Identity--The Ball Starts Rolling

A friend suggested that writing about our experiences as divorcees might somehow be of benefit to other women.  My immediate reaction was that I didn't want to think of myself as a "divorced person."  This particular friend and I would often complain about our ex-spouses.  So, in the context of that friendship I suppose I am a "divorced person."  I have other friends who are also divorced but I might be to them a "yoga person" or a "mom" or a variety of other identities.  So there is hope, because although I think getting divorced is one of the best things I've done in my life, I don't think of myself as a divorced person.  Being on my own, however, has allowed me to become a person--an individual--a gift I couldn't imagine as I went through the process years ago.

What made me finally feel that writing about divorce would be worthwhile was listening to a young man's description of the day his mother told him his parents were divorcing.  We were in a writing class together and I'd written about the same thing.  My parents divorced when I was seven and I divorced my children's father when my oldest son was seven.  I remember how my sister had come into my bedroom one morning--I would have been lying in sheets decorated with cartoon characters. I was wearing a little pink nightgown. There'd have been stuffed animals tossed about me on the bedspread.  I had that room all to myself. It had been my father's den and had a window that looked out onto what seemed like a giant avocado tree.  That morning was quiet and cool.  It was probably just getting light.  Patty, who was a year younger than me, stood in the doorway, flipped on the lights, and announced "Mommy and Daddy are going to live in two houses!"

I'd investigated divorcing my ex-husband the day after he called me "evil."  It was September 1998.  We had such a boring existence--in anyone's eyes we must have been quite the pair of good-two-shoes. We didn't cheat on each other, there wasn't an addiction problem or a money problem.  He called me "evil" and that was enough for me.  There wasn't any love there and I'm not evil (or any more evil than every other human being) so I called a lawyer.  The lawyer never called back and I didn't pursue it further.  At Christmas-time--that was when our wedding anniversary was--I bought him a wedding band and had written a note about how couples go through bad times but that it probably wouldn't last.  When I gave him the band though, he said something that angered me and I didn't give him the note.  A few months later I was driving home from work in the middle of the day and strangely thinking of my husband being in a plane crash (he was safely on the ground at his work).  When I got home he called and said he'd like to get a divorce.  I was sitting at a crappy office desk that bowed in the middle from the weight of a computer and bookcase we'd put atop it.  I don't remember being surprised.  I probably thought it went with the airplane-crash thought.  When he came home we moved into the kitchen to talk.  It was dark.  It was a little room that we'd remodeled before our first son was born.  He leaned against the white tiles next to the refrigerator.  I asked if he'd get therapy and he said "I don't want to know what's wrong with me." 

These are moments your remember. They are the moments that get the wheels rolling, or shake the ground--take your pick.

And then everything changes.