Falling Apart in One Piece

by Stacy Morrison

  More than once since Chris had ended our marriage, I’d been brought to my knees—or, more literally, been brought to a prone, please-God-take-me-away-from-all-this position—and I still believed that this life was worth living. Or, more to the point, I was worth living. I was worth it. I possessed worth. I played with these words over and over in my head in the days following my breakdown the way you slide tiles around on a Scrabble rack. I used the words to console myself for having let Zack see so much pain, to forgive myself for having failed to be a parent in that moment, to remind myself that wisdom comes only when and where it comes, and you have to be open and ready and willing to accept it whenever it lands on your doorstep.

  In the same way I’d had to accept the divorce that landed on my doorstep.

  I realized that if I have no idea what’s coming next in life . . . then, well, I really have no idea what’s coming next! That if I’m not in charge, then I’m not necessarily to blame when my life gets hard. And that what’s coming for me could be good and surprising and wonderful as easily as it could be stitches that don’t dissolve or vacations that don’t work out as planned.

  After months of endlessly asking myself the question “Why me?” I was reaching the point where I realized “me” wasn’t even in the equation. The events that came into my life—the floods, the fire, the stitches, the blood, the rain, the water, the endless water—had come into my life . . . just because. In trying to comfort me through this last round of unfortunate events, friends would reflexively say, “You are due for a break.” And I would reply, “Nope. Not necessarily.” Not because I was being negative, but because I was being realistic. I was learning that these situations that tested me to my limits didn’t come into my life because I deserved them, because of my karma, because I was cursed, because they were life’s way of proving to me that I would never be happy. They came Just Because. Because each one was what came next.

  The concept of Just Because used to be totally terrifying to me. If it all came down to chance, then what could I do to be sure I was safe? Nothing. You can count your blessings or practice gratitude. And then you have to let go and fall into all we cannot know and live your life. My myriad attempts to master life would be foiled again and again, or, more accurately, more confusingly, my attempts would be foiled sometimes and rewarded sometimes, leaving me to wonder whether I’d been “good” or “bad” or hadn’t invested enough in the karma tip jar at my local Starbucks, or whether those mean, petty thoughts I’d had about the guy in the car next to me on the highway had rebounded through the universe, ricocheting back to me. Yes, it mattered to be a good person, to be compassionate, to care about others. But it mattered because of what it made me feel about me and about life, not because that quarter in the tip jar was buying me a golden future. Because, no, I don’t get to know what’s next, just as my mom told me when I said I was in love with Chris but so afraid. I didn’t get to know then, and I don’t get to know now, or ever.

  Yes, this is a scary thought. But getting away from causal thinking—from “if this, then that” thinking, from thinking that I have any ability to program my life—was helping to lighten my load. Because if I’m not actually in charge of what happens to me, then all I have left to focus on is: How close am I living to my truth? And that is a Buddhist TV-talk-show-host way of asking, Am I who I want to be—inside? Not my accomplishments: a woman who made her girlhood dreams come true, a wife for ten years, the editor in chief of Redbook, a would-be poet and a dreamer, the owner of a really outrageous collection of four-inch heels (of which I am extremely proud). I hadn’t wanted to be divorced partly because I feared what it said about me. But I came to see that it says nothing at all—except whatever meaning I give it, and whatever credence I give to the opinions of others, who know nothing about the inside of my marriage, much less the inside of me.

  And so I realized that what my divorce was teaching me was that I am an optimist—something I’d always wished or hoped was true about myself. It had been part of my public persona since I was a precocious, know-it-all girl. “I’m a relentless optimist,” I’d say, feeling proud of myself for having such a deep and thoughtful statement to make about myself. I said it then as a way of pronouncing that I was strong, but today I hear those words and know I say them because I dare to admit that I’m soft. That I believe in the power of love. That I believe that life is worth living. That I believe it is just as likely that there is something good, something amazing, waiting for me around life’s next corner as it is that there is something terrible. I expect some of both, frankly. But I know that my optimism will prevail.

  It was only through my divorce that I realized how deeply I liked and loved who I was. And that I would be fine, I would be safe, because I was safe in how I felt about myself, I was safe in knowing that I could trust myself to get through anything. And I was safe because I’d had the opportunity to lift my proverbial hood and take a long look deep within. And I had discovered that I really liked what—and who—I saw in there.

  And so I found ways to really begin again. I joined an online group, Park Slope Single Parents, reveling in both the intimacy and the anonymity. My first post after I introduced myself to the group was a lengthy one detailing my confusion about the vacation gone wrong, and how I didn’t know how to help my friends understand the grief and aloneness of being a single mom. I printed out the responses that people sent me, and I felt that I’d been understood.

  I checked in on the site almost every day, reading long, impassioned posts from moms who were struggling to make ends meet, or wondering aloud how their ex could just not show up for a planned visit, leaving their child wondering why. I was blown away by the stories of single moms by choice and how they grappled with all the difficulties of being a solo parent—how to run errands, buy groceries, park your car in the city, afford day care—without even having the luxury of blaming their worst days on someone else’s departure. I was heartbroken to read how many divorces and custody battles were tipping into full-on wars. With topics such as love, money, parenthood, divorce, and honor in the mix, it’s not surprising that the occasional fight would break out in the group, with people typing as fast as they could, occasionally SHOUTING IN CAPITAL LETTERS, jumping to refine or challenge a perspective they felt called their own choices and actions into question.

  One weekend, after one mother had described a poisonous exchange with her ex, and four or five other mothers had chimed in with tales of egregiously bad behavior from their own exes, one poster asked: “What is it that you are doing that is making them react like this?” I was shocked by the insensitivity of the questioner, and I rushed in to defend the women who’d shared their tales of woe.

  To your question I say: It is not one’s actions that cause the other’s actions (i.e., most single mothers do not willfully create monster exes who use the children to spite the woman for her independence or whatever other evils she’s visited upon him), but rather the CHEMISTRY between the two adults. To think that one has total power to control how a divorce plays out is naive. Like a relationship, a divorce/separation/breakup/custody agreement is controlled and managed by two people and how they dance together. And sometimes the dance goes awry.

  As for me, I am very lucky. I have an extremely unusual coparenting relationship with my soon-to-be-ex-husband. I am lucky because Chris (my ex) was very invested in the idea of redeeming himself for walking away from our ten-year marriage (with no counseling, no effort, no hope) by remaining an active partner in Zack’s—and therefore, my—life. But he totally broke open the marriage of his own will, and not with my agreement. I was devastated. And angry. And hurt. But what I found in this horrible, horrible two years since this all unfolded is that (1) I’m bigger than I thought, and (2) Chris is bigger than I thought.

  Having generous thoughts about Chris isn’t always my favorite thing to do, but the paradoxes of what he and I have been through since we broke up are truly awesome. I feel closer to understanding myself than I ev
er have before in my life because of having to face the pain with wide-open eyes, and to continue to think well of him, even when he did (and continues to do) things I didn’t like. And the truth is, I actually wasn’t so good at that in our marriage. And being forced to finally learn it because we broke up? Well, that’s God’s way of laughing, I suppose.

  But I feel as if this whole experience has been like yoga: it’s a practice. I practice being big enough every day to will myself to forgive him his many failures. And not because I’m a saint. And not for my son. For me. For my sense of self. For being able to trust myself to make a choice to have a partner again. For not punishing myself because my marriage fell apart despite how much I wanted it to work.

  And having been through all that consciousness-raising, I can say: IT’S NOT FUN! And so I am not surprised when it is a path people can’t choose, because there are so many other tantalizing options, like being “right,” or being cruel, or being unforgiving, or wanting to demonstrate to the ex that YOU WILL HOLD NO POWER OVER ME!! Fear and fear of not having control are powerful forces, and it’s no wonder the brain offers up a hundred more savory options.

  The human spirit is flawed, and it wants its rewards fast. This is how people can end up in such a terrible place. And I truly am awed by all of you going through what you do, because it was freakin’ hard enough for me, and I had it easy. To you I say, brava! And you didn’t do anything to bring this on yourself. But the question remains—and it’s a life’s work, this question—how can you make it easier on yourself? Are you practicing that?

  Stacy

  Mom of Zack, 3

  Finding this community meant I could explore what was happening to me out loud instead of blurting it out to a colleague at a black-tie dinner—which I did more than once. It was a place where I started to understand the me who I was becoming, the me I’d probably always been. I realized many things by sharing myself in this community, beginning with the fact that I was not actually a single mom, but a mom who was no longer married to her child’s father. I had too much support and presence from Chris to pretend I was on my own in parenting, and so I let that go and felt grateful for what remained between Chris and me. I discovered that I had a bottomless resource of compassion for and interest in these people I didn’t know who were sharing their struggles and successes on the message board, which inspired me to shine a little of that compassion toward myself. I finally came to accept that I wasn’t a loser or a failure or a freak or flawed or any of the dozen other negative labels I had tried to apply to myself, because there was a lot of very interesting and worthwhile company to be found in this land of broken dreams. Even though I was totally alone in the slow, hard work of putting myself and my life back together, there was an entire world of people who knew expressly what that quicksand struggle felt like.

  Best of all, not one of these people needed my story to be anything except my story. They didn’t automatically start to use my life to serve whatever it was they already thought about divorce and love and failure, because they weren’t people who already had answers; they were people with questions. And I was now someone who was trying to live life’s questions, too.

  One Saturday afternoon in November, Nicholas, a single father of two boys, and a prominent voice of reason and compassion on the site, hosted a potluck. Zack and I showed up at his house with a big bowl of homemade tabbouleh and spent the afternoon among a roomful of families that looked kind of, sort of, but also not quite, like ours. It was the happiest kind of chaos, with all the adults trying to align our first names with our online names, and put faces to the voices we’d all been reading online, and the children wreaking havoc all around us, leaping and screaming and brandishing plastic swords and yelling and laughing, so pleased to find themselves in a full-size army of playmates.

  On the surface, I didn’t have a lot in common with many of the people in the room. We had all had wildly different life experiences, different educations, different backgrounds. A handful of the women had come to the United States from other countries: Sweden, Slovenia, the Dominican Republic. A couple of the women were lesbians who had adopted their children or given birth to their children on their own. Some of the parents were parents of teenagers. One parent had lost a spouse to drug abuse. Some of the women had had two children with different fathers, single moms twice over. Everyone had a unique story of how he or she had come to be a single parent, and the complexity and diversity of our stories was comforting. But for all the ways we were different, what we shared was what counted: for the first time in months and months, I didn’t feel I had anything to explain about my life.

  I waited until Zack was two tantrums past time to go, because I wanted never to leave that room, with its table of homemade dishes cooked from scratch by all these people who, I knew, had the least amount of time to themselves. And yet they had taken the time.

  Soon Thanksgiving was upon us again. Chris was going to take Zack to Illinois, and this year, I was ready. I made four days of plans, packing the time as much as I could to try to protect myself from hitting a wall of grief. (All the while shaking my head at myself a little bit, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to protect myself if the grief was going to come.) Eric and Dave and I made reservations for Thanksgiving dinner at one of our favorite restaurants. I invited my family to my apartment on Sunday to join me for the very first proper Thanksgiving feast that I would prepare myself, ever. I intended to spend the rest of the weekend on an ambitious DIY project I’d been planning for months: painting a huge gold-and-silver floral stencil on the wall behind the bed in my bedroom (with its gray-beige walls and aqua ceiling), something I’d never be able to do with Zack underfoot. It was a perfect way to pass the days without him, and I’d have something to show for it all when he came back.

  But things didn’t go as planned. Zack threw up all over himself on his way to the airport, and Chris, with a big, fat mess on his hands, freaked out and decided not to try to fly with Zack, unsure whether he was carsick or he’d caught a virus. Chris called me three times in his panic, trying to figure out what to do, but I stayed calm and didn’t feel burdened by his indecision. I suggested that he go to the airport and get Zack all cleaned up and see if they could take a later flight that day, but Chris decided to turn around and come back to Brooklyn, to my apartment, so he could figure things out from there.

  By the time they got back to my place, Zack was feeling better, though he was covered in “red,” as he kept calling it (strawberries having been on the menu for breakfast). I stripped him down and started the laundry, then gave Zack a bath as Chris, extremely upset, and probably feeling like the universe had it in for him (and I knew the feeling), got on the phone with his mother and the airlines. Chris decided he didn’t have the energy (or the desire) to try to make it back to the airport over the busy holiday weekend, and that he would postpone the trip for a few weeks. He turned to me and started to talk about how we would share Zack for the weekend. I felt a lick of panic start in my stomach: Oh, God, there go all my plans. Oh, God, Chris is going to be so mad that I don’t want to just take Zack back for the whole weekend, with Chris coming in and out for his shifts. Oh, God, Chris is going to tell me I’m a selfish and awful person again! But I got a grip, took a deep breath, and said, “Chris, I made a lot of plans for these four days. I would love to have Zack all day Saturday when my family is here for Thanksgiving, and I’ll take him overnight Saturday, but I am packed with plans on the other days, and I can’t change them—I don’t want to change them.”

  I did it. I stood up for myself with Chris, and I hadn’t needed to make him look bad or turn myself into a martyr. I had merely said what was true for me: I had opened myself up to the possibility of no, instead of trying to scheme my way into yes. And Chris had heard me and said, “Okay.” Yes, feeling vulnerable is a condition of living, I reminded myself. I still didn’t love this notion, but I felt a lot of gratitude for the moment I was living: a successful exchange with Chris, three days for
me and my plans, and Zack with me and my family for Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday.

  On Thanksgiving day it was pouring down rain, but for once it didn’t feel like a curse. Eric, Dave, and I hopped in my car and drove into Manhattan for our night on the town—our night on the empty town. Because of the rain and the holiday, we were able to park right in front of the bar where we went for drinks, and then we parked directly in front of the West Village restaurant where we had made a reservation for Thanksgiving dinner, the cobblestone streets shining with rain and lamplight. The prix fixe menu at the restaurant offered three choices in each course, and so we got one of each, tasting everyone else’s meal until we were stuffed full of good food, good wine, and the great feeling of doing just exactly what we wanted to do. Friday, I precooked some of my Thanksgiving dishes—lyonnaise potato gratin, sausage and cornbread stuffing—in between hours of mapping out exactly how the stencil would go on the wall and testing my painting techniques on cardboard. I was happy as a clam to be filling my brain full of things other than work and toddler time. It was like being reintroduced to a very familiar stranger, this side of me that belongs to me alone (an expression I use at work to capture the part of our readers’ identities that Redbook is serving). And I was really looking forward to making a holiday in my own home, to filling my house with happiness and family.

  The next day, my turkey came out perfectly. And I mean perfectly. The tented-foil trick my mother had suggested worked out great, and I had been able to “borrow” an upstairs neighbor’s stove so that the seven different dishes were all hot and ready at the same time. I set up a beautiful buffet on my wobbly dining room table, lit tall candles, arranged some harvest flowers, and beamed while my family heaped their plates with my beautiful Thanksgiving meal.