People often ask me how I am doing since the separation and the answer is “still grieving.” I have not lost a beloved to physical death but I lost my family in the shape I have known and built it all my adult life. I heard Tara Brach read from John O'Donohu's poem "For Grief" in a 2010 meditation about healing trauma. I was struck by this passage:
“And when the work of grief is done the wound of loss will heal , and you will have learned to wean your eyes from that gap in the air and be able to enter the hearth in your soul where your loved one has awaited your return all the time."
My eyes are still fixed on the gap in the air where my intact family used to be and I am not yet able to enter the hearth in my soul where the new expression of my family is awaiting my return.
Since I last wrote on this blog, my life has been upended by grief: mine and the children’s. I struggle to write about this jagged and unpredictable journey. We all know that separated parents should not disparage each other in front of their children. We look at statistics and studies on conflict and divorce and we tsk tsk at parents who are not able to put their children’s well-being ahead of their own. Can’t they just wait until the kids are out of earshot before letting it all hang out? Here is one of the first lessons I learned after I separated : Everyone, even those who communicate only by email and exchange kids in neutral parking lots, even those who are taking their spouse to court over custody matters, even those who just called their spouse an effing a-hole in front of the kids, knows that. That’s the easy part. What is not so easy is hiding the abject, gut-wrenching pain of the separation and its trauma.
I realized through this journey that witnessing my pain made people angry at Paul and his girlfriend. I can tell a story with words about my separation that gives a fair shake to both of us. But no one who has come close to me and my grief in the last year has indeed believed that shake to be fair. It is not in the words that I say or write but in the pain that oozes and radiates from every pore in my body. People reflexively understand the relationship of grief to love. That we have just as little power over the pain of losing love as we do over the delight of finding it. But more importantly, that we grieve in the measure that we loved. It matters very little what story we tell in words about the end of a marriage. Our pain and our struggle often tell a different story. I am always questioning if sharing my pain is tantamount to shit-talking my ex-spouse. Maybe it is. And maybe you will stop reading here. If you don’t, I will assume that you made a choice to step into my world and share my journey.
The story of grief that accompanies the end of a long marriage is a story of nuance, unexpected losses, and the realization that what felled your marriage was in equal parts completely avoidable and inevitable. You grieve the efforts you did not make, the interventions you did not accept, the time wasted looking the other way pretending things weren’t as bad as you thought. You also grieve the efforts you made, the advice you followed, the time wasted trying to make things better in ways that were ill-advised, irrelevant or downward damaging. The breakdown of a long term relationship is a study in doing the right things wrong, doing the wrong things over and over, and trying to get different results from the same strategies. You need to hold your sanity on the fine line between regret and acceptance, between looking forward and looking back. You need to understand how your marriage failed for your own sake, for the lessons it holds, for your future happiness. Yet, it is hard to look back without getting swallowed by the anger, loneliness and fear you held in check for so long. When I used to read about the grief of a divorce, I thought it was a grown-up version of the teenage heartbreak. The pain of rejection, of unspent love. What I am experiencing now is a grief that touches just about everything but the person I lost.
Over 25 years, the pain of lost love is felt in increments so what little is left to spend at the time of separation disappears in the relief from pretending that things will work themselves out. You look back at your relationship as if you were tracing back your steps trying to find your keys: there are times when you clearly remember love being present and times when you clearly remember love being gone. In between, there are miles of grey zone where love could have fallen out. In this example, finding your keys matters because you need to unlock the door when you get home. But the love between my husband and I has no home to go to anymore.
There is a quote I can only paraphrase here but I heard many times during my recovery: modern day humans -- for whom “til death do us ‘part” means living older than 45 -- will have on average 2 or 3 meaningful long term relationships in their adult years. The question is whether these relationships are with the same person or different ones. It doesn’t matter whether you marry young or not: at several points in your lifetime, you and your spouse will change and you will have to make a decision as to whether or not you still believe in what you add up to as a couple. This realization can come over time or it can come all at once. Major relationship-shattering events like infidelity or betrayal happen at the apex of change, when all the lateral edges moving away from the base finally meet.
With 9 children, what Paul and I added up to as a couple was easy to see. But as a lighthouse can guide you in a storm, it can also blind you if you stare at it too long. In the glare, we changed and became people we didn’t want to wake up next to. For the last 5 years, contempt and stonewalling -- to borrow John Gottman’s 4 horsemen analogy -- were omnipresent in our family’s life. Paul’s contempt led me to build a fortress, a stone wall, around myself. My children were suffering and they still are. They suffered from the criticism and contempt directed at me. They suffered from the defensiveness and stonewalling directed at my spouse. But they especially suffered from living with parents who ignored rather than manage their marital conflict. I thought that anything short of dish-throwing would go over the children’s head. Boy, was I wrong.
I don’t grieve for my husband. Through his own quest for happiness, love and authenticity, he has become a person I would never fall in love with today. And he says the same thing about me. The humorous thing about seeing your partner of 25 years find love again is that you can compare yourself to their new flame and see how far you are from being someone they would choose today. But I grieve everything else. Everything.
I grieve the years I spent trying to make myself into someone my spouse would like, only to become someone I didn’t even like. I grieve the time I spent trying to make myself into the kind of woman and mother he would cherish only to see the goal posts move again and again. I grieve that instead of calling bullshit I tried harder. I grieve that while I was trying to play a role that wasn’t written for me, I didn’t give my children the type of care and affection they needed. I grieve the years I spent with someone who barely tolerated me. I grieve that I believed myself to be a burden on my family. I grieve that I modelled a version of marriage to my children that would make anyone profoundly unhappy. I grieve that I saw his contempt and made it mine.
I grieve everything I gave up because I believed in the Catholic model of marriage, including my authenticity and my sense of self. I grieve that this ideal would leave me on my ass at almost 50, with an outdated education and 8 non-consecutive years of work experience interrupted by moves, pregnancies, and homeschooling. I grieve starting over when I thought I would be settling down after 25 years dedicated to childbearing and childcare.
I was having a heart-to-heart with one of my adult children about marriage and he asked me if I believed longevity — in and of itself — to be the hallmark of a successful marriage. I said that no, longevity is nothing but the hallmark of time passing by. Longevity tells me nothing about the quality of a marriage. But son, you need to understand that there are choices you make under certain assumptions. You don’t have 9 children over 18 years, sacrificing a lucrative law career in the process, if you think that you’ll end up single, trying to support the last 5 on an entry-level salary at age 50 (okay, 48…). If you don’t think that marriage is permanent, if you don’t think that marriage is a long-term partnership, if you don’t think that marriage will protect you from the financial suicide of childbearing and childrearing, you don’t disappear from the job market upon graduation for 20 years. Do I sound angry? I hope so, because I am.
I grieve that I am free from the pain of my marriage but that this freedom has come at such an incredible cost. I no longer see my children every day. One of them has decided not to live with me, in part because my need to share the rent with a housemate means that I cannot offer him the same personal space his dad can. I am as financially dependent on my husband to support my family today through child support payments as I was before the separation, but with less money. In my marriage, I was not able to pursue my own personal goals and aspirations unless my husband approved of them. Today, I am free to pursue goals such as taking my children to France to visit family regularly, send them to alternative school, and move inside the greenbelt to an urban walkable neighbourhood close to transit -- but I can’t afford to. So what have I gained other than the safety to unravel into a deep burn out and depression?
I grieve not having to worry about money, or where I will live if my rent increases, or how long it will take to find a lease that accepts a single woman with 4 children, or whether I an afford to live close to my children’s schools if I lose my housemate. And in the middle of grieving the loss of financial stability, I grieve having to pay a lawyer to defend the value of what I sacrificed to raise my children for 25 years and whether the value of my post-secondary education makes up for it. A post-secondary education that brought me nothing but opportunities to turn down because my family’s demands could not accommodate them.
I grieve everything I lost. And yet for every loss, I have also gained. I have gained the deep knowledge that I am loveable as I am. The pain that brought me to my knees has also brought me to rest, to the simpler life that I used to long for. I no longer dread having to move in three years when Paul decides to break down and reinvent our family’s life again. The lack of money has brought me closer to the kind of conscious spending I used to aspire to; and if I can’t figure out how to buy new snow tires by mid-November, I might get my wish of a car-free life sooner than expected (Edit: the day after I wrote this, I received a retroactive salary adjustment going back to January 2020 and my snow tires are covered. Thank you providence, as Alanis would say). My burn out has forced me to prioritize my recovery over trying to advance in my career, which has given me the time to tend to my children’s emotional needs over their lifestyle needs. and my recovery has forced me to ask for and accept help from friends and colleagues in ways I would never have imagined appropriate before. Needing help connected me to those who longed to be helpful. Yielding to my vulnerability opened a window into a world of kindness and generosity.
Recovery is a slow process and I am taking the promise of a stronger better self in faith. I still have a lot of pain to work through before I get there.
I have faith that you will be okay, and better than okay. That you will eventually thrive. You process well (perhaps through your writing.) I am so sorry for the pain.