Money, the image that money brings, meant a lot to Jake. I couldn't get a bookshelf or a pair of shoes without checking in first - I would have gotten a look, a comment, a day of silence. A plane ticket to see a friend for the weekend, that was out of the question. We didn't have the money to spend it recklessly.

The thing was, we did have the money. And when Jake wanted something, he would get it. He was an impulse furniture buyer. He bought a $300 humidor on whim.

He thought that, because he made more than I did, financial decisions should be his. He was uncomfortable with feeling this way, he tried to pretend he didn't, but he did.

I have mixed feelings about money. If there's not a cushion in my bank account, I get nervous. My cat might need surgery again. My car might fall apart. I want to be prepared. And, for the most part, I don't spend a lot. I don't like shopping. I don't have expensive taste in anything.

But I want to see my friends, and I'm willing to throw down for a plane ticket to do so. If I have the freedom and ability to travel, I want to do so — I might not be able to later. If that means carrying some debt around for a couple of months, so be it. I don't want to be irresponsible, but I also don't want to give everything up. So I try to balance.

I definitely have less money now that I'm divorcing. I have to watch things, especially since I have to guard against the day my settlement payments stop. But I love that I can take a class if I want to and not have to justify it to anyone. I can go on vacation. I can get a bookshelf.

I used to wonder about couples that had been together for years but still kept separate bank accounts. Now, I see the appeal. I don't know how willing I'd be to get back into shared finances. This way, I know exactly where everything is, and my choices about what to do with what I have are mine alone.

Lindsay knows exactly what to do when a friend is getting divorced. She doesn't press. She doesn't pester with questions. She doesn't fill the space with reassurances or aspersions - she allows silence. She allows time. She knows that what's needed is normality.

At the same time, she'll let you that, anytime you need, it, you can call her and she'll drive out and spend the day with you, or the afternoon, or the hour. She'll take you to lunch, she'll go to a movie, she'll just sit with you so you're not alone.

When you move to a new place, she's the one that will spend the first night with you so you're not alone, making the weekend into a party instead of a chore, keeping any of it from being sad. She'll unpack boxes. She'll organize your closet and your kitchen.  

She is, in short, an invaluable friend. 

The other reason to look to Lindsay is that she has a marriage that makes me rethink my certainty that relationships can't last. Years in, she and her husband are still in love, still happy, still right for each other. They make room for each other's lives while still sharing them. They compromise. They talk. They are each other's best friends, and they still make out.  

There are people like this in the world. There are relationships like that out there. This is good to remember. 

Once, in college, my friend Danielle and I were having a bad couple of days, so we decided to count our blessings. We wrote down everything from "We have legs" to "We know how to say ‘Where is Stresa?' in Italian." It helped. I still have the list.

Getting divorced sucks all around. We all know this. But falling to the absolute bottom of the pit means that, as you climb out, you realize afresh just what you've got. As much time as I've spent over the last year and half curled up in a sad little ball on my couch, as lonely as I've gotten, as hard as it was, there's something to be said for getting that wake up call as to how lucky you are. It's easy to forget, after all.

I have colleagues who planned and organized a two-day birthday party for me, so I wouldn't be alone the weekend my husband moved out.

I have friends like Lindsay, who spent the first weekend in my new apartment with me, mixing drinks and organizing my closet.

I have a family who wants nothing more than to hear updates about how my new-apartment-traumatized cat is curled up in a tragic little ball in the bathtub.

In addition, I've learned that:

I have the ability to move in to a new apartment on a Friday and be completely unpacked by Monday. With some help, yes - but still impressive.

I am capable of negotiating public transportation in another country without getting lost.

I can be completely, unequivocally content in my own company.

My new plan: remember all these things, all the time, so the universe doesn't feel the need to snack me upside the head about it. 
 


While I like solitude, I have issues with silence. I like to have the TV on when I work. I play books on tape when I cook or clean or do dishes. I can do without, but there's an awful lot that goes on in my head and I prefer something else in the background.

In my marriage, silence meant a number of things. Early on, when things were good, silence was companionable — the quiet that came with being comfortable with each other. Later, silence meant we were running out of things to talk about. Eventually, silence meant that there was nothing left to say.

Jake was gone a lot, traveling, and he was gone for long, long periods of time. Silence during these absences came to mean a great deal. At first, we'd talk while he was away. Even if just a quick hello, or goodnight, we tried to connect, somehow, each day.

When we got to the point where days would go by without contact, that meant something. It meant we didn't want to talk. It meant it was better apart. It meant that, without proximity, we were rethinking.

The thing about having been married, you get into a lot of habits. And when that relationship is over, it's difficult not to make assumptions about a new relationship based on learned patterns. Thinking a few days of silence is a sign of trouble is a hard habit to break.

When your relationship is long distance, you don't have the daily check in of real life contact. And while I like the idea of being in a relationship that doesn't need daily assurance, that's secure with its reality, it's difficult not to second-guess when there's a several day stretch.

This is a recent revelation. One of those moments that makes me realize how very far I still have to go before I feel like I'm capable of having a relationship free of neuroses. At the same time, knowing what's behind that second-guessing makes quite a difference.

This time, this relationship, silence gets to mean something different. 
 


Counting "divorced" as one of my personal adjectives is a bizarre thing. Like it or not, this is now a huge part of who I am. I don't like this as an identifier, but there's no getting around how much this has shaped me. You don't spend 15 years with someone and lose them without it becoming a part of you. But still — I'm tall. I'm a teacher. I'm divorced. This is a descriptor. This is uncomfortable.

I was about to meet Mike's parents, and realized this was how they know me — I'm someone from college. I'm someone from California. I'm someone who's divorced. Worse, actually, I'm someone who is getting divorced.

I had no idea how to bring this up when I started dating. When do you tell someone? You bring it up too early, it's, "Whoah, hey, that's a lot of information for someone I just met." Too late, "How could you not tell me this earlier?" The problem is, of course, compounded by the fact that the thing isn't final. I tried casually slipping it into conversation: "We used to do so and so — oh that was back when I was married," but was never able to pull it off successfully.

What was nice about Mike was that he has known me since college, so there was no news to break. There was, though, that horrible moment way at the beginning, when he said, "So, when did your divorce become final?" And having to answer, "Well, it's not."

Eventually, this will be so far in the past that it will cease to be a top-three descriptor. Eventually, everything will have been finalized for so long that I won't have thought about it in ages. Eventually, I'll stop worrying about what parents and new friends and colleagues think. This day, honestly, can't come soon enough.

I just had a very odd moment.

Sometimes I get lonely. I'm never quite sure what it is what I want when this happens, I just get knocked a little flat by the reality of my solo flight.

I'm up too late. When I finally tear myself away from the computer, flip off the reality TV I watch when I'm grading papers, start to straighten up for the night, I'm hit with a wave of lonely.

Normally, when this happens, I curl up in my comfiest chair and just sit in the feeling for a while. So I figured, okay, well, I'll do this for a bit. I'll have a contemplative little 15 minutes.

But then — and this is the odd bit — it just went away. I looked around my living room, the apartment that's just mine. It's neat, because no one else is here to mess it up. There's a cookie left on a plate on the coffee table, and it's still going to be there tomorrow, because no one will sneakily eat it when I'm not looking. There is nothing in this place that is ugly, that I don't want, that I keep around because I have to.

Tomorrow I'm going to a job that I choose to have. I will be wrestling, all day, with what I'm going to do with my life next, but that choice, when I make it, will be mine, too.

I was all set to have my little moment in my comfy chair, feeling sad and alone and such, and I just can't do it. I don't want anyone else here. I miss the boy, it's getting harder to say goodbye to him each time I do, but — I am loving having my own life. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


"She thought about him when she was not with him. Sometimes too much, she worried. What if he turned away from her greed for his love?"

It's comforting to know that's common enough, universal enough, to pop up in a novel.

It's funny how you can be secure, for all intents and purposes, in a relationship but still monitor your own behavior. When you feel so much for someone, you constantly worry: Is it too much? Will this frighten him away? Will this bother him?

When you've spent years in a relationship in which the other party is weary of your affection, you learn to hide it. You learn to hold back. You become reluctant to show things. At the same time, you live in constant anticipation, constant wanting.

The worst feeling in the world is knowing you love someone more than they love you. Feeling you're always trailing after them, hoping for a word, a hug, a gesture. Hating your need, hating the kind of woman you're turning into.

When you're with someone who gives affection freely, that greed doesn't stop.

Adopted feral cats and strays can't be left to monitor their own food intake. Apparently, if you keep their bowl full, they'll eat themselves to death. Since, out on their own, they never knew when they might eat again, when they're presented with food they'll eat it all - never confident they'll eat again any time soon.

I feel like that, a lot of the time.

Mike says my relationship-expectation bar is absurdly low, that I should start taking him more for granted.

I wonder how long that will take?

My insomnia problem is recent. Nightmares, though, I've had my whole life. And I have them a lot. Not just the uncomfortable/ anxiety kind, but the screaming-terror-wake-up-gasping kind.

If that weren't enough, they are often hard to shake — I wake up freezing and sweating, desperately relieved it was just a dream, only to fall right back into it a minute later. I try sitting up. I try walking around. Sometimes it works. Often it doesn't.

Regular dreams I don't mind. My brain does an impressive job letting me know how I really feel about things when I'm asleep. More times than I can count I've gone to bed in a turmoil over something, only to dream about it and wake up going, oh, yeah. Right. That makes sense.

So what do you do when the work-it-out-in-your-subconscious dream keeps coming back, but, since you've already worked it out, now it's just a garden-variety nightmare?

Specifically, I keep dreaming I'm still married. But that it's now. I'm in my apartment, I have all the things I've built for myself the last year, but Jake's now a part of it.

It's horrible.

My brain managed to work out some time ago that I didn't miss this relationship, so how do I convince it to stop rerunning that particular work-it-out dream? I suppose it's a break from my usual things-with-big-teeth and plummeting cars, but these are so awful in their gaspy, trapped, desperation that I think I prefer the fangs.

What I can cling to, I suppose, is the constant reminder that this was the right choice.

In the course of scolding myself for expecting an epiphany I actually had an epiphany. Why, I was asking myself, do you expect everything to mean something? Can't you just, for once, sit here and just be?

And that was it, of course. I don't know how to just be. I do 48 things at one time, all day, every day. There's always someone around, something to do, somewhere to go. I had never really been alone with myself - and now that I am, I don't know how to do that. This, then, I thought, is why I am here. To learn to be still. Because if I can, I can get through this, because I'll know I can be content just alone, just quiet, just me.

(By the way, Josh Groban is excellent epiphany music. If you're due for one, please, plug him in. "Verita" was playing at this particular moment. It was like being in a film.)

So this is what I did the rest of this trip. I found places to sit and I sat there. I listened to Josh. I looked at the view. And I figured out how to be quiet. How to have my own company be enough. Each time I felt like I had managed that, each time I sat in a place and just was, without worrying or twitching or needing to talk myself down, I'd find a pebble and take it with me. I have a little dish of them on a bookshelf at home, to remind myself that I know how to do this.

That's a little cheesy, I know. It's contrived and sentimental. But I eat that kind of thing up, and knowing that little dish is there does help, now that I am back without a hill on which to sit.

Dear Jake,

I try to count my blessings constantly, reminding myself that this could all be so much harder.

But, tonight, I'm a little overwhelmed with how much you suck.

When you left, you left everything undone. You left your car for me to sell, but didn't bother to clean it out. I had to go through the glove compartments, the seat pockets, the trunk — finding your lists of errands to run, your receipts, notes I had written you, your gym bag. There's nothing quite as pathetic as sitting in the driveway and weeping over a bag of dirty socks.

Getting your mail, explaining where you were to your friends who called, packing all the things of yours you didn't take with you — I can't express how hard these things made every day.

For the last year and a half, everything I've asked you to take care of — taking your name off our credit cards, forwarding your mail, calling your friends — you've dragged your feet about all of it.

The only way, I've found, to get you to do anything is to get into an argument with you, to offend your integrity so that, in your offense, you follow through. Which is exhausting. Are you simply not thinking about it because none of it is staring you in the face? Are you stalling in case you change your mind and want me back?

So, tonight, the bitchy email saying I owe our lawyer some paperwork, that you don't know why I haven't done it yet, that "it's really important we take care of this quickly, I wish you would understand that," has sent me a bit over the edge.

I spent five years watching you leave, little by little. Each year, I listened to you tell me, "I can't make this marriage a priority. Next year it will be different." I never asked you to stop traveling, never demanded you make a choice. I stuck it out, because I loved you and because I thought "next year" really would be different.