I was sitting on our couch when my wife walked in the front door and came into the living room, sitting down in the chair across from me. She took a breath, met my eyes, and she told me she no longer wanted to be married.
I went ice cold and lost my breath. In the split second that followed, my thoughts raced down paths that words take too long to walk: where was this coming from – we’d been doing so well – we hardly ever fought, now – our communication had become so positive in the last two years – what was she saying – what was going to happen? My mouth was dry and my stomach seized. I stared at her and asked, “What are you saying? That you want a divorce?” The moment I asked the question, I felt like an idiot – of course that’s what she was saying. But though my mind was racing, it was running in the wrong direction; it could not catch up with what was occurring to process it in real time.
I don't know what she said in response, I didn't hear her words. My head was a jumble of thoughts and my ears had closed like shuttered windows in preparation for a hurricane. And then, very calmly, very quietly, there came this voice that spoke from a different place than all that fear. And the voice said: “Stop it. You are so unhappy. The two of you are depleted and exhausted. You tried.”
We did. We tried relentlessly, for years. We tried with countless therapists and communication exercises, tearful fights and exhausted resignations after which we'd regroup and start again. We tried to change and shift and alter and adjust, constantly, all while raising children and raising each other; two very different people who kept trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole because there were so many aspects of the peg that made it seem like it really should fit.
And for me there was also an added element of “You stay and make it work, that’s what you do.” My parents had been through many ups and downs, and extremely hard trials, but they had stayed together through the decades. You made a commitment; you saw the commitment through. That’s what marriage was.
But as she sat across from me, I stopped my mind and listened to that voice. "You are unhappy. You're depleted. You tried." Marriage, like all aspects of life, is defined by the people inside of it and their stories: the stories they come in with; the stories they write together; the stories they tell themselves; and the stories they tell the world. Sometimes the characters get lost in the shuffle of all of those plotlines. Sometimes the stories stray too far from fact and into fiction. Sometimes the writing itself becomes too exhausting to keep the story going. And sometimes the stories simply change over the years as the characters within them change, and you reach a point where you have to choose to either drastically shift the narrative or close the book entirely.
We had raised two beautiful boys, we did family so well together; but those boys were a strong element of the glue that had kept us united, and the youngest was about to leave for college while the oldest had already been gone for a couple of years. We appreciated and respected each other, but we were such wildly different people that it often left each of us feeling frustrated and unheard. Our goals, our ambitions, our desires were not in absolute contradiction, but they were definitely not in tandem, either. We made each other laugh hysterically, but there were so many times I would hide in the closet and cry. And yes, our communication had gotten much better in the past couple of years – but didn’t I often feel that was because we were both too exhausted to keep arguing?
We loved each other very much, but, as the song goes, “sometimes love just ain’t enough”. The story I had been telling myself and the story I had been telling the world was: “I am happy.” The reality of the narrative was that I was lonely, and exhausted. And so was my wife.
It didn’t take away from any of the love we had poured into one another or into the children. It didn’t change the previous chapters of the story, rewrite them to exclude the good and leave only the portents of impending doom. Our ending didn’t mean that I had never looked at her and thought, “I am so lucky to have you by my side.” Our ending didn’t mean I had to toss aside my wedding day, or anniversaries, or memories of walks in the park, laughing. I have, in my antique hutch, a framed photograph of she and I and our two boys at a pumpkin patch in Half Moon Bay. Our ending didn’t mean that day never took place and suddenly that photograph disappeared into the ether. Her announcing that she wanted a divorce, and me realizing it was the right call, just meant that the time had come to write the final chapter and then move on to separate books.
I don’t mean to make it sound as if all was peaches and cream, and we sailed through the divorce in a montage of smiles and memories with some sappy 70’s music playing in the background. Grief hit, as I watched my entire existence reshuffling in front of my eyes. I wasn’t prepared for the loss of my best friend, as she and I pulled apart and disentangled from each other’s everyday lives. My identity – wife, Mama, keeper of the house – was thrown out and I had no idea who was left instead. There were items to divide, memories that hurt to hold. But that was all part of the ending of the story. We want all our endings to have pretty, pink bows wrapped around them and all our beginnings to be full of sunshine and flower petals. But that’s not life. Endings are painful and beginnings are messy. And that’s okay. It’s okay to write “The End” in a shaking hand. And it’s okay to start the next book off with “She had absolutely no damn idea what she was going to do, but she knew she’d have to figure it out along the way.”
The point is to keep writing.
-Joy Read, Co-Founder/COO NASDF
