It has been a year since my marriage ended. Sometimes I go back and read the journal I started on D-day. The pages are rippled like potato chips. Paper goes kind of corrugated when it gets wet and then dries.
In the beginning I howled every day. Cried till tears trickled into my ears sometimes, or when I was upright they plopped onto the pages of my journal and the barely decipherable rubbish I was scribbling. “It is just so painful blur don’t think I will ever feel better blur.”
It was all very fourth form – the kind of thing I used to write sitting in my bedroom listening to REM – but psychologists will tell you it helps to just spew it out on paper and turn all that psychic mess into something tangible. Something that no poor sod other than me should ever have to read. They are right. But in daylight hours I did try to cry surreptitiously so the children wouldn’t see.
The fortunate thing is that my children are young, aged two and five, and they seem to have adapted pretty well to their changed circumstances. I eavesdropped on my neighbour’s son talking to my five-year-old daughter while they played with their trains. “Why doesn’t your daddy live with your mummy?”
“They decided to split up‘cos they argued too much” my daughter replied, not looking up from Gordon the pompous Tank Engine. Fortunately their father had always been away overseas on business a lot, ever since they were born, so his absence from the house wasn’t unusual. We tried to keep things pretty much the same for the children – just with less door slamming.
You will find there is a lot of advice around about how to talk to children about divorce. I didn’t find much of it very useful. The official bossy-boots experts insist you should repeatedly tell your children “It’s not your fault” and that “Mummy and Daddy still love you just as much as ever.” I don’t think it had occurred to the kids it was their fault or that we had stopped loving them so it seemed asking for trouble to put those ideas in their heads.
My approach was to try and keep things as samey as possible and to keep repeating the party line, “We thought everyone would be happier this way.” For toddlers, this seems to work fine.
I’m sure there is never an easy time to go through a sanity-testing upheaval but it is never bad to take advice from William Shakespeare. “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well. It were done quickly.” Thanks Will, I don’t think my children will even remember a time their parents lived together.
It was certainly easier for me that my husband and I had spent so much time apart. I was already used to sleeping on my own – or rather with only a twitching Dalmatian dog as a bedmate – but giving up the dream of what I thought was our happy but wacky marriage was still deeply painful and made me feel like a big fat failure.
We might not always have felt like it, but I think we both tried to keep things a bit matter-of-fact during the separation. Pretending, for the children, and saving up for a good cry later.
Distance is helpful. Those early years with two small children are all consuming; our relationship had, almost without us noticing, become a bit of a neglected ramshackle structure, deserted and dusty while we were apart so much. Once we realised we worked at trying to fix it. But we were on separate continents – as per – when I sent the email saying I realised it would be best if we separated as kindly and gently as possible. My husband politely asked asked if I didn’t need more time to think about it. “No thanks.” I had to rush because I was on the way out the door to take our daughter to her regular swimming lesson. I managed a watery smile as she showed off her starfish exercises in the pool and thought “Well that was the end of nine years of marriage.” It all seemed so unreal.
When it came to telling the children I took a show rather than tell approach. I thought it would just spook them out if I sat them down – you can’t sit a two year old down very easily anyway – and had an official ‘separation’ talk. I went with my instinct, and just tried to be a bit Suzy Cato-bubbly repeating the mantra “Daddy and I thought we would all be happier this way.”
But I hope that doesn’t make it sound easy. It was the darkest, grimmest, most challenging time. There was one particularly dreadful time where my son was thought to be autistic, was having an operation, my nanny left me in the lurch and I had no childcare, no other adults around to share the burden and felt full of unattractive self-pity. Everyone else seemed to be in happy couples and families and I felt like an alien. Even worse, an alien who had to pretend to be full of the Christmas spirit (whilst secretly rushing into the kitchen for a cry)
I signed a settlement with my husband, or rather ex-husband, pretty quickly – after a few months. It was raw. I felt I wasn’t ready, that it was too final, but I took the leap and, strangely, it helped. Getting the financial stuff out the way seemed to enable me to start the emotional healing. The end of our marriage was officially a done deal, now I just had to accept it, whether I liked it or not. The opposite of build-it-and-they-will-come.
I can only talk about my own experience, but my advice would be if at all possible to sort out the settlement by yourselves and as soon as possible. Lawyers can be very destructive. Their us-against-them approach can feed anger and conflict rather than encouraging you to let go of it. It is also very expensive. I was also lucky that my ex-husband was generous.
Six months after separating, the kids and I moved house. It was awful for my daughter changing schools so soon after she had just started and was settling in and making friends.
But when I got the overwhelming guilt’s I told myself we were going to have to move sometime as the house had to be sold so it was better it was now. And in other ways the change was helpful.
We were laying down new memories of things we enjoyed: the deformed Dr Seuss tree in our garden, the clickety-clackety bridge, painting a blackboard on the wall and starting a Walking School Bus.
We went from Devonport, a white-picket-fence sort of suburb to Parnell which is more urban. There are lots of children with separated parents at my daughter’s new school which makes me feel less freakish. I have made new friends, some of whom are in the same boat as me. That is the wonderful thing about having children; until they started school I hadn’t realised this is how most people make friends and feel part of a community. People were really welcoming and nice to me – sometimes I wonder why as I was a bit of a basket case sometimes, wearing sunglasses to cover my red eyes.
At the same time there was the challenge of being a single woman again and trying to do a DIY job on my tattered self esteem. I felt like emotionally naked, like a turtle without its shell going out after a decade in a relationship. I bought a leather skirt, started running, threw out my glasses, dyed my hair blonde.
Sometimes it felt liberating, sometimes it just felt downright terrifying. I started seeing a lovely new man, but also read up all about “rebound relationships” and realised if it was going to work we would have to just keep “dating” and take things very slowly.
To start with I did fancy some sort of trendy bohemian arrangement where my ex-husband and I remained such fabulously good chums we simply extended our family unit to include new partners and various hangers-on. I saw myself in a floaty chiffon maxi-dress hosting a sophisticated Primrose Hill-set barbeques, serving dandelion cocktails to my husband’s new girlfriend and a raggle taggle whanau of children and exes and lovers.
When I told my shrink about my Bloomsbury-ish fantasy he kind of squinted at me – he claims he doesn’t accept nutbars as clients and I thought he was going to fire me – and declared the idea was “bollocks”.
I still have the dream but am a bit more pragmatic about the reality. I know it works for some people but either they are film stars or there is a supernatural degree of maturity and empathy from all concerned. The thought of my children forming a relationship with my husband’s new partner makes me feel quite sick, but hopefully I will get de-sensitised to that over time.
In the meantime, the logistics of the children seeing their father seem to work increasingly well. When he is overseas he skypes them and I text him with news of what they are up to, photos of school projects and Halloween outfits. It might not be perfect but it’s better than what Captain Cook’s poor children had to put up with when their gallivanting father was on the other side of the world. When their dad is in the country he sees them morning and night in their own house and we do outings all together. Each time he is back it seems more natural and hopefully that will continue.
As to me, I am a different person from the newly separated me of a year ago. I went through a very dark teatime of the soul. No surprises there. Take your pick; there was the feeling of failure that we couldn’t make our marriage work. There was guilt that our children were not going to have a mother and father who lived together. There was the fright of learning to be on my own, the shame at being rejected, the loss at the closeness we once had, the status of being a wife, the regret that I hadn’t done things “better, more or differently”, the loneliness of dealing with two small children on my own but mostly “the fear”. Fear of having to take responsibility for my own emotions, the fear of the future, fear of being alone and all that looking-into-the-abyss angst.
That part of divorce really is the norm. Divorce Stinks, as unconventional divorce lawyer, “recovering glutton” and Alabama subsistence farmer Lee Borden says on his website, Divorce Info. “There’s just no getting around it; divorce is a cruddy process.” He gives some good suggestions for dealing with the hideous loneliness without turning into a total stress bucket.
Everyone has to find their own way out of the self-loathing crud you feel when your marriage ends and find what helps. For me it was running up hills while listening to Metallica till my legs were like jelly, making cupcakes with the kids, walking the dog and writing in my journal.
This part of the process is about learning to love yourself. You also have to learn to look for everything that is positive. If in doubt, look at people who turned all bitter and twisted after their marriage ended – in Auckland you could try the pickup joint Longroom or any bar really – and realise you don’t want to be like that. Buy some incense and think about hippyish things like love and forgiveness. Anger is like a hot rock. If you hold onto it it will be burn you. Let it go. It helps to practice gratitude and think of all the things you have to be thankful for. Your children, for a start.
I read a lot of books about grief. Just plain vanilla grief, not relationships. A friend said to me “But no one has died”. I bopped him on the head and told him to stop being so goddamn literal. We are not taught how to grieve and sometimes people get stuck. The main thing I learnt is that you have to be brave and feel the pain. Every time you do you come alive a little bit more and you heal a little bit more.
I recently went and packed up the last of our things at our old house, which has been sold. It was painful but more of a wafty ennui than the primal screaming, fetal position mean reds that made me feel like screaming on the first round of moving.
The good thing is that the more progress I make in this divorcing process, the more love I seem to have to give my children. There are advantages to splitting up. All the energy I was putting into surviving in an unhappy situation can be used for something more productive and good for them. I certainly never had time or inclination to make waffles for breakfast before. And there are other advantages: being able to make my own decisions, decorate my house how I like, eat what I want, and focus just on us. That has got to be good for them.
These days I am much more dry-eyed for all the kids stuff like playing UNO, discussing which is our favourite Thomas train and tickling frenzies. I still cry quite a bit but the pages of my journal are lying a lot flatter these days. You still wouldn’t want to read it though; it’s just embarrassing.