I spent twenty years trying to stay married. Praying. Counseling. Compromising. Hoping. I fought like the dickens in the way that I knew how. But one day, I woke up twenty years older; the strain and stress made me exhausted and sick. I was terrified of losing another day of my very short life.
Once I reached my fortieth birthday, the panic of future regret haunted me. Instead of mourning my marriage, I began to mourn days lost to sadness and fear. I wondered, “Is my life half over? Is this all there is? Spending a life unloved, lonely, and stuck?”
The only real feedback I got was that staying was hard and being divorced was hard; the only one that could make the choice to stay or leave was me. Both felt like loss. I kept asking myself, “If I would lay down my life to protect my children, then shouldn’t I also sacrifice myself so their life stays the same?”
In the end, after years and years of therapy and wise counsel, I asked, “Which choice is healthiest?” The answer led me to the dismantling of a relationship and family that lasted half of my life and all of my children’s.
Make no mistake, a column can’t possibly summarize the painstaking care that was given to save, repair, heal, restore, and renew the individuals, the marriage, and the family before I moved forward. I knew it would be the most consequential decision of my life.
The weight of it nearly did me in.
In the beginning, the kinetic push from the administration of a divorce propelled me forward. Clean out the stuff. Check. Sell the house. Check. See the counselor. Check. In robotic fashion, I put one foot in front of the other and checked off the boxes. The high emotions quelled, replaced by numb resilience.
I. Just. Kept. Moving. Forward.
I didn’t know it then, but I was holding it together while falling apart. I was weak and strong. I was exhausted and energized. I was living and dying. I was happy and sad. I was brave and terrified. I was finding myself and losing nearly everything I’d grown to know.
I didn’t know how to ask for the support I needed. I was drowning in guilt that I couldn’t give my children the idyllic family. I struggled to reconcile being willing to give my life, while being unable to give them married parents.
I worked on giving myself grace. I accepted the things out of my control, bit my tongue, and stiffened my backbone. I quit caring about other people’s opinions. I took small steps forward.
Groceries must be bought, homework turned in, and flu seasons come and go. But daffodils bloom after winter and frozen hearts melt. Spring and morning comes, and dreams and desires emerge again. Bit by bit, day by day, healing happened.
More than five years later, those days are a blur. While I do not regret leaving, I grossly underestimated the traumatic impact, and the longevity and depth of the direct fallout of our particular divorce. In many ways, our lives are still demarcated between our lives before and the reality that followed.
It’s hard to talk about starting over without at least touching on what you left behind. The problem with talking publicly about a divorce is that no matter how objective the attempts, it’s still one-sided, and when there are children involved, it’s their story, too. In an effort to respect their autonomy, I try not to speak of “my” divorce, when its impacts were ours to share.
So, what’s a storyteller to do? How do I authentically convey the grief and heartbreak of the loss of my marriage and family without disparaging the other person or scraping the scab of our collective wound? I could just tuck it away like it never happened, but what are we on this earth for if not to walk together in the journey?
Because of the loneliness and despair I felt for so many years, I feel called to share so that anyone who reads will know two things: 1) you are not alone; and 2) there’s a bank on the other side of any rushing river.
I won’t lie, I was nearly sucked under and my ascent up the other side has been a slippery mess. Before I was totally out of the water, I clung nails deep in thick mud, half of me out and half of me still fighting the undertow. But I crawled out. Out of despair. Out of exasperation. Out of the current. Covered in sweat, tears, and the debris from the river of real life, I climbed up and out and am standing on the other side.
For a long time, I stood looking back at the river, in exhausted awe of where I came from and what I swam through. But slowly my periphery opened up and the tunnel vision that once focused only on the river, began to see beyond it. My perspective widened from survival to possibilities. From loneliness to love.
But at nearly 50, is it really possible to find love and to dream again? To make plans and look forward like we did in our twenties?
Meet me back here next week for Part 2 of Love After Divorce: A Southern Girl’s Guide to Starting Over.
