Falling Apart in One Piece

by Stacy Morrison

  Before we ate, I made a toast, thanking my family for standing by me during so many difficult months, and for having helped me in every way that they could. And I tentatively announced that I believed I was truly through the worst, and said I was so happy to have them here with me today to celebrate family and gratitude. Zack said “Cheers!” when we all raised our glasses, lifting his sippy cup in concert. Of course, if things had gone as planned this Thanksgiving, Zack wouldn’t even have been with me today. I just smiled at him, and to myself and the universe.

  My January birthday is somehow now irretrievably tangled up with my divorce and the years of instability surrounding it. I broke the news to my family on my birthday, shortly before Chris moved out; the year before, five days after my birthday, we had moved into the house with an six-month-old baby; the following year, two days after my birthday, I moved out with Zack. All those events had overridden whatever desire I might have had to celebrate my birthday in those years. But in 2007, I was beginning to breathe again. I had celebrated Christmas at my parents’ house and New Year’s Eve with the Park Slope Single Parents (we drank our champagne at 6 p.m. to toast midnight in Paris, since our kids would all be in bed asleep at midnight in New York City). I made plans for a nice dinner out with Patrick and Alix and Eric and Dave for the weekend after my birthday. But on my actual birthday I found myself riding the subway home from work with no real plans in mind other than going home to Zack.

  I came up from the subway and started to walk past the French bakery in my neighborhood as I do every night, except today I turned around, walked into the bakery, and bought a little chocolate mousse cake. When I got home, Zack was already in his pajamas, and I asked him if he remembered what today was.

  “What, Mama?”

  “It’s my birthday,” I said. “And I have cake.”

  And so once we had sent Sezi on her way home, we sat down at the dining room table and I snipped open the red-and-white-striped twine around the pastry box. I put the cake on a plate and stuck a candle in it, and once it was lit, I started to sing “Happy Birthday” to me.

  “No, no, no, Mommy!” said Zack. “I’m going to sing it!”

  And sing it he did, keeping his eyes fixed on the chocolate mousse cake the whole time, just in case it should decide to wander away. I was filled with all those oogy mommy feelings you get when your child is being impossibly cute. But more than that, I was feeling something new: This is my family. We are a family. And I am so, so grateful. When he finished the song, he let out a big, lusty “Yaaaaaaaay!” and then said, “Okay, blow out the candle, Mommy!”

  I closed my eyes and leaned over the cake and made a simple wish that my life would forever be filled with these kind of unexpected moments of love and sweetness. Because I knew I didn’t know what was coming next. But I could make my wish—and, actually, call it a pretty safe bet—that at least some of it would be as magical as this.

  10

  The Answer Is a Riddle

  On a late-winter day a few weeks after my birthday, snow still on the ground in big piles, Chris and I met for a long mediation session with our two lawyers, to finish negotiating some of the fine points in our separation agreement. The broad terms of our financial separation had not changed at all in the eighteen months since the hushed nighttime conversations Chris and I had had in the backyard as we stared into the black sky, but my lawyer had been inexplicably slow. Over the past year I’d sent her many cranky or pleading e-mails and left prodding phone messages to urge her along, with little result. I had considered dropping her, but I simply couldn’t face adding “find a new lawyer and start all over again” to my to-do list.

  So after I’d made it through the upheaval and labor of moving, I insisted that my lawyer schedule this mediation. I wanted to dispose of all the remaining questions in a single face-to-face meeting, rather than lose another two or three months in the back-and-forth paper-pushing that defines the legal process of divorce.

  It felt a little awkward and a little stiff to be seated at the big round table with Chris and his lawyer, whom I had found for us when we first thought we would try a mediated divorce. That was before some friends reminded me I was the one with money to lose, and so I should definitely have my own legal representation. It was probably bad advice; Chris and I weren’t fighting about who gets what, so we definitely could have divorced with a single lawyer to write the separation agreement and handle all the paperwork. But as I’d never been through a divorce before, in the beginning I’d found it hard not to take whatever advice came my way. At the very least, it was comforting to sit at the table now and feel that my faith in my own judgment had come back. But it was strange to have these two people doing all the talking for the two of us, as if they were protecting us from each other—especially since Chris and I talked almost every day on our own, like adults. Like friends.

  But in this meeting, Chris appears tense, studiously looking at his hands or the table, avoiding my gaze. His mouth is set in a firm line. There’s one issue we’ve disagreed about in the document, and Chris seems to be focusing all of his energy on it, preparing to do battle. The lawyers start going through the separation agreement and outlining the broad points, rounding up a dollar amount here, eliminating some retirement fund–sharing there, and again confirming that in regard to Zack, Chris and I are adopting the language of “primary residence”: Zack will live full-time with me and Chris will have plenty of scheduled time with him. We review the visitation schedule: Chris is to have Tuesday nights, Thursday nights, and either Friday or Saturday night (to be discussed and agreed on in advance) as well as most of the day Sunday, and one morning a week. The morning is the third-rail issue, the one Chris has his prickles up about. It’s in there so that Chris could take Zack to school once a week, participate in that routine for himself, and for Zack—and in the process make it possible for me to attend early meetings and schedule early appointments once a week. What has his back up is that I am asking him to come early enough—6:45 a.m.—that I can also use that morning to go to the gym, since on every other morning I am home with Zack until the babysitter gets there.

  When my lawyer brings up the morning visitation time, Chris snarks out some comment about how the visitation rights are for taking care of his son, not taking care of me. My lawyer reminds him in her calm, lawyerly tone that sometimes helping take care of the primary residential parent is, in fact, part of taking care of the child, and his lawyer concurs. Chris cedes the point, but thinks it’s too early in the morning and I’m asking too much. I am fuming inside: I have agreed to take on the bulk of the parenting responsibilities—all the shopping, the cooking, managing the child care, the schools, buying all Zack’s clothes, everything—and Chris won’t even help me fit in one workout a week. I acquiesce, feeling sheepish (and selfish) that I was trying to get some time for myself, while at the same time feeling pissed and hateful. I am confused by feeling both things. I am tired of feeling both things. We finish the mediation session, agreeing that the document is now complete with one morning a week at a later hour added—which will allow me to get to work early, but not get to the gym—and I hang back to talk to my lawyer, so I can avoid having to talk to Chris in the elevator on the way out of the building.

  It’s a Thursday, which means tonight Chris will be the one to go home and relieve the nanny and put Zack to bed. As my cab pulls up in front of the apartment building at 9:30 after my work event, I’m annoyed that I’ll have to face him, since I’m still feeling bruised from the day’s mediation. I give the front door to the apartment the hard push of my palm it needs to groan free of the doorjamb, and then I step into the foyer. Chris is sitting at the dining room table, as he always is when I get home, at work on his computer on making his dreams come true without me.

  “Hey,” I say, tossing down my keys on the table and flipping through the mail, moving past him into the kitchen, opening up the fridge, surfing for a snack.

  Chris is all energized and bright. I can feel
he’s happy to see me, that he sees the light at the end of the tunnel in finishing our separation agreement.

  “Didn’t you think today was good?” he asks.

  “Yeah, sure,” I say into the refrigerator.

  The kitchen is a tiny anteroom that opens onto the dining room. I close the fridge and find myself standing just behind the glass cabinet that hangs between the two rooms. I’m eyeing Chris through the panes, trying to hold on to the sense of superiority that being self-righteous gives me, but he starts talking about how the process today was a relief, how we accomplished so much after months and months of being stalled.

  This is true, but I don’t want to admit it to him just now. I still don’t want to be his partner in this undoing, despite how far we have come. But Chris is clearly feeling relieved and happy and is trying to connect with me. Then he apologizes for being on edge at the mediation session and explains that it came from how much he hates early mornings (which, of course, after being his partner for thirteen years, I already knew). I want to cry. I’m tired. And I’m tired of resisting his niceness.

  So instead of cooking up a manipulative response, I just speak.

  “You made me feel like I was asking for so much, like I’m insane for wanting one morning a week to myself.” I say this standing halfway hidden by the doorway; I have to protect myself with distance and wood and wall. “When you get angry at me like that,” I continue, “I feel like I am a shitty person for trying to have something for myself.”

  Chris looks down at his hands. Then he looks up at me and says, “Angry?”

  “Yes. You were angry. I know you think it’s not true that I’m scared of you, but I am scared of your anger,” I say. “I always have been. I can’t function around it. It makes my brain go blank.”

  As I say this I feel as if I am slowly stepping onto very thin ice, sliding my feet forward in a shuffle, mindful of the steep drop-off into freezing-cold water that my sixth sense tells me must be somewhere around here.

  Chris pauses, considering what I’ve said. Then he speaks again. “Angry like how?” he asks, as if he really wants to know. “What did I do? Did I . . . ?” And he goes on to describe, very distinctly, the three different ways he gets angry: (1) the quiet fuming, clenching his jaw, looking up slightly at the ceiling or down at his hands, the angry I got from him when I would surprise him with an unexpected event on the calendar or a change in plans or a new idea for what to do on vacation; (2) the snide talking down, which he’d employed that morning, disdain and disgust so thickly partnered in his voice it was as if he were trying to erase me, a feeling I remembered from my childhood experience of my parents’ anger, and something I have never been able to tolerate; or (3) the blaming anger, the one in his loudest voice, telling me I’m crazy, I’m unhappy, I’m selfish, that everything is always about me, that I create all the drama, or, in other words, that I am too big for this world, too big for him, too big to be loved.

  As I feel what is coming, this moment of Chris trying to build some kind of bridge toward me, I take a step back into the kitchen, even though I am the one who took the steps out onto the ice. I start to cry as Chris calmly describes himself at his worst—as he finally admits that he can see, maybe just a little, that it might be possible that I could have been scared of him in our marriage, and could be scared of him now, even me, even strong, dominant, always-in-charge me.

  He turns toward me, with those big blue-green eyes I know so well, the eyes that now stare up at me every day from my son’s face, and shrugs, apologetic, and nods his head as if to say, Yes, that’s me, I know it is.

  After that, Chris went on to explain the ways I trigger his anger—but he wasn’t blaming me. He was explaining himself, suggesting ways that we could interact and make all the inevitable calendar adjustments that coparenting requires so that I wouldn’t set off his anger: let him know my plans as far in advance as I can, give him a set schedule, don’t push my stress onto him as a way of trying to guilt him into helping me when a calendar crisis strikes, which makes him want to tell me no. Just ask. By the time he finished, I was on my knees in the kitchen, clutching a paper towel, trying not to sob, and failing.

  I managed to get out: “So you don’t think I’m selfish?”

  He shook his head, with a gentle, almost loving, expression in his eyes, and said, “No, I don’t think you’re selfish.”

  “Really?” I squeaked.

  “No,” he said. “And I’m sorry if I made you feel that way when we were married.”

  And with those words he set me free.

  I sat on the kitchen floor and bawled like a baby, feeling as if I were taking off a thousand pounds of weight as I let go of the sense that he had been married to somebody who wasn’t the me I knew at all. I sat there as if dead naked in front of him, stripped of all my protection, and cried, while Chris looked on, with compassion in his eyes, not anger.

  After that night, I felt something shift in my questioning the end of our marriage. Maybe Chris and I didn’t make it because our emotional baggage wanted to live on the same luggage rack and so we kept trampling on each other’s deepest vulnerabilities (Reason #314). Maybe we didn’t make it because his need to turn inward was becoming more pronounced as I was discovering how much it means to me to live my life nakedly open (Reason #315). Or maybe it’s simply because we had totally different ideas of what life should look like (#316) x 2.

  I am still stumbling across reasons why we broke up, but I don’t get lost in the dark eddies of my mind when it unfurls a new thought about how I might have failed him and us and why he decided he had to go. I’ve started to understand that this searching is just part of the mental furniture divorce leaves behind, a stool that I’ll stub my toe against from time to time—a quick, sharp pain and then it’s gone.

  I will never be a hundred percent sure why Chris and I broke up. But I am finished with those questions, even though strangers and new friends can’t help but ask them, even now, because they still need their magic, their prayer, their proof, their certainty that if they can put the end of our marriage in a box, they can keep divorce from coming to them. I’m done with certainty, at least in this one area of my life. It took me more than a year before I could accept all this vagueness as being the most I, and we, would ever get to know about the end of Us. I didn’t get the answers I thought I needed—the answers that would keep us together, the answers that would make me look good, the answers that would hide all the messy, unhappy stuff that lives inside even the very best of marriages—but by being unafraid to see the ugliest of things, I have laid my whys to rest. They won’t haunt me anymore.

  I was able to take all the reasons from the long list that I had been compiling for two years, and let them go, one by one, allowing them to float into the sky and bump up against all the thank-yous that I send into the universe.

  And as I’ve gotten stronger, the urge to answer other people’s questions—or accept their hastily offered answers—has faded away. When friends or strangers ask whether Chris and I had married too young/spent too little time together/collapsed under the weight of our disparate incomes, I can now calmly say to them, “That question is for you, it’s not for me.” And I don’t mean it to be rude; I say it to be generous. The best time to ask questions like these is when you are still married, and to ask them of each other, spouse to spouse. But Chris and I did talk about many of these things, just as his mother had said when we told her we were breaking up, and it still didn’t save us.

  In the end, some couples just don’t make it. And it turns out we were one of them.

  * * *

  Now that I was almost divorced, I became a student of divorced people. I asked them all the questions that I was asked, but not because I thought they had answers for me. I asked because I was puzzled by the fact that we don’t have a shared story in our culture about how hard it is to break up, no matter the circumstances that may have led to it. I had been a women’s magazine editor for years, an “expert” abo
ut relationships and love and sex and marriage, yet I was totally unprepared for how quickly everything in my grasp, even my sense of who I am, turned to dust when my marriage ended.

  But more than a student, I’ve become an emotional activist, because I am so saddened by how much people don’t know about their own marriage’s demise, by the sheer number of partners who walk away from three, five, ten, or twenty years together with a simple “I don’t love you anymore” or “I’ve changed” or, worst of all, “I am in love with someone else.” I see now that if we are part of a couple that’s disintegrating, we don’t know how to truly explore why the relationship is over, even though, as spectators, we cannot squelch our curiosity.

  I understand the curiosity, I forgive the curiosity. I wish I were evolved enough as a human being that I didn’t crane my neck when I drive by a highway accident, in a mixture of prayer and dread, but crane I do—and what’s a divorce but an emotional highway wreck?

  But we move too fast to bury other people’s marriages, because of all the discomfort their failure awakens in us. So many times I was asked whether Chris had cheated on me—a question that was asked with the assumption that I would say “Yes, he did.” It was unsettling to realize that this was the answer people wanted, because somehow it would have affirmed that the end of my marriage was about Chris’s failing, instead of being about the way the many moving parts that make up a marriage can shift just slightly out of place, bringing the whole thing to a grinding halt. We fall in love or into an affair with someone else long after those forces have been in play.

  In our culture, we romanticize marriage and love, despite plenty of evidence in our own homes that marriage is a lot of work. We pick sides in celebrity couples’ breakups: Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook, Reese and Ryan, Marla and The Donald—admit it, you have opinions. At weddings where we deem the couple ill-matched, we slyly invoke the (misunderstood) statistic that half of American marriages end in divorce, and we shrug. When our neighbors’ marriage is breaking up, we think we are in a position to pass judgment. We are not insensitive; of course we comfort our friends should they be so unfortunate—all while plumbing the depths of what we believe we know about their relationships, essentially digging through their emotional trash cans, weighing pieces of arguments we’ve witnessed, comparing notes about their conflicts. We can’t help it; we want to believe there is a reason why.