents for events such as these was futile. It was already enough to coordinate for two parents coming from two jobs and hooking up with one or two children and their babysitter while the neighborhood was exploding in hysterical Halloween celebration without also trying to connect with me and Z. and I was tired of feeling like the desperate divorcée. Which is how Chris and I ended up spending Halloween together with Zack.

  The three of us went trick-or-treating as we made our way to the parade, Zack getting out of his stroller and hesitantly taking candy from our neighbors. He looked back at Chris and me for permission the first six or seven times, not fully comprehending why these people he’d never met were handing him chocolate. (He got the hang of it.) Then we headed to the starting point of the parade, joining a cacophonous crowd that surged around homemade floats—a sailboat bedecked with fairies and mermaids, an aquarium filled with little toddler crustaceans—and costumed children being pulled in wagons by costumed adults. I knew Zack would want to walk in the parade and be surrounded by people. But as I walked into the fray with him in my arms and Chris pushing the stroller behind me, I felt dread trickle into the back of my throat, realizing that I was putting Chris into a crowd situation, which he hates, hates, hates. I tensed up, but then I reminded myself that he’d chosen to join us, and so I could will myself to relax. And then actually relax. I zeroed in on Zack’s wide-eyed awe. All these people! When Zack heard the drum corps at the front of the line start up, with its heavy, happy beat, he shimmied down out of my arms so that he could stand there and shake his groove thang, feeling the music and the thrum of the crowd.

  The parade began its lumbering pace, and Zack went into performance mode, scooting up through the paradegoers to get closer to the beat of the drums, doing his funky dance for a stretch of the twenty-block, jam-packed, shimmy-walk processional. Halfway through the parade, we walked by Marnie and Paul on the sidelines, with Luke all dressed up as a little lion. A few eyebrows were raised at Chris, Zack, and me all being there together (Marnie and Paul both exchanged meaningful glances with me on the sly), but I just shrugged, and the three of them joined us for the last leg. After a few more blocks, Zack hit his limit, so Chris and I traded off carrying him and pushing the empty stroller before turning around to head back home and put our tired little caveman to bed.

  Halloween had been a kind of victory. It wasn’t quite planting my flag on the top of my mountain, but it was close. But right on the other side of Halloween, the big holidays loomed large, and I found myself starting to backslide. Just thinking about Thanksgiving and Christmas served up a fresh platter of grief. I didn’t want a lifetime of having only half of those holidays with my son! I didn’t want to have to pack him up and send him off with his father to create his childhood memories of the holidays without me! And even worse was the thought of my having to be alone. Going to my parents’ house to celebrate with them and my brothers and their wives was going to feel like I was fresh out of college and just beginning the work of creating my life, instead of being an almost-thirty-seven-year-old, a mother, a successful career woman. And, yes, a divorcée, a loser. I felt all the growth and acceptance that I’d laid as groundwork for myself in the past few months start to tremble and shake; my mind flashed back to images of my house’s foundation being jackhammered up, revealing all the dark earth hidden beneath.

  I told myself to be a grown-up and just get on with the impossible task of choosing which holiday with Zack I would give up to Chris. For the past thirteen years, we had been spending alternating holidays at our respective parents’ houses, so in theory this year m
eant Thanksgiving in Illinois, since we’d been there last year for Christmas, when we’d had to tell Chris’s mom that we were breaking up.

  The truth was that I wanted to go to Illinois to stay with Chris’s mom for Thanksgiving. There was a lot about the life that Chris and I had shared that I didn’t want to have to say goodbye to, and his family was the biggest part of that. Chris’s two sisters, Kelly and Jennifer, had three children each. The oldest of Zack’s cousins, Colin, had been born just weeks after Chris and I had started dating; the second oldest, Danny, was born a few weeks before Chris and I married. Of course I thought of all them as family; they are family. Three of the cousins lived near Barb, and the other three cousins often showed up around one holiday or the other, making the long drive up from North Carolina with their parents in their minivan. I wanted that rumbly-tumbly seven-kids-in-a-house holiday chaos for Zack, and I wanted it for me.

  But giving up Christmas this year with my two-and-a-half-year-old was unimaginable. My father, a lifelong train enthusiast and hobbyist, was all revved up to give Zack a gigantic play table for his wooden train set so that he would have a place to make amazing track layouts for Thomas the Tank Engine and all his friends. My mother was just about to finish knitting the “Zack” stocking that would match the one she made for me thirty-odd years ago, with Santa peeking up out of a chimney, his angora beard all fuzzy and white. And I wanted to be with them; they had helped me with so much in the last year. I couldn’t bear it that I had to live without one of these; it was fueling new anger toward Chris and reigniting all the old hurts.

  One weeknight I got home and Zack was asleep; Chris was packing up his work piles and getting ready to head to his apartment. I worked up enough nerve to start the conversation, asking him which holiday he was planning to fly home to Illinois for this year.

  “I hadn’t thought about it yet,” he said.

  Of course not, I thought, ungenerously. I had always been the one who bought the tickets and made all the necessary arrangements.

  “I don’t really feel like going out there at all,” he said. “I can’t stand traveling that time of year. It makes me crazy.”

  That’s an understatement, I thought. I felt all the places where Chris and I rubbed each other the wrong way rising to the surface. This you hate, I reminded myself, this you don’t miss, his inability to just deal.

  I willed myself to calm my prickles, and instead took my window of opportunity, suggesting that maybe I could go out there with Zack. And then I just went for it all.

  “Except, Chris, I don’t think I can not be with Zack for Christmas this year. I know we should share, I know we have to share, but I don’t think I can right now. By next year, I’ll be ready.” I tried not to get teary because I didn’t want to be manipulative. I tried to just say it straight, but I felt all my sadness pushing up into my eyes.

  Chris didn’t even look at me. He said, “Okay. That’s fine.”

  I should have been happy. I was happy. But there was still an aching hollowness, both for whom I’d wanted Chris to be when we were married, and for what was gone. When would what was gone stop being what I wanted?

  I had to face facts. In the year since Chris had said he was done I had not really taken any steps to rebuild my life. I had rebuilt my house, I had rebuilt the magazine, but doing so in conjunction with caring for Zack had kept me from the labor of starting over. I knew I needed to find other single moms and dads, to create a new social life around who I was now, but I felt too tired and closed off to do the work (and take the risk) of connecting. That’s why my text-only boyfriend was right for this moment in my life. He lived so far away I didn’t have to actually be in a relationship with him.

  I remembered watching my friend and coworker Melanie go through the end of her own marriage when we were working at Marie Claire. I remembered how raw she was, her tears lurking just below the surface and how much she struggled with her sense of not fitting into her tight-knit suburban neighborhood anymore, with all her friends married and starting their families. I recalled offering her what I hoped was useful advice. I’d advised her to be gentle with herself, and to be forgiving about her grief, and said that it would get better, slowly. I’d reminded her that her friends would find ways to keep her in their lives, and she didn’t have to start from scratch. I’d believed every word I said to her, fervently.

  Now swimming in the rapids of my own divorce, I recalled my well-intentioned advice, and I longed for it to feel as true and as certain as it had when I was doling it out.

  On the last day of work before Thanksgiving break, I couldn’t keep my sadness at bay, even though Zack and I were getting on a plane tomorrow to go to Illinois. I was worried that I had been fantasizing about continuing to live in a past that was gone, that I was setting myself up for disappointment. While all this was running through my head, Melanie came out to the elevator bank, loaded down with bags to take home for the long weekend.

  After a minute or two of chitchat, I looked at her and said, “It’s so hard, Thanksgiving.”

  “Yes. Yes it is,” she replied, instantly understanding exactly what I was talking about.

  “I know I believed everything I ever told you when you and your husband were breaking up,” I said. She nodded. Then I said, trying not to cry, “But it just doesn’t help, does it?” Melanie shook her head, her eyes filling.

  I brightened my voice, as if it would brighten my mood, and said, “It feels better now, right? You’re better now?” And she nodded and said, with as much conviction as she could muster, “Yes, it’s better now. It’s still hard, but it’s better.”

  Two years later and it was still hard for her. I went into the subway hearing the word “alone” playing in my head over and over: Alonealonealonealonealonealonealonealone. It was all I could think about, me, who had never wanted to marry. I didn’t understand how I could have given all my self-reliance away in my years with Chris. I tried not to hate myself for feeling so weak; I tried to hear the advice I’d given Melanie and to believe that my life was moving forward even though I still, one year later, felt like I was drowning.

  I decided that all this was Chris’s fault. Not the divorce, but the way that I still felt so terrible. It had to be because he was still too much in my life. Maybe my friend Paul had been right that night at the Old Town Bar: I needed to get tough, be mean, just seal off the place where Chris and I had been connected, and snap the emotional ties in the way everyone else in the world seemed to think was normal, as if thirteen years of connection could be rejected overnight. Maybe I wasn’t an optimist, doing my best in a hard time; maybe I was actually a masochist, and keeping Chris in my life like this was a way of hurting myself. I vowed to get better at separating myself from him. I was selling the house we’d lived in together, and Zack and I would start our new life soon—without Chris.

  I had to go before my apartment’s co-op board to be approved as a buyer. Such a meeting usually entails a simple review of the buyer’s financials to make sure he or she can afford the apartment. But I felt exposed and not a hundred percent sure that I would be approved. I could definitely afford the monthly mortgage payment and the monthly maintenance, but I would be putting every single penny I had into the down payment for the apartment, leaving me with no cash reserves. Meaning that if I happened to lose my job, I would pretty quickly be unable to pay my mortgage. As I’d prepared for the meeting—sending in the sheaves of financial documents that detailed the financial tornado I’d been living in for the past two years, managing the house and all its repairs—I’d caught myself wishing I were a chemical engineer or a teacher or something that seemed stable. But then I reminded myself that the last time I’d been fired, I had managed to line up a well-paying freelance job in just days. I would be fine. If the worst happened, I would find work quickly. Hadn’t this past year taught me I could survive anything?

  When I headed to the interview in the apartment building in Brooklyn, it was pouring rain, curtains of water sweep
ing across the streets, chased by a bitter wind. Of course it’s raining, I said to myself as I negotiated the storm with a giant umbrella, hailing a taxi near the office. The weather is wailing back at me because I’m going to a meeting tonight to put the stake in the heart of my house. I tried to shoo these magical thoughts from my mind and set aside the notion that the weather was proof that my house didn’t want to let me go. As I rode over the Brooklyn Bridge, I rested my head against the cool glass of the window and stared out at the black river, water meeting water in the storm.

  I was ushered into the apartment just above the one I hoped to buy, and led to a small chair surrounded by a semicircle of people who lived in the building’s other seven apartments. I welcomed the sensation of facing my future. And it felt good to know that when I needed to park my car or unload groceries there would be people above and around me. For years I had wanted the independence of living in a house, and now I could hardly wait to give that up and be surrounded by others again.

  The interview was straightforward, but I still felt vulnerable. One of the board members kept circling back to what my outstanding liabilities were, because I hadn’t shown any on my net-worth statement. I hadn’t remembered to list my credit cards and show their zero-balance statements; I hadn’t remembered to show that I owned my car outright with no loan to pay off. So I haltingly told the whole story of the house and its repairs and the divorce and the way I’d had to borrow money from my parents and that I’d spent the last two years living up against the threat of losing everything, and that the last thing I had any interest in was taking on any more debt. That the apartment was debt enough, an investment in my son’s and my future and in our stability. I told them how I’d chosen this very block and waited months for the right apartment to become available. I told them how all I wanted was to move in and move forward, and put all that had happened in the past two years behind me, and live somewhere that didn’t leak, somewhere that felt safe. After all my talking, there were a few seconds of silence, during which I could hear the rain still raging against the windows. And then the interview was over. I got an e-mail from the sellers the next morning letting me know that I’d been approved, and that I’d been declared “lovely.” I stood up and danced a little jig at my desk, sending my thank-you into the universe.