I left off Part 1 at the part where women like me don’t have to learn how to push limits, they have to learn what their limits are and honor them. You can read Part 1 here.
The winter before the pandemic hit, I had recurring inflammation in my elbows, shoulders, and lower back. I was also nursing a worsening sciatic nerve injury. Physical therapy treatments brought some relief but never completely healed my screaming tissues. I was also suffering from chronic back pain since my miscarriage in 2015. No one had been able to properly diagnose and treat this pain – I saw dozens of practitioners over 3 years – but during my trips to France in 2017 and 2019, and for the first 3 months after I started working in 2018, the pain disappeared completely. I knew it was somatic but I didn’t know how to get to it.
Mentally I was finding my edge and pushing against it. Fitness is a response to injury: we injure our muscle fibers, we huff and we puff, and our inflamed body goes “I’ll never let that happen again!” and rebuilds a thicker, stronger muscle. But my body was having none of it. It was not getting stronger, it was getting depleted. My body was having the same “I’m never letting that happen again!” response but instead of getting stronger, it was trying to stop me.
I was still trying to keep up with the much fitter members of my family. They were reaching milestones and seeing progress training 6-7 days a week and I thought that if I made a similar commitment to my health and fitness, I could turn this around. Every time I tried to lift a bit heavier, work a little faster, or add another day of training to my week I got injured. Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, knees and toes.
When Canada went into its first lockdown Paul set up a garage gym. CrossFit training in the garage in March in Ontario meant training in freezing temperatures. The loss of the motivating class environment, which provided friendship and support, combined with the misery of training in a dark and cold garage next to a pile of garbage resulted in a dramatic decrease in the frequency of training. Since I no longer had access to barbells, I started training with dumbbells, reducing the load on my joints and tendons. As soon as I switched from barbell to dumbbells, my elbow and knee injuries healed.
With the dramatic reduction in training frequency and intensity, my sciatic nerve injury healed almost overnight. It was as if I had been walking on a blister for months and finally took off my shoes. I was learning that at my age and with my life history, pushing against my limits was not helping me get fitter as it did when I was younger and healthier. Rest was more beneficial than training.
Coming back to CrossFit, I wrote that from the moment I joined my gym, I got caught in a cycle of inflammation and injury trying to meet a norm that was anything but normal. The pursuit of weight loss and fitness at the cost of my physical health was mirroring the pursuit of making the separation inconsequential to my children at the cost of my mental health.
When Paul and I separated in April 2020, things started out well. I think that we were both relieved to be separated. The vision we had for our separate lives was to keep the family unit as « together » as possible while being separated as spouses. We had no idea what that meant in practice, we were only acting on a sense that the children would suffer less if we kept things as stable as possible and limited the upheaval in their lives. We didn’t want to be spouses anymore but we were committed to our role as parents. We decided to stay together in the family home but on a week on/week off parenting schedule. A friend who happens to be a family lawyer told me that “these arrangements often fall apart when new partners come into the frame” and I told her that the stakes were high enough to take that chance.
As if on cue, things started degrading when Paul became more deliberate about finding a new partner in the Fall of 2020. I can only speculate on Paul’s intentions – this needs to be clear: I’m telling my story here – but based on his comments at the time, sharing a house with his ex-wife started to feel like an albatross. He encouraged me to find my own place and to come back to the family home whenever I wanted. Paul needed “more space” and felt like we should be more independent from each other. Both things were true, but instead of letting Paul figure it out for himself I took responsibility for it.
I was very concerned about the message that moving out would send the children, especially since Paul stayed in the family house. The family home model meant so much to me that I started bending over backward to make it work. I had set the family home as the norm of harmonious separation. Just like CrossFit, the “prescription” dictated my actions and I ignored my own distress and injury signals.
If I look back at this time in my life, I can see with clarity that I was acting out of an abject fear that my family would abandon me if I rocked the boat. My family still blamed me for the move out of the country. If you have been following me for a while, you know that Paul and I built a house in the Lanark Highlands in 2014 and pulled our children out of school to live a life that bore little resemblance to what it turned out to be. After three years of trying to make it work my mental health was deteriorating quickly and we decided to leave. We sold Paul’s dream home and moved back into a rental home in town. That was in 2018 and my marriage never recovered. Today, some children still tell me, while looking at picture albums: “we were so happy in Middleville but you had to ruin it.” I recall a conversation between Paul and the buyers of our home in Middleville where they asked why we were selling and Paul answering “My wife couldn’t handle it.” The sacrifices that went into making it work for over 3 years were never seen or acknowledged and my mental health provided a convenient scapegoat to avoid too much introspection. In the aftermath, Paul told me “Every time you have apprehensions and concerns, the thing ends up failing.” Obviously, I was the problem.
In November 2020, I decided to move out of the family home to put more distance between Paul and I. I came back to the family home every day during Paul’s weeks to make the children’s lunches and help with supper and bedtime. Instead of getting a thank you, I received harsher and more explicit demands for more space. The children refused to visit me at my house. My house represented the separation and the family home had become “dad’s home”, a belief that remains firmly anchored across the ages even though Paul moved twice in the last two years.
In hindsight, I should have pulled the trigger on the family home as soon as I started being pushed out of it. Allowing the family home not to be a truly neutral space would come back to bite me 8 months later when, after failing repeatedly to set boundaries around Paul’s personal use of the family home with his new girlfriend, I couldn’t continue. We moved into 2 separate homes when the lease on the family home expired. Switching to two homes meant that I had to hire a lawyer to claim child and spousal support, introducing an element of friction in my relationship with Paul. The children started blaming me for « making dad broke » and for hurling them into the unknown. Taking the high road meant that I couldn’t tell the children what had led to this decision. I was left with platitudes and non-answers that raised even more questions. I took the brunt of my children’s pain over the separation, which included one child refusing to live with me, even part time.
I couldn’t afford to live near the family house on my own so I started looking for a housemate soon after signing the lease. My (male) best friend was also going through a separation and looking for a place to live. He moved in with me a few months later and his presence and support through the most difficult time of my life has been life-saving. If you can imagine the movie scene where someone falls off a cliff and is saved when their clothes get stuck on a hanging branch: Glen was that branch. He held steady while I figured out how to get myself back to safety.
Paul had started dating a woman from the gym while we were still sharing the family home week on/week off. Since Paul lived in the family home during my weeks, his dating life was impossible to compartmentalize. I felt like a « good ex wife » should be ok with it. And maybe I would have been had Paul and his girlfriend handled their new relationship with more care and concern for the family’s adjustment. But I paid no respect to the fact that I was unable and unprepared to process the complex feelings that would accompany this new fork in the road for Paul, the children and I. My heart and mind had fallen into the same cycle of injury and inflammation as my body had.
To be continued. Part 3 coming soon!