After I finished the long, slow walk through all the rooms, and I was back in the kitchen, I set down the basket and just stood there and smiled to myself. It had been such a simple thing to do, but I could feel its power, I could feel the pull and promise of the life that comes next.
After that lovely declaration of independence, I thought long and hard about trying to find a way to change the coparenting arrangements. I wanted to tell Chris that he would have to spend his time with Zack at his own apartment, or suggest that we move toward the more conventional custody arrangement, where there wouldn’t be so much contact between Chris and me, but I just couldn’t do it. I still couldn’t fathom putting myself in a situation where I would go more than a day without seeing Zack, and I didn’t want to move him to a new home and then suddenly give him two homes; it would be too much for both of us.
So instead I withdrew from Chris. In all our interactions, I spoke to him as little as I could, my eyes cast down, while he talked at me, barely even registering that I was trying to make myself invisible. I felt as if his talking would grind me into the wood floors—going on and on about his conflicts with his bosses at work, his attempts to have more time to work on his screenplay, his struggles not to be so angry all the time—but I remained polite, if distant, even though I felt I was being crushed by the weight of his burdens. When I went away on a business trip a few weeks after moving into the apartment, I told Chris I didn’t want him to sleep in my bed anymore. That bed had been our bed, of course, but I felt as if it had gone through some kind of cleansing process in the twelve-block move that brought it to the new apartment. Chris ignored me, of course (the big red sofa now lived in his apartment, and my new aqua velvet sofa was too small for a six-foot-two man to sleep on), but just having told him what I wanted made me feel better.
When I came home from the airport after the business trip, Zack was asleep in bed and Chris was a fountain unstoppered. I heard every last detail of what had been playing out at his office, the same intramural struggles, the same communication issues, the same pecking order, and yet Chris was still in the same place with it all as he had been for the last several years. I unzipped my suitcase in the front hall and proceded to sort its contents, giving Chris as many “mm-hms” as seemed necessary and trying not to get pulled back into this conversation I’d had with him so many times. My take has always been: Accept the truths of how an organization is organized. If you don’t have the authority to change those rules and structures, then you have only the authority to decide whether you can take it (and stay) or you can’t take it (and then go). Why hadn’t he left? Why hadn’t he marched off in a whole new direction when we split up? I felt he was wasting the divorce that he’d wanted, and worse, that he’d gotten to walk away from what he didn’t like about me, but hadn’t had to give up one single convenience of our married life—me always taking care of things, making the plans, keeping the household going—except that I didn’t cook him dinner anymore.
I kept unpacking my suitcase, getting angrier, and using my anger to create a wall between his troubles and me. I walked down the hall to deposit some dirty clothes in the laundry basket, Chris following me, still talking. I walked into the bathroom to start putting away some toiletries, shielding myself from his chatter by opening the medicine cabinet, putting the door between us. I walked back down the hall and got down on my knees in front of the suitcase to pull out more clothes and Chris finally snapped at me, “Could you show me some compassion here?”
“Compassion?” I shrieked as I looked up at him, totally incredulous. “Compassion? You don’t get to have that anymore! You left me, remember?”
He slammed out of the house that night, and I felt for a moment that I’d won some small victory. But what had I proved? That I could be a bitch? That I could choose to reject him, too? Big whoop. The poison of the anger seeped into my stomach, making me nauseous. I was a world away from the calm I’d created walking through my home with my basket and my visions.
Nonetheless, I spent the next two weeks holding my anger like a small, hot flame in my chest, shutting him out. Chris figured out what I was up to. “Oh, you’re not talking to me now? Okay, Fine. I get it.” I started packing my Sundays full with errands and gym time and dinner with friends to avoid being around my apartment when Chris and Zack were in it, and our evening transitions shrank down to six- or seven-word exchanges, Chris picking up his bag and whooshing out the door; me flouncing down the hall.
But after a few weeks of this, I realized that my anger was leaving me exhausted and empty, and disconnected—and not only from Chris. I was losing more than I’d bargained for: I was losing myself. When I thought ahead to who I wanted to be when I got to the other side of the divorce—and I was fervently praying these days that I would actually discover that there was “the other side,” as I’d been reassured by so many people—it wasn’t this woman. The anger that had helped me throw up a fireproof screen when Chris and I were coming apart was putting distance between me and myself when I really needed to be listening to my instincts, so I could be learning not only who I was separate from Chris, but who I was for me.
And worse, I was denying myself moments I really treasured: the Sunday afternoons and evenings of my sitting at the dining room table reading manuscripts, or cooking, or doing laundry, while Chris and Zack played together in the living room, ate dinner, did the evening bath routine. Even though it caused poignant pain sometimes, I loved watching my son spend time with his father, hearing them make each other laugh, and witnessing as Chris grew more confident in his role as a parent. I loved to watch Zack just be instead of attending to his needs. The actions I was taking to try to protect myself were hurting me. And I was so tired of hurting.
It was in this frame of mind one afternoon—feeling stuck, and hopeless that I would ever get back to feeling “normal”—that I went to see my shrink, Dr. G. When I got into her office that day, she kicked off the session with her usual question: “And so how are you?” That triggered sobs. I lay on her sofa, chest heaving.
After a few minutes, I managed to croak out a few words. “I’m so tired. I’m so weak. I give up. Everything hurts so much, and I feel like I will never be free of it. It’s like I’m in a river, almost drowning, being swept along by the current.”
“And what does that feel like, being swept along?” she asked.
As I lay there on the sofa, I could feel only the whooshing sensation of being carried by water. I realized that it felt quiet, even though it hurt. “I’m just going with the flow, I’m just floating along. It’s all I can do. I don’t have any fight left.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be fighting,” she said. And that statement landed like a big, soft pillow right in the spot in my chest that ached so much I could hardly breathe. I knew she was right, but I was afraid not to fight, not to push for whatever I thought should be next; it was the only way I had ever known to live and to be.
Dr. G. sat there with me as I cried. We darted in and out of the conversation, but I was unable to stop the tears as the session ticked away. The expression on her face was tender and questioning; I could see how broken I felt reflected in her eyes. Finally I sobbed the last sob, stood up and gathered my bags, and headed toward the door; she stood up, too, and stepped toward me, putting out her arms and gathering me into her embrace. I fell apart again as she held me, sobbing into her shoulder, humbled by her reaching across the professional divide because I so obviously needed the comfort.
In my head, though, I was a little alarmed. To have your shrink take you in her arms? This person who gets paid to be professionally detached? Now I knew without a doubt that I was in a really bad place.
But in a few days I realized it wasn’t a bad place; it was an open place. I was just yielding, and it was a totally unfamiliar sensation for me. I had done a lot of crying in the past year, but I hadn’t yet given in to the miserable pain, even after that scary night on the kitchen floor when I pulled aside the curtain in my mind. I
could now see I had tried to give myself some sense of control by holding fast to my idea of a tidy time line. I kept promising myself that I was getting better, even when I knew deep down that I wasn’t. I was going to have to come to terms with the fact that the pain and grief would ebb and flow in unpredictable patterns, for months, even years, after I thought the healing was complete.
I thought back to the contractor who had told me that my basement had been built for the express purpose of taking in water, because I lived at the bottom of a slope. And I realized now that my soul had been carved deep to take in life’s water. The grief of my divorce would stay with me and leave its mark. But I reminded myself that in a way this was exactly what I had wanted. I had wanted my marriage to leave its mark on me, and so I would simply have to learn to take the undercurrent of grief along with it.
I was starting to feel that letting go and giving in to the pain was somehow giving me comfort, like that quiet space in my mind I discovered at the kitchen table after Chris was gone. In fact, I was being buoyed up because I had lost my fight, because I wasn’t thrashing wildly against circumstance. Grief isn’t the mountain I’d first imagined, a visible terrain to be conquered one step at a time. Grief is a river, with hidden depths and coasting shallows; sometimes you’re swimming for your life and sometimes you’re being carried along by the same entity that threatens to drown you.
I realized that it was a relief to just give over and feel what I was feeling, instead of instantaneously reacting against it and creating a battle plan. I was learning that being gentle with myself when life hurt was a compassionate thing to do, a way of making room for the inevitable ups and downs of the journey, and it had simply never occurred to me before my divorce to do that. It brought a grain of truth to Chris’s accusations that I was “never happy.” It’s not that I wasn’t happy, it’s that I wasn’t still, because I had always been pushing, pushing, pushing myself to get to the next goal, unable to relax enough to be in the moment. I started to understand a little bit better who exactly it was he had been living with all that time, which was more gentle than blaming myself. And in that moment of clarity, I started to forgive myself for the simple, human failing of trying to solve life, instead of just living it.
I stopped willing myself to feel strong and started to let in the truth that feeling vulnerable is a condition of living. I would not be able to win my divorce, and I would not be able to win life, either. It suddenly became clear to me that no one had been keeping score, except me.
Everything I was learning was a Zen puzzle of sorts. Being carried by grief was better than always fighting to get away from it. Bringing Chris closer was making it easier to let him go. My infant son knew more about life than I did after all my years on the planet. I had friends and family to help me, but in this process of falling apart and putting myself back together again, I was truly, deeply, untouchably alone. As I talked all these thoughts through with my friends (and yes, with strangers, massage therapists and shop clerks and subway companions), shaping them and turning them into river stones I could store in my pockets, I started jokingly calling myself a Zen warrior goddess, but the comfort I was getting from these seemingly contradictory thoughts was serious indeed.
I e-mailed a friend from college who had always lived more on the woo-woo side of life than I did, running a yoga retreat in Africa and doing the hard, good work of bringing the best of East and West together, and gave her an update on how I was feeling and what I was doing. I wrote, “I’m either going to become a Buddhist or a talk-show host,” explaining that as all these simple and obvious truths took root in my head, I found myself unable to keep from sharing them with others, that I kept finding myself with a ring of women around me at the playground or cocktail parties, all wanting to hear the story.
Her e-mail back to me was perfect in its simplicity: “Why not be both?”
I laughed. Why not? But I also could laugh because I was starting to discover the lightness in knowing that I had absolutely no idea what was coming next in my life.
9
When You Accept That You Can’t
Be Safe, You Can Be Safe
Every night when I got into bed in the new apartment, I lay on my side and gazed out my bedroom window at the big, tall tree that grew in the back of the building, its skinny, mostly bare branches reaching up into the sky, and the expanse of dark night all around. I loved the tree for how it pulled me out of myself, out the window, and into the wider world that existed beyond my own heartbreak and worries.
The tree came to represent my appreciation of being able to live life, even when it hurt—especially because it was a “weed tree,” the humble alianthus, found all over Brooklyn. It became the first item I named on my nightly list of gratitudes, the mental tally of all I’d been thankful for that day: I was happy I had the tree, I was grateful for the friendly neighbors in our building, I had drunk in my son’s loving nature in our bedtime ritual, I was still thrilled by the orange boiled-wool slippers my parents had given me for Christmas, I was humbled and happy to be living in a home I wasn’t afraid of, a place where I felt safe.
I settled into our new home and our new routines, and I set aside my plan to freeze Chris out of this life. I also had to set aside my text-message boyfriend, the electronic connection being both too much and not enough: I became desperate for him to bring me answers about me and my worth, and life and love, and I had to be gently reminded, by both him and my shrink, that those answers, in the end, had to come from me. So I let my text-message account go dark and let him recede into memory, but I held on to what he had relit in me and dared to imagine a day when I might actually try to share that spark with someone in the flesh.
And then I was finally able to shut the door on the house Chris and I used to share. He and I both attended the closing—Chris being sure to take careful note of numbers on the big checks I would walk away with and deposit, so we could divide and divorce at last. There had been some complicated legal tussles in the final days and hours before the closing, which didn’t surprise me at all; I had known there was no way this house would let go easily. When we arrived at the lawyer’s office late on a Friday afternoon, the buyers’ lawyer still wasn’t there, refusing to show up until my lawyer and I made some last concessions regarding permit violations that had stood on the house, unchallenged and uncollected, since long before I’d lived there. I paid, of course (and argued about it with my lawyer later, since he should have caught those violations two years before, when we were the ones buying the house). I had to be rid of the house today. I would pay any price to close this chapter of my life; to close the door, turn the lock, and hand over the key.
When all was resolved and all the signatures were in place and the checks duly recorded, I stood up, handed over the keys to the new owners, a young couple, and said, “I hope you enjoy the house more than we did.” Then I turned to Chris and said, “Okay, now let’s get divorced.” And I went home to my apartment, sending a huge thank-you to the universe as I walked in the door, Zack careening toward me, all smiles.
* * *
Zack was now two and a half. He was absorbing the world and his new environment with abandon, and was in love with this brand-new concept of “neighbors.” Having been freed from the vertical restrictions of a house with four stories, he’d run from end to end of the apartment, from playroom to living room and back, squealing the whole way. I winced for Marc and Pat, our downstairs neighbors and apologized to Pat when I saw her in the hallway. She demurred and said, “Well, he goes to bed pretty early; it’s not like he’s keeping us up at night.” Pat and her generous spirit made my gratitude list that night, and many other nights, especially as Zack gained in speed and size and energy.
One Sunday evening as I was giving Zack his bath, there was a knock on the front door. Zack loved the surprise visitors who happened by in the apartment building, and as I made my way down the hallway to the front door he screamed after me, “Who is it? Who is it, Mommy?” It was
Pat. She’d come upstairs to let me know that my bathtub seemed to be leaking into her bathroom.
Oh, God. Water leaking?
I focused on pretending I was calm and upbeat, even though I wanted to lay myself down on train tracks. It’s not a big deal, I said to myself. This isn’t the house coming to haunt you. This is easily fixed.
I offered to call my plumber—the one I trusted, who had fixed the basement, and have him take a look. I dreaded that he might have to open up the floor or a wall in my nice, new, recently renovated bathroom to look at the pipes.
When I called the plumber and made the appointment, I also placed an order to have a pricey bit of prevention installed elsewhere in the apartment: an automatic sensor and shut-off valve for the clothes washer. When I’d had the apartment inspected before I bought it, the house inspector had mentioned that the washer, like those in almost every New York City apartment, didn’t have an industrial drain—make that any kind of drain—under it, so that if it or the pipes malfuctioned, gallons and gallons of water would pour into my downstairs neighbors’ apartment. “Everyone thinks, ‘Yeah, well, I have insurance to cover that,’ ” said the inspector. “But they forget that it’s just a big mess and a pain to have to deal with the damage and the repairs. It’s not a small problem.” Well, I was familiar with the spectacle of gallons and gallons of water and the damage that went along with it.
The plumber came and detected a pinhole leak in my bathtub drainpipe, which he was able to fix from Pat’s ceiling. And Pat was delighted to hear about the extra steps I was taking with the washing machine sensor. At the very least I figured I’d just bought myself a few more months of Zack running amok in our apartment, but I know deep down what I was really trying to buy was a little peace of mind.
Falling Apart in One Piece Page 20