Imagining affairs is fun: the raised pulse, the hushed phone calls, the scent of sex creating a tantalizing swirl in our heads. Sex belongs to everybody; solitude belongs to no one. We can dare to ask about the dirty details of an affair—“How did you find out?” “How long had it been going on?” “Did you ever catch them together?”—but it’s impossible to imagine asking our friends and neighbors about the ponderous slide that is the decline of a marriage: the intermittent silences, the bungled communications, the pressing of wills against each other. It’s way too personal. But that’s exactly the point. Breakups are personal. They are deeply, wholly personal.
An affair we can imagine; the much more brutal act of looking at someone you share a life with and saying you want to go is something we struggle to envision. It’s too hard, too scary. And so instead of trying to name the vague, complicated reasons a marriage starts to fray—those reasons that don’t seem on their own good enough or big enough to throw away three, five, ten, twenty years—we inflate annoying personality habits and small transgressions, we blow ourselves up and make ourselves Right or make ourselves Wronged, and make things as unbearably awful as we can stand to, so we can give ourselves permission to let go.
But I believe there has to be a better, more connected, more compassionate way to help the people around us honor the end of one of life’s most beautiful leaps of faith.
The bravest, and best, thing Chris did when he said goodbye is that he didn’t wait until we had nothing left. He didn’t have the affair that obliterated our relationship, sweeping all the complicated truths of our marriage under the rug. He didn’t walk out, saying simply that I’d changed, he’d changed and we were done. He did his best to be my partner in the breakup, to be present as we both tried to make sense of what was happening to us. He accepted that he was the one who had to carry the guilt for ending the marriage. People tend to give me too much credit for the kind of relationship Chris and I have today, because, of course I am the holy one: The One Who Was Left. But in the same way that he set the tone for how we would fight when we were married, he set the tone for how we would connect when we divorced, by not being hateful, by staying open to me. And I am deeply grateful to him for that gift.
Yes, I know, it sounds like I still love him. And believe me, I do. But I don’t want to be married to him anymore, either. I got a close enough look at our marriage, and at my hidden fears, and at how we really wanted to live our lives, and at how much we each erased something important, something vital, in the other that defined who we are, that I was able to truly let go, too. Apart, we have found a new connection. A far better one.
At some point, almost imperceptibly, my breakup stopped being a secret. I had completely lost track of whom I had and hadn’t told. I repeatedly found myself in the circumstance in which I’d run into a friend or colleague, casually refer to the breakup, and watch the person I was speaking with rearrange his or her face quickly, moving from shock to composure in an instant, and then attempt to say something polite: “Oh, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”
I always resisted the urge to grab the person by the lapels and say, “Oh, my God, you mean there is actually someone on the planet that I haven’t backed into a corner at a cocktail party and told the whole sordid saga to, with footnotes and references?” Instead I stumbled into something more like this: “Oh, that’s okay. Thanks. I mean, it’s good. I mean, I didn’t want it, my husband left me, but it’s fine now. We’re getting along great, I mean, it was really hard for a while, and, you know, thanks. Anyway . . . , uh, you were saying?”
It amazes me to this day that I, of all people, still haven’t found a smooth way to handle these moments. I’m a professional talker: I make up speeches on the fly, I can do live TV appearances with my eyes closed (though generally TV producers prefer them to be open), I can answer any kind of tough question that is sent my way without flinching, and I have mastered the even tougher skill of not answering any question I don’t want to answer. But on the topic of the end of my marriage, I remain as tongue-tied as ever, or, more accurately, un-tongue-tied: I stumble over too many words and too many thoughts, because I cannot pack the whole experience into a simple sentence.
Instead, I have relied on the phrases that I repeated to myself to calm my mind when the panic felt too big—a different phrase for each stage of my profoundly humbling journey. I will never really know why we didn’t make it. I am not alone in all this, but, yes, I am totally alone. When everything is too big, focus on what’s small. If I truly come to terms with the fact that I can’t be safe in life, I can find my safe place within me. These small truths are the stones I picked up off the bank of the raging river of circumstance and emotion that threatened to drown me. They arose from the questions I lived during my quest. I didn’t find answers. Instead, what I found was me.
My two years under water forced me to let go of all my false strength and come to accept the ways in which I am vulnerable. Accepting these weaknesses has, in turn, made me more flexible, more forgiving. I am better able to see and react to what is happening in life, as opposed to reacting to a story I’ve made up in my head, a plan I am trying to fulfill, a fear I am trying to ignore. And I feel more connected to the nature of life: it isn’t black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. It’s everything all at once, many shades of gray, a beautiful, poetic mess.
My apartment—where I live my wholly unexpected and lovely life—is aqua and blue and gray, every single room the color of water and clouds and uncertainty, as if it’s reflecting back to me the experience of these two years of falling apart in one piece. This was unplanned. I painted the rooms one at a time, some of them two or three times—the dining room yellow, then chocolate brown, then finally a warm, earthy gray—before it all felt right to me. People always comment on the colors of my apartment, and say they find the place “very soothing.” I just smile to myself, remembering my hardest-won lesson: that accepting my vulnerability was the only path toward feeling safe. And I do feel safe in my apartment, and in my life. I do, I do. Even though I don’t know what comes next. When I get nervous about all I don’t know, I just recite my favorite mantra, the closest thing I ever found to an answer.
Life is good. Life is hard. These two truths are unrelated.
As I like to say at work, “Everybody bleeds.” Everyone faces his or her own struggle in life, whether it’s the death of a spouse or an intractable case of vanity. There’s no weighing one against the other; there are no degrees of “hard.” When I used to stumble into a conversation in which a colleague was complaining about a bad meal at a restaurant or a petty fight with a boyfriend, sometimes that person would turn to me, open his or her eyes really wide, and say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to complain. I mean, you have so much worse to deal with in your life.” And I always responded the same way: “Everyone has pain in their life. It all counts the same.”
I didn’t want my pain to be that different from someone else’s. I didn’t want to comfort myself with my agony. I wanted to count myself among the ordinary. I wanted it to all just be a part of life. We all have to take the hard with the good; we don’t get to choose. And how you handle the hard that you get will help you understand who you are and what you believe about this life, and what you believe about yourself.
And what I believe, at last, is this: It is, and I am, Enough.
The first time I felt those words land in my head, I had to laugh at myself. Because, of course, that sentiment is the reason I wanted to be a magazine editor, to reach women and remind them to breathe it all in, to put themselves on their to-do lists, to feed their mind and continue to invest in becoming who they are, all to help them celebrate the love all around them. To “Love Your Life” as Redbook’s new official motto urges. All those messages I wanted to share with the millions of women I’d never have the chance to meet—I realized those messages were also and always meant for me. It had just taken me thirty-eight years to hear them, to let go enough to let them in.
So I decided I was ready to write in the magazine about the fact that my marriage had ended. In the November 2007 issue, we were running an article called “The Changing Shape of the American Family,” which included mini profiles of ten very different kinds of families, from the traditional (husband, wife, and their children) to blended families; married couples who chose to have no children; grandmothers raising their own children’s kids. I had been totally moved both by the article and by the voices in a survey we’d commissioned to go with it, and by the myriad ways people create security and love in an uncertain world. And so when I sat down to write my editor’s note, it took me no time at all to type up what I wanted to say:
“What Makes a Family?”
At Redbook, we think about “family” all the time, especially about that amazing transition we make from belonging to our family of origin to creating one of our own. But what it means to start a family has changed dramatically in the last 40 years, as Americans have found different ways to come together and create that special sense of place and peace we call home. This month, we take a look at the changing shape of the American family, to put a face on just what all this change has wrought.
My own family has changed in ways I wouldn’t have imagined or hoped for, as I am now a single mother to my three-year-old son, although I am fortunate that his father and I are still raising him together. Suddenly finding myself outside the mom-dad-child unit has forced me to think really hard about what it is that makes a family, because I have felt so deeply that I simply lost mine. But I comfort myself with company: Only 25 percent of all American households today are made up of mother, father, and their children. In the end, I would rather that I were still in that 25 percent, but for the so many of us who find ourselves caught in different circumstances, isn’t it wonderful to know that we can create loving, happy homes of our own, by our own design?
Wherever and however it is you make your home, treasure it. The comfort and solace we get from—and give to—those we love is the greatest reward in life. So this Thanksgiving, be sure to hold your family, however you define it, close.
I finished writing the editor’s note and hit “send” to drop the article into the executive editor’s in-box. Then I sat back and thought some more about how amazing it is that I don’t know what’s next and how good it feels not to worry about the next step. What I was feeling was the relief of not being the one in charge.
The mediation meeting had accomplished what it was meant to, and so in the beginning of March, Chris and I met again at my lawyer’s office to sign our separation agreement so the papers could be filed and we could have our divorce at last. That day was not one of the saddest in my life. In fact, in a weird twist that I have now come to expect in my day-to-day, it was one of the happiest.
Once we had all filed into my lawyer’s conference room, Chris, his lawyer, and I sat at the big round table, trading chitchat, while my lawyer zigged in and out in a flurry, bringing in and removing various papers, then sitting down and getting up to retrieve something else she had forgotten. She and Chris’s lawyer had one last, polite disagreement about how to word the complaint and about how to file it, and she left the room to make the final adjustments. His lawyer looked at me somewhat apologetically for the delay, and commented that trying to get two lawyers on the same page was like herding cats. I smiled. And then I said, “I’m glad I hired her, because if this had all gone quickly, I wouldn’t be able to sit here and be happy that we are almost finished with this.” Truly, I would have been devastated and sad, feeling that my life was ending. And so what had felt like a curse for many months now felt like a blessing.
At last, the stacks of paper were approved by both lawyers, and Chris and I began the signature rally that leads irrevocably to the end of the marriage, two years after the marriage had already ended. When Chris and I had finished signing the papers and were each handed our own copy of what thousands of dollars in divorce fees had bought us, we made our way around the table toward each other and we hugged. We had made it to apart, together.
Our lawyers gaped, and one of them mumbled, “Well, we don’t see that too often.” Chris and I walked out of the building together and shared a cab uptown, since we work in two big buildings just two blocks apart. It was one of those beautiful spring days, a day filled with sun and clear sky and optimism. It was the day after my second exhilarating date with a man who thought I was fascinating and smart and maybe even sexy, a man who was helping me rediscover parts of me that I had thought were gone forever. As the cab headed uptown, sliding through the canyons of the Fashion District, I got an excited phone call from a mentor at work, who was calling to let me know that Redbook had just been nominated for a very prestigious industry award.
It all could have been much too much—as an editor, I would have rolled my eyes if I’d been reading the story—except that at this point I had been living my lessons for months, and so I merely recited in my head what I know now to be true for sure: Life is good. Life is hard. These two truths are unrelated. And so today just happens to be a good day.
And I’ll take it.
11
The End Is the Beginning
Two months after that sunny spring morning when Chris and I signed the papers, our divorce was finalized by a judge, and a few days later I received my crooked copy of the official notice in the mail. I held the papers in my hand, expecting to feel Something, but the truth is that by then the fact of the divorce’s becoming final didn’t mean anything to me anymore. Finally reaching the other side was just another day among days, in the best way.
I spent two years living in hell because of my divorce, counting every single day and willing time to pass, waiting to be whole, to be healed. Now life and time are back on their regular tracks, moving quickly, days unfolding one into the other, my life being lived. I marvel at how much more I trust myself and know myself than before all this happened. And I think about how strange and lovely it is that the end of my marriage has been the beginning of so many good things.
I think about how Chris is a much better partner now than he could ever have been if we had stayed married; our relationship as coparents is warm and calm. I know also that it may not always be this way between Chris and me. Life will intervene yet again with some unforeseeable circumstance—or even one of many foreseeable circumstances—and Chris and I will have to adjust. But I have faith that we will continue to find our way, both together and apart, and keep refining the dance we do that supports our son, as longtime friends and forever partners in parenting.
When Chris first told me he wanted to leave, almost five years ago now, all I could feel—all I could imagine—was the terrible, wrenching loss of what was ending, the loss of the love that was being stripped away from me. What I lacked was the imagination to conjure all the love I would find on the other side: from Chris, from Chris’s mom and sisters, the great love of my friends, and, of course, that solid love for myself.
Three years after our last Thanksgiving trip to Illinois, Zack and I flew out to Chicago again, to spend the holiday with Barb, Chris’s mom, and his sister Kelly and her family. I couldn’t wait to see everybody, though I worried it would be awkward. But the visit was heaven: Zack and his youngest cousin, Holly, played together for hours; eight of us gathered around the table for Thanksgiving dinner, the oldest cousins now teenagers, and we remembered Chris’s father, Cole, and others who weren’t with us, expressing gratitude for the food and family; and I got to lace up my sneakers and set out for long, long runs across the flatlands of Illinois, during which I enumerated the many blessings in my life, including all this, which I’d thought was going to be gone forever.
When all the other relatives had gone home, Barb and I talked for hours on end, about movies and celebrities and family news. I got on the phone and talked with Chris’s other sister, Jennifer, for the first time since Chris and I had broken up, the two of us quickly brushing aside the years of not being in touch with apologies an
d understanding. Barb and I also talked at length about my life, the strangeness of dating again, my job, Zack, and what was new with Chris and how Chris and I have made it all work.
Later in the trip, as the three of us were driving back from a movie, Zack asleep in his carseat, Barb said to me, “You know, when this all first happened you told me you would never marry again. I hope you don’t still feel that way.”
I had to pause to think back to the night Chris and I told Barb we were breaking up. She had said to me then, “Please give it a year. Don’t rush into anything.” I said that of course I would give things time, that I hoped we would find our way back together. And then I told her that the only thing I knew for sure was that I would never marry again. I had never meant to marry, and this just proved to me that there was no point.
“That was what I felt then, Barb, that was me then,” I said. “Now I think I appreciate marriage even more, all it means. I certainly hope I get the chance to do it again.”
“Well, good,” she said, satisfied. She turned to me and smiled, and I felt my eyes well up from the gift of her love, of her ability to keep moving forward with me in my life, separate from her son. And I thought of all the love out there in the world that was waiting for me to find it, love I couldn’t even imagine.
I used to judge the success of my life by the answer to this question: How close am I living to my dreams? But I realized that somehow I turned my dreams into a list of things to accomplish no matter how I had to get there. Now I judge my life by my answer to the following: How close am I living to my truth? Am I learning more about who I am every day? Am I surrounding myself with people who help me be the me I love the most? And the answer is definitely yes.
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