33 Collages....about my divorce

 

I've been over the break-up of my marriage so many times I've lost count. Over means over--until that feeling is over. And then there you are again. In it.

When I found out that the Someone intended to terminate (in fact had terminated) my alimony at the end of 2020, I dropped into feeling it all again. Add in a pandemic, a quarantine, and a recent interest in all things book arts--and here you have it. One collage for every year spent with someone I never really knew. 

These individual collages are not meant to each sum up a particular year, but simply reflect my thoughts and feelings in the moment of making them. 

And  of course, “These are works made of paper. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.”  I might add that life often feels as fragile as paper and seems quite dependent on coincidence.

In a day or two I hope to sign the official paper that says I expect no more alimony. It turns out that the Someone is not only completely retired, he's in ill-health. 

As this final collage of the series reflects, I'm ready to move on.

Light a Candle and Move On

Crazy Came Knocking and I Didn't Even Reach for the Handle on the Barcalounger

How do you know when when you've left Divorceville for good?

Maybe it's when there's absolutely nothing you miss about your ex anymore. Maybe it's when you read a fabulous short story about the break-up of a marriage and you think to yourself, wow, what an amazing story--I'm going to send it to my ex-husband--and then you stop yourself and say, nah...why would I want to waste an envelope and some cool stamps with pictures of bonsai trees on them to do something stupid and crazy like that.

Joshua Ferris's short story "The Fragments" in the April 29th issue of The New Yorker is a heartbreaking chronology of the disintegration of a marriage. The narrator's wife is a  busy New York attorney and, through a crossed-signals cellphone connection, he learns that she's cheating on him when he hears fragments of her conversation with another man. "That night, Katy came home later than usual. He feigned sleep. With the lights off, she tiptoed into the bedroom, making no effort to wake him. He wanted to give her an opportunity to say something, he wanted her to say something, but she slid in lightly and was soon asleep. What hurt more--her peaceful sleep or the silence that preceded it?"

 As the narrator stumbles through the ensuing days unable to confront his wife, unable to work, unable to call a friend, and unable to confront his distress, he takes in the fragments of other people's conversations. Through these disjointed eavesdroppings on the communications  of others, Ferris weaves a sort of surreal narrative for a narrator who's too flattened to think his own thoughts.

When Katy calls the narrator after staying out an entire night, he hangs up on her and then hauls himself up from the sofa. "He walked through the apartment. He'd done this two nights in a row. He was sick of doing it. Everything that was 'hers' hurt one way. Things that were 'theirs' hurt differently. The last thing he wanted to have to do was sort and divide it all."

In the end, the narrator goes to the window and calls to passersby to come up to the apartment and take whatever they want. Later, as Katy approaches the apartment building, "She recognized the polka-dot roller bag that the first man was pulling behind him. When she reached the landing, he was standing in the open doorway, going through their wedding album with another man."

Yes, that's how it is.

How it was.

While I never gave away The Someone's stuff, I might have if I'd thought of it. But when I packed up and moved out of the house he wanted to keep for himself and his new wife, I did take all the blank CDs and the Sharpies. Crazy, right?

Sticks and Stones Can Break My Bones and Paper Slashes My Heart

Whew. There it is The divorce paperwork neatly stashed back into its box. A bunch of lavender atop it to deodorize its stench. I stayed up late last night organizing it...until I felt "divorce sickness" come over me. Perhaps the box will never be opened again, so does it matter if it's not in chronological order? Hell, no.

And the check came today. A man of his word.

Once upon a time he was my everything. I'm not even sure where that phrase comes from...a song, a movie? Not important.

These photos were on my camera (my son and his family were here this past weekend) and I loaded them onto my laptop with the one above. They tell a story that could begin with "Once upon a time," too.

The princess looks a bit wistful, doesn't she?

Maybe because her sweet prince turned out to be an evil sorcerer, and he's going to grind her heart to bits.

Oh dear sweet children, I wish you the minimum amount of heartbreak in your lives. If grandmothers could cast spells, maybe that would be the one I would choose.

Or does heartbreak make us more compassionate?

I'm glad to be still basking in the hugs and the love from their visit, as well as  the afterglow of my weekly sixteen-hour sojourn with the man who loves me.

Now, if you'll pardon me, I think I'll run all the way to the bank.

A Brief Journey Back to Divorceville

I awake with a vague awareness there's something I need to remember about October.

Yes, yes. In a matter of days, it will be 12 months from the entry of the final judgment in my divorce.

In a hour, I nearly destroy my bedroom looking for the hard copy of the paperwork that I am certain is stashed in a handy file in my cabinet---but isn't. The dreadful black file box reveals only page 1. I tape it to the window sill so as not to lose in the flurry.

Why do I need this document? Two words. "Credits and reimbursements."

The black box yields nothing but a memory of heartbreak. I feel it all again. Muted yes, but it rises up as I touch attorney bills, bank statements, copies of motions. I feel the disbelief layered over the knowing. The grief and betrayal melting into sickness and hysteria. I feel it in my stomach and my chest. The anger. Still there.

In the end, I find an electronic copy on my computer. I print out three copies. While they are printing, I email The Someone. And formulate a plan. When he doesn't get back to me in 48 hours, I'll email him again. I will contact my attorney 24 hours after that second ignored email. Because yes, it will be worth the stress and the expense. One daughter in grad school. The other going back to school after the new year. But wait. As I'm about to ignore the mess and go on with my day, I see his name in my inbox. A check in the mail today, he says.

Maybe when it arrives,  I'll tape it to the window sill for an hour. Let it wave a bit in the breeze while I put the mess back into the box. If I can stand to touch any of it just one more time.

Hello hearbreak, I'm a little busy right now

"Make me a schedule," M. said. " I  want something to do every hour." Heartbreak makes some people want to burrow into bed, I suppose--but not her. My broken heart wouldn't let me sleep either.  I paced. Walked the dogs. Had middle-of-the-night Google extravaganzas. Grabbed onto the Blogospere as if it was a life raft. It helped a lot that I started grad school less than five months later, though I suppose grad school might have been more productive if I hadn't been in needy "overshare" mode.

So M. will be busy. The weeks that she works full days will be easier. Of course the brokeness will just do its broken thing from time to time. That's okay. It will fit itself into the schedule when it needs to. 

And then one day, it won't. 

Have Heart; Will Travel

I have forsaken the elderly and the infirm and traveled to be at the side of the brokenhearted. My serene cell-sized room in St. Paul is home base for a few days while I tend to my daughter.

I remember heartbreak. I remember that the morning after I got the news that my marriage was over three friends took off work to take me out for breakfast; that my daughters seemed to take turns watching over me. C. was working in Nova Scotia, but if M. left me alone at home, she was barely out the door when C. would give me a call. The phone rang relentlessly then. Dinner with friends on their backyard deck, the scent of roses on weekend afternoon patios, "no, this one's on me," and "hey, I have an extra theatre ticket," and "how would you like to learn to play poker?" There was an avalanche of care and kindness.

So here I am. A different sort of St.Paul fix-it trip. Hearts are trickier than remodeling a closet though. Much more complicated than a coat of paint. Taking a door off its hinges is child's play compared to closing up the fissure of heartbreak. Heartmending is like building a ship in a bottle, or painting a cityscape on a grain of rice. It's slow and close, and sometimes the tools have to be improvised.

Meanwhile in Maryland, bones continue to mend without me. My brother can get in and out of his recliner without anyone to counterbalance his walker. He can hobble down his back steps to the gazebo. My mother is buoyed by a visit with her sisters. I'm already planning my next trip back there. She and I will go to Baltimore for her treatments, and if she has the energy, I will treat her to a shiny new hearing aid.

But before any of that, there will be California. Three or four years ago I dreaded each return. When the plane pierced L.A.'s layer of haze, the bird's-eye view of the geography of my marriage had me asking where I could escape to next. The terrain is different now.

In a courthouse in downtown Los Angeles there is a signed document that tells me what is mine, and what I have lost. And in my heart there's a smoothed-over place where loss is no longer the defining feature. There's a little paper drink umbrella in that spot now. Love is dozing under it, humming a tune, feet propped up.

The man who loves me will be returning to L.A. a day or so before me. It'll be him I see through the smog when the City of Angels reveals itself. And some emerald summer when my daughter flies into the Twin Cities she might see that the Mississippi curves in a way she never noticed before, or that a certain configuration of lakes and trees seems different somehow and more beautiful than she remembered.

This is how a heart breaks

As I read This Article in the L.A. Times this morning I remembered how physically debilitated I felt in the months after Mr. Ex left. The pain in my heart was as real as a migraine or the broken fingers I suffered years ago after catching them in a car door.

The intense legal wrangling has made me feel awful lately. This morning I fought it as if I were coming down with the flu. Jazzercise, then a walk. I took time to notice the little finches in a tree near the post office, their yellow feathers the same yellow as the tree's blossoms. I ate healthily today, dosing myself with  squares of chocolate between the greens and veggies and yogurt. I drank water as though it might wash all of these feelings out of me. I took a hot bath and soaked while I mentally worked through an essay I'm writing. I read while I rested in bed and took two rounds of Advil for all the achiness I'm feeling. I prepped for the workshop I'm going to teach on Thursday, all the while trying to ignore Mr. Ex's characterization of me as "unemployed" in his response to my motion for attorney's fees.

Still, I'm going to bed early and I'm not taking the bottle of premixed margaritas upstairs with me. Only water.

More Labors

I hate to invoke the name of Hercules since he had to perform his seemingly impossible labors as atonement for killing his wife and children. As if that isn't bad enough, when all was said and done he became immortal and got a new wife in the bargain. I mean, Holy Zeus!

But I've been working hard--and not because I killed someone.
True,  I haven't removed a ton of horse shit or battled with a hound of hell, but I have affixed my eyes to a lot of paper. All of the paper that my divorce has generated thus far. Every paper.


A grieving brain is a slippery thing. I've looked at these papers before. I've made notes. Such as: May 7th 200,000 into chking. account from invest. acct. Yup, the note's in my handwriting. It explains something that's been nibbling away at the edges of my consciousness for months. Something that I had to find out. A mystery to be solved. Except I already knew it.  Maybe I've even blogged about it. I guess I didn't want to believe it.

Here's the deal, when someone dumps you and you go back over the weeks and months that precede that bad news, you don't want to admit to yourself that when your sweetheart was locking eyes (or other things) with you that it was done out of deception. To throw you off the trail. He takes you out for dinner and smiles and raises his glass so you won't guess that he's done that just a day or two before with someone else--and he's planning to marry her.

So here's what I know. Gosh a blog is a handy place to make lists you don't want to lose.
1) Phone calls:  To her. First thing in the morning, last thing at night for months before he left me.
2) Dinners out near the office: Price tag just right for a party of two. Plenty.
3) Money: Missing. A big fat chunk from a nicely growing investment account. Almost a year and a half untouched. Then poof! Gone six weeks before he is.
4) Therapy: How exactly does one find a therapist so expensive?

Okay. I know what I know. My brain is no longer made of teflon. My heart is no longer broken.
Maybe if I put this list on my sidebar where I can see it regularly I won't forget it.

CENSORED

So, he said he wanted a disparagement clause in our agreement. That he wouldn't have me disparaging his new family. Not his wife. Not his baby. The title of this blog was mentioned.
I said I was a writer. That I write. That I hadn't disparaged him or his wife or his baby. That if my tongue was going to be cut out, the cutting would be done in court by a judge--not by him.

This blog is taking a hiatus.
In the meanwhile I plan to re-read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott--the very first book I ever read about writing. Here's an excerpt:
A friend of mine recently fell for this non-Catholic priest who seemed very learned and spiritual and tender in the beginning, and then turned out to be a mean little Napoleonic shit; not to put too fine a point on it. She wondered if she could use him as a character. 
Oh, I said, I insist.
"Do I have to make him tall, so he won't sue me?"
"No, no, no," I said. "Make him an uneducated writer, instead of a psychologist. Give him a past, two wives, and a number of kids he hasn't seen in years. Make him homely, make him a smoker, make him an atheist." 
If you're a writer, you probably know the rest.

I wanted to tell the truth as it really happened. To hack a trail through my grief. And I will continue.
Until then--thank you all for reading. From the depths of my no longer broken heart, thank you.

The Hurt He Gave

I have softened the hurt with milky tea and roses. With beer in green glass bottles. With airplane gin. With red wine, the oak lingering on a lover’s tongue segueing to the morning’s kisses and espresso. I’ve softened the hurt at my mother’s kitchen table, in the company of Iowa songbirds and in my daughters’ cars on I-80, and the Lincoln Highway. I’ve softened the hurt lying on the floor with dogs, around the Monopoly board, with a handful of Canasta, and breathing in the dark with a grandchild in the crook of my arm. The hurt, the hurt. The hurt of a bed too wide wrestled and lost to dirt trails and ragged steps cut out of mountainsides leading to blinding white chapels high above the Aegean. The hurt lost to ancient stones and bridges spanning dark waters, to blizzard and dessert, to lake and plain. I am a traveler now, and the hurt tried to find me but I'm the one who is finding, finding, finding.

waiting

I'm waiting. Waiting for my mom to be taken off the ventilator. Waiting to hear her voice once that damn tube is out of her throat. Waiting to see her moved from ICU to the regular post-surgical ward, waiting to take her home. And I'm waiting for Mr. Ex to get his asinine self together and do what it takes to divide our joint assets. The marriage has been over for more than two years. We worked for thirty-two years, building our future together, thinking about financial security, how we'd take care of our mothers when they were old and where we'd live when our daughters were grown. Of course for some undetermined amount of time he was bullshitting me, stringing me along until our younger daughter was eighteen so he could leave and he wouldn't have to pay child support.

I still have no idea how long he lied to me.

And I have no idea if I really will hear my mother's voice again.

And I have no idea if the joint assets will ever be divided--or if Mr. Ex has a slimy big-shot L.A. lawyer scheme he's working on to screw me and deliver another gut-wrenching nasty surprise.

I'm waiting.

My Life Right Now

My mother has lung cancer. Her twin (my bonus mother) is in the hospital, impossibly frail. I feel nauseated from too many mussels in butter and garlic and too much cheap red wine. I want to pillage my mother's "drug box" and pocket a few xanax. I don't know if I should register for this semester of my MFA program or not. Mr. Ex owes me an email as we try to finish up the division of community property and the bitter taste of betrayal is not a distant enough memory and I wonder when if ever I will look fondly on the years we spent together. The man who loves me now says I will. But I think he is a far kinder and more forgiving person than I will ever be.

Nothing Compares to You

I'm a mess, I admit it.  

The road trip is over.  I'm about to board a plane and fly back to L.A. where I will be "home" for 36 hours before I board a plane to Greece. I've left my daughter M. in St. Paul for what we are calling her first "grown-up summer." She's almost 2o and she will live in my condo, drive the car her dad has handed down to her and work a  9-5 internship tutoring inner city kids. For the next few days she will be hosting her brother, his wife and their 3 kids and putting her first household in order.

Meanwhile, I feel like I've come almost full circle. I became a blogger after my trip to Greece last fall--when I left the country to be as far away as I could manage when Mr. Ex got re-married. I'm returning for a writing workshop + hiking with the author Meredith Hall  http://meredithhall.org/  and I have fallen completely in love with the man I've been dating since December.

Here's how I know:

M. found little to appreciate on my ipod during our long drive from California to St. Paul EXCEPT for Sinead O'Connor's hit Nothing Compares to You. We played it a couple of times every few hundred miles. Mr. Ex liked this song and when the two of us were driving in the car together when it came on the radio in the 80s or 90s or whenever that was, he'd sing along and put his hand on my knee.

On this trip, I remembered that and there was an interesting pang, but I didn't really care.  All I could think of was the man I'm going home to.

I am very, very lucky. 

And a mess.

EXPOSED

I've been feeling rather exposed lately.  As if my heart could be plucked from my chest, put on a plate and eaten until not even the tiniest morsel remains.

"This isn't a relationship," I told the man I'm dating a week or so ago.  He looked surprised until I went on.  "It's a love affair," I said.  Making that distinction was my way of reconciling the fact that we live apart and aren't really involved at all in each other's day to day lives and that I see him about half as much as I'd like to.  This week, I'm asking myself what I want--really.  His last relationship was a weekend thing.  For 7 or 8 or I dunno how many years, he and this woman saw each other only on the weekends.  I could see that working out...if we actually saw each other on the weekends.  What if what this all comes down to is that I like him more than he likes me?

Problems of the Heart

My new sweetheart is down with a cold and has been confronting the fact that he may have a problem with his heart, too.  It will take some time before he gets in to see the cardiologist and because he's been feeling run down we've been seeing each other less.  

It seems like my own heart has only recently recovered from the trauma of divorce and now just as the word "love" has worked its way back into my vocabulary, I find myself speechless with melancholy.  I don't want to talk to anyone or go out. I don't feel like tackling any serious writing projects.  My kumquat and lemon trees are waiting to be transplanted into their nice big pots and I don't have any energy for the project.  I feel like I'm waiting too, but I don't know for what.  My own roots don't know whether to wind themselves into a little ball or reach out for deeper soil.  

The trick with all this is that I blame it on the divorce.  I catch myself grumbling that if my husband hadn't left me, life would be good.  But life wasn't good when we were married either. I was living with a man who didn't want to be with me.  I spent less time with him than I spend with the man I'm dating. 

I hate it when I lie to myself.

Things About Snow that I'd Forgotten

1. It's really sparkly.

2. Snowflakes, as they fall, can look really raggedy.

3. Snow looks amazing on a red coat.

4. Snow makes a lot of things look good--old cars, dirty sidewalks, those ugly green plastic patio chairs....

5. It smells clean.

6. It erases memories of Southern California with Mr. Ex.

Valentine

"Anti-valentine--(n) a curative measure, most often administered during the month of February; a kind of medicinal tonic, often melancholy, bitter or dark, traditionally made from paper, glue and epistolary materials," so read the party invitation sent our by the visual artists to the whole Vermont Studio Center community.  

Some made anti-valentines.  Some made valentines. The latter, I'm relieved to report, outnumbered the former.

It was fun.  But I'm not going to send it.

Tomorrow, they say, is Lupercalia, an ancient Roman festival of wolves that traditionally involved much drinking, carousing, and a ceremony where young men ran around clad in goatskins lashing people with strips of goat skin for good luck.

I'm feeling like my luck is pretty good, actually.

SAFE SEX

Here's a pre-Valentine's Day thought for those of us who might be afraid to risk an open heart. Risk is.....risky. But I guess I'd rather experience that vision of the pond's edge than close my heart to love altogether.

Safe Sex

by Donald Hall
If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident  they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;  if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire only the tribute of another’s cry; if they employ each other as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel—  then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread, no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,  no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond’s edge

Emotionally Unavailable

I've been on Match.com again (it's like crack--I say I'm quitting, but...)  His name was Gene and we've been emailing back and forth for the past few days. Tonight he emailed me and said he was sorry but he's realized he's "emotionally unavailable." It's the holidays. They're a bitch when your heart is broken, when your heart is half-way healed and probably when you think it's almost recovered. While I was visiting my friends in Portland, we took a scenic drive and then went downtown to walk through the streets under the lighted trees. When I stepped out of the car and heard the brass band on the corner finishing a Christmas carol, I felt my eyes fill with tears.  All those houses with their pretty lights, the city lit in some kind of happy conspiracy and then the music---it made me sad and if I hadn't had a lollipop in my purse, I would have been standing in a puddle of tears. This is my second divorced Christmas.  I had 29 married ones.  I wonder how many Gene had.   

Sunday Sunset

I saw a jumbo jet glinting in the sunlight tonight while I was walking my dogs and wished I was on it.  Sorry, dogs.  It seems ridiculous to me that more than 15 months after my marriage ended, I  still  have not adjusted.  I have a lovely townhouse.  I live with 2 dogs and 2 cats. When I turn out my reading light at night, the dogs come over to the side of the bed for a final pat on the head. The timid cat who spends her time licking the hair off her legs while living in my downstairs bathroom cabinet comes out of hiding and settles down on the foot of my bed.  The other cat moves closer and purrs. So what is my problem?  The problem is that it's Sunday night--the one night of the week when I used to eat dinner with my husband (I know--how pitiful is that?!) and as I was walking those sweet dogs and looking up at the jetliner, I actually thought, I should be walking to dinner with Mr. Ex right now.  Is there no hope?

My son once told me that being adopted is like being in the witness protection program. Divorce is like that too. Your past is wiped out. You're supposed to forget it and move on.  Be someone else.  Erase your history.  Good thing I'm not in the witness protection program because I'd be fucking failing and would have a bullet in my brain by now.

So here's the score: 30 yr. marriage--over.  4 month relationship--over.  Coffee date--lukewarm.  Dinner date--no indigestion; just bland.  Full moon Athens/internet/telephone romance and possible friendship--over because I felt like burning a bridge out of spite. Internet and telephone correspondence: over due to the fact that I'm not OVER the divorce.  Internet correspondence--over because I'm not OVER  the divorce.  Okay, I admit it, I'm not over the divorce.  So sue me.