Writing and Healing

I imagined two different ways of killing myself after my husband left me for a woman more than twenty years younger. I would hang myself or jump.

I had the sense to know that I needed help. All three of my children were stunned and grieving. I wanted to stay alive for them. And for my mother. Love kept me alive.

I had already written a memoir by the time my husband left me. I'd penned 85,000 words about giving my son up for adoption after a secret pregnancy--and twenty-one years later reuniting with him with the help of a clandestine adoption underground railroad. I started writing this story by accident. I had another story I was burning to tell then. A story involving teen-age girls, lies, Los Angeles gangsters, and a party gone wrong. I put pen to paper on the spur of the moment one morning after I'd pulled my min-van back into the garage--home from the morning school run. A mug of coffee and the L.A. Times were on my kitchen table, and after reading some article about teen-agers, pagers, and drugs, I grabbed one of my husband's yellow legal pads and a pen. I wrote pages and pages over the next week. Then I spotted a flyer in a local coffee house about a writing group. I folded the flyer in half and stuck it to my bulletin board. When I showed up for the first meeting, I was stunned to learn that the workshop was for writing memoir--true stories.

My story about teenagers and the lies they tell was mostly true anyway, but what came out of my pen that first Saturday morning was about my son. An essay, I thought. I had 35 pages of essays about giving up my son by the time I took my first real writing class at UCLA extension a couple of years later. The essays turned into a book. I got an agent, did a lot of revising, and I like to think  that if I hadn't been turned into a blogaholic by my divorce, I might have a book out in the world by now.

I think that memoir will be published eventually, but meanwhile I've had a lot of time to think about the stories that life delivers to us. I know about what it feels like to open a garden shed where two colorful jump ropes hang on a hook; what it feels like to run my hands over them while my eyes survey the children's climbing structure in my back yard. I know what it's like to find the view of the Mississippi River  from the window of a hotel room unbearable and the relief when a friend not only returns my phone call but shows up at the hotel.

I've altered my brain chemistry with two courses of anti-depressants since my marriage fell apart. I'm on my second therapist. I've had light therapy, dropped Bach Flower remedies onto my tongue, taken a  fine selection of herbal concoctions, and anesthetized myself with gin. I've exercised faithfully to up my endorphin production and devoured a boatload of chocolate. And I've  written so many essays about my divorce that I have another book.  

Writing heals. I'm not the only one claiming this.  Check THIS out. And THIS. Google "writing and healing." Read some more.  Then grab a pen or fire up your laptop.

Why I Write About My Divorce

Some months back during a phone conference between Mr. Ex and me and our attorneys, Mr. Ex threatened me with a "disparagement clause." He claimed I was disparaging him, the Little Missus, and their Kiddo. "My blog is for me," I told him. "It's my path through my grief." I don't remember what else I told him because I was wailing after he accused me of being a baby disparager, and that was pretty much the end of the phone conference for me.

Today there's an excellent article on grief and writing in the New York Times. The piece is an interview with Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O'Rourke who have both written books about their grief--Oates after the unexpected death of her husband, and O'Rourke after the death of her 53-year-old mother.

Like O'Rouke, writing is the way I make sense of the world. I don't always think fast on my feet and frequently come way from crucial encounters wishing I'd said something that I couldn't quite articulate at the time. Reflection and writing help me put my thoughts and my feelings in order. I write down my experiences much the way O'Rouke describes. I began this blog in September of 2008 about  a year after Mr. Ex left me. This is my three-hundred-and-twenty-ninth post. In the year prior to starting the blog, I wrote nearly 70,000 words. Words that I can still hardly bear to re-read. Without those words on the page, I doubt that I would have survived.

I continue to blog more about divorce than I do about writing because it continues to help me get through this period when the negotiations over the division of joint assets have devolved into the absurd. Many people would choose to not write about such trying times. There was a woman in the memoir workshop I taught the other night who seemed to be bursting with emotion. She preferred to write fiction, she said, because writing the truth was like re-opening the wound. She had tears in her eyes and slashed the air with her hand as if it was a knife. I have the utmost respect for her position, but I found working on my novel/MFA thesis excruciating because all I could think about was my divorce. Grief is hard to talk about in our society. People just want us to stop grieving. O'Rouke postulates that there are so many movies and books about loss because we need a public space where we can talk safely about grief.

I recently had the privilege of hearing Joyce Carol Oates read from her memoir and found that her writing about her grief over unexpectedly losing her husband  was a comfort to me--even now. It seems I'm over the whole thing...until I'm not. Just last week I sat in the kitchen of the man who loves me keening about how tired I was of the whole thing, and why didn't Mr. Ex just tell me he was smitten with someone else instead of sneaking around and plotting and lying and stringing me along. So while I keep getting over this mess and then backsliding so that I have to get over it again and again, writing is the thing that seems to help me most. I'm in good company.

Apricots, Blueberries, and Stories

This morning I finally wrestled the remnants of  last year's bird netting out of my apricot tree.  The widow's veil has been cast off, and

the first blossom has opened.

The blueberries are flowering too

and tonight I teach a memoir workshop.

Let there be apricots, blueberries, and stories.

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.