Divorce, for real.

Or: The acceptance speech I would've given

The Vermont Book Awards were held this past Saturday, April 30th. BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY did not win. I did not expect it to win. And I was only able to enjoy being nominated for a few days before my life was unexpectedly blown apart. Losing a book award that I never expected to win in the first place has been the very least of my problems.

April was one of the most painful and annihilating months of my life, saturated with grief and alarm. My divorce was finally set in motion suddenly and without warning earlier in the month. Or rather, I set it in motion given the change in our circumstances. For anyone who has read my book and thought we had it too easy or that I didn’t truly understand the pain of divorce, let me tell you something, you are correct.

This experience has made it all the more clear that my book was always about marriage and a form of separation but was never about the real and true end, a divorce-divorce. The real coming apart. The real cyclical hellos and goodbyes to one’s own children. The complete end of a part of my life as I have known it, in all its various forms. The inability to hang out with the same group of friends in the same way, together. The choosing, the choices. I am in awe, actually, that anyone survives this type of pain.

As I said, my book did not win. But if it had and I was given the mic and a truly obnoxious amount of time to monologue away, perhaps this is what I would’ve said:

Instead of thanking anyone involved in the creation of this book (who I have thanked in multiple ways previously), I would instead like to thank the constellation of friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers who appeared during my dark night to light the way. It has taught me that the worst pain in this experience was made exponentially worse by isolation. It has taught me that I must reach out and ask for help and insight, that I cannot do this or other hard things completely on my own anymore.

I would like to thank one of my best friends for meeting me the night all of this imploded, even though she was flying out the next morning. As we sat on the curb of a residential street in the pitch dark as I chugged a beer and cried, she knew exactly what I was thinking as a UPS truck, that did not see us, began to back up. We jumped out of the way as she said, “whoa shit that guy is going to hit us” and I replied, “I would prefer it actually. Honestly, that would be perfect right now.” I will never forget the many ways she has showed up for me — when she ran to hug me when she first saw my face — and everything she has done for me since that moment. She has saved me.

I would like to thank the young woman behind the counter at the bakery where I picked up my ex-husband’s birthday cake so he could celebrate with our kids while I went to a hotel. Although I was wearing a mask and she could not see my entire face, when our eyes met she looked genuinely startled, doing a double take. She saw in my eyes that I was suffering. She saw that I was picking up a cake in tears, which is certainly a first for me and maybe her, too. I needed someone to mirror back to me that I was not holding on, not even close.

I would like to thank the owner of the cottage I’ll be renting in a few months, the first person I emailed at 5 a.m. the morning after my life detonated. Her surprising generosity and tenderness in providing a place for me to retreat to cannot be overstated. When I came by to see it one more time she said, “You might be surprised to hear that a lot of people have stayed out here while they’re going through a divorce. I think you need this. I think it will help heal you.” When I was ready to go, so used to quickly moving on to the next thing, she suggested I take the time to linger, without her there. She suggested I sit in that space and imagine my new life. So I did. I stood there, leaned my head against the door jamb, and cried. But I also felt my first glimmers of hope and excitement. My life has been on hold for so long. It has felt like forever.

I would like to thank my midwife who I peppered with messages, wondering if I should come in, because I was waking up every night of that first week with my heart pounding and completely drenched with sweat. During the day I was panting, unable to catch my breath. When I told her a little of what had unfolded she simply responded, “You don’t deserve that.”

I would like to thank a friend from years ago, who was the first friend I made explicitly and intentionally when my kids were toddlers because I was so alone and lonely, having no friends with kids. Our kids attended preschool together and I basically asked her out on a date. She helped me navigate those early years with sensitivity, wisdom, and can-do-ness when I needed it most. So even though it has been years since we hung out, when she came up to me at my kids’ chorus concert a few weeks ago and said, “Hey! How are things in your world?” and my eyes welled up with tears before I croaked, “not good” she followed up with a text later that day and invited me over to feed me and make me a margarita. We sat by her fireplace on a cold April night as she listened, then told me only good things about myself, things I have never been able to hear or believe. And then she said, “This is exciting, now you get to write your own story.”

I would like to thank the nurse practitioner who was so gentle in her questioning when I said that I think I needed to go on antidepressants because I had not eaten nor slept nor stopped crying, and also my friend had urged me to. She went through her standard checklist and asked, “Do you feel worried?” “Yes.” “About?” “Literally everything”. She then gently responded, “I have been where you are, I have been through this. You will get through this.” and with my head leaned against the wall, tears poured under my mask and across my throat.

There are so many more people in this constellation who have blinked on through the darkness. Our family therapist who responded immediately with a characterization of the hero’s journey I was embarking on, then scheduled an appointment as soon as she could fit me in. The owner of that red and white 1930s cottage that I had reserved again this summer but had to cancel, our family vacations over, who texted me to check in. One of my closest friends who I exchange voice messages with almost every day, who listened to me collapse over the phone and although I refused to hear it, she insisted “these stories you’re telling yourself are not true.” My aunt. My mother. Three of my closest friends who accompanied me to the awards ceremony this past Saturday, one of only two happy days I had all month.

I am better now, although the dark mental rabbit holes lie in wait. I’m still recovering from the shock that after all of these years and all of the careful planning that my entire life would still ultimately change in an instant (isn’t that what they all say?). I finally understand this as grief, so I try to accept that some days are really good and others are just very bad. I am mostly just trying to be present and only look forward, but some days it is impossible to not look back. I try to look for the opportunities to do things differently, even the smallest of things, now that I am finally on my own. What I’ve chosen to repeat to myself like a mantra is this:
This needed to happen exactly the way it did.
I know who I am.
And I will survive this.

I’ve had to remind myself often over these past few hard and terrible weeks that this was always going to happen. This was always going to happen. My mistake was somehow forgetting that. I realized we had hit a pause button and avoided all of the real pain at the end of our marriage. It feels exponentially worse now. Now instead of one relationship I have lost two, the marriage that was long gone and the greater and richer friendship we had created in its place.

The depth of my pain would be easy to mistake for longing or love or a broken heart, but none of those characterizations would be true. It is harder than I could’ve imagined to be forced to let go of one of the very few people who has been in my corner for most of my adult life, no matter our problems. My pain is the pain of loss. Of thinking we’d make it all the way to that last high school graduation, which perhaps was foolish anyway. We still had a ways to go, too long as it turned out.

Still, I’ve had to remind myself that our experiment bought us almost four more years full-time with our kids — years that were cooperative, pretty happy, and calm. Two of those years probably wouldn’t have happened at all without a pandemic forcing us together and pushing everyone else away. In that way, the experiment worked. We were lucky. It mattered. Those moments of grace and evolution and connection don’t suddenly disappear because the circumstances have now changed. It’d be a mistake, I think, to regret any of it. We tried. And it worked.

Like a lot of married women and mothers, I have spent a significant part of my life arranging the lives of others, even if it didn’t always appear that way to those on the outside. I have created and recreated infrastructures that others could hang their lives on, like a worn coat on a hook. I have prioritized the lives of everyone in my family, assuring their comfort, facilitating their ease, worried about how they felt, worried about how everyone was doing. Not always and perhaps not in the most typical of ways, but I know what I have done. And I put the most personal part of my own life on hold willingly, believing my own happiness didn’t matter or at least paled in comparison to theirs. I am done with this belief.

And I am done with the fraught experience of this book. I feel like I can finally put it behind me. I actually reread it recently to remind myself what was in it, because in my head I was telling myself a story about what it contained, and perhaps what it had glossed over. But the dots were always there to connect, even if I hadn’t connected some of them myself until recently. I had done my best, I really had. I worked so hard to understand, but until these past few weeks I never truly grasped what I had been up against. I am done feeling sorry and I am done making excuses for anyone else. Twenty-seven years with someone, in all the ways we had been together, is a lot to say goodbye to. But it’s finally time to let go.

Thank you for this nomination. Thank you to anyone and everyone who reached out to me about this book. Thank you for showing me that it mattered.

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P.S. TO MY PORTLAND, OREGON FRIENDS: I will be there the week of 5/30. Over the past four years I have struggled with the feeling that my life has only gotten smaller and smaller (pandemic aside). I thought I would just wait it out until my new life started, but turns out that new life is now. My life must get bigger, I need it to get bigger, to seek out friends new and old. So: get in touch, I would love to see you while I’m there.

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THINGS THAT HAVE HELPED
• “Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation” by Rachel Cusk. I will never be able to articulate what this book means to me. I will never forget reading it, in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, in the morning during my abbreviated school break trip with my kids, while drinking a coffee in the sun, needing so badly to feel that warmth on my face. I have never read anything that so completely captured how I felt or mirrored some of what I was experiencing. I will never, ever forget this book.
• “Healing Your Heart” on Hidden Brain. “We’ve all heard about the five stages of grief. But what happens when your experience doesn’t follow that model at all? Resilience researcher Lucy Hone began to question how we think about grief after a devastating loss in her own life. She shares the techniques she learned to help her cope with tragedy.”
• “The Dentist Who Treated My Divorce” by Hillery Stone in The New York Times. “When in pain, it helps to know someone who has experience treating it.” I never realized that lifelong dental trauma + divorce was my subject area sweet spot yet here we are. P.S. Hillery Stone if you ever read this please be my best, best friend.
• “A 63-Year-Old Runner Changed the Way I Think About Regret” by Lindsey Crouse in The New York Times. “As Yugeta reclaims the dreams she once abandoned, she says her athletic breakthrough is ‘fueled by regret.’ ‘I don’t think the feeling of regret is a negative emotion,’ Yugeta told me. ‘What’s negative are thoughts like, I can’t run fast anymore or I’m too old to do this, and I think that it’s an entirely positive way to live, to use any regrets you might have as motivation to achieve a goal.’”

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You can find my books here. You can find my writing here. You can find my copywriting and creative direction work here. You can find me on Twitter. You can find me on Instagram. You might find me in real life again, a life I am finally returning to.