Fail Better - On Divorce and Creating My Own Orbit

Divorce is hard, in ways that I expected and in ways I didn't.  We filed the paperwork, going to the courthouse together, bumping mostly silently along in the car, a long stretch of already-spoken words trailing behind us. I kept waiting for the wham-o of emotions to hit; everything was signed and we were officially putting an end to this twenty two year relationship.

What I mostly felt was numb. There is nothing more to say, and the whole thing was anti-climatic. We didn't even have all the right forms, but we both didn't need to back the next day to drop them off, so he went back alone.

Now we wait for the court date, for the legal end of what has already ended.

I have (mostly) stopped staring at everyone's ring finger. I don't know what I was looking for, really. I still feel a surge of kinship when I see a Mom with no ring on, out and about with her kids and looking happy and whole, but I have stopped searching the faces of the married couples I see and wondering if they are really as happy as they seem.  I no longer look at them and feel that disquieting combination of longing and emptiness.

The tsunamis of rage have subsided. I was so angry, at myself, at the Universe, at him, at his new woman.  She used to be my good friend, this new love of his. They began before he and I had ended. That betrayal blasted a hole through my world, left me shattered and with a shuddering rage that festered and bloomed like an infection in my soul. I don't write about it here, because what could I possibly say?  He has a life to lead, as does she, and it isn't my place to broadcast their business for everyone to see.

That infection has mostly healed, leaving a dull ache. Happy marriages don't fall apart in one explosive event, so I don't blame our demise on her, but it has taken months of licking my wounds, exploring my part in everything and begging the Universe, over and over, for surrender and acceptance to get to this place where I am now.

And where is that, exactly, I ask myself.

The answer surprises me, sometimes, because it's so simple: I'm right here. I am fully present in my skin, in my heart and mind. I didn't realize just how much of myself I had given away until I was forced to find me again.

I have learned that I am good on my own. It wasn't this way at first. A marriage develops grooves, patterns, and those take a long time to smooth out. Five o'clock would roll around and my mind would click into wife mode:  what's for dinner, is the house tidy enough, what do I need to do to make sure he is pleased when he gets home.  

For weeks I heard his voice in my head, both the one that would criticize me for the things I didn't do well enough in his opinion, and the things he would praise me for.  Marriage is a constant stream of compromises, little coming-togethers and moving-aparts. And at the end of each day there was always that marital download; the one that takes place snuggled into bed each night, where we shared our we-are-in-this-together moments.

Without the push-pull of marriage, when it's just me and the kids, I didn't have anyone else's gravitational pull to anchor me.

I had to create my own orbit.

From the perch of hindsight, I can see how I have grown, the ways in which I surprised myself with my resilience, my ability to feel all the hard feelings and come out out stronger, but OH it didn't feel like progress. It felt like a tearing-down from the inside out, because that's what it was.

I started by forgiving myself, bit by bit. I treated myself gently, and slowly changed my inner dialogue from words of worthlessness and shame to those of love and compassion.  I waded through feelings of abandonment and rejection by holding tight to myself and the love of my kids. I leaned - hard - on the people in my life who love me just as I am.

There are recovery slogans I have heard over and over that didn't mean much to me before, but that are mantras to me now. One of them is this:  pain is the touchstone of all spiritual growth.  I have grown and stretched uncomfortably in so many ways, but I am finally in a place where I can say all that discomfort was so, so worth it. Like sore muscles the day after a hard work out, I limped along at first, but with a smile growing slowly wider on my face, because I knew that ache meant I was growing stronger.

My other mantra comes from the Buddhist monk Pema Chodron (she has a book coming out shortly with this as the title):  fail, fail again, fail better.  My life doesn't look anything like I imagined it would, but I have learned that the disconnect there isn't in life itself, but in the imagining, in the expectations of how things are supposed to be. I no longer believe in supposed-to.

I have long said we are not defined by our mistakes, but rather what we make of them. I amend that, now, because I am defined by my mistakes. I used to try to run from them, from the uncomfortable feelings, the anger and shame they evoked in me. I embrace them, now, because without them I could never have been forced to do the hard work it takes to find acceptance and peace of mind.

I look down the road at new milestones, now. It puts to test all this work I've done of self-acceptance. I am going on job interviews, and even on a date here and there.  One interviewer said, "So, if I Google you, what am I going to find?"

I felt a pinch of fear, a panicky feeling that maybe I should just take it all down - the blog, the recovery stuff, all of it.

Then I chuckled, out loud, and said, "well, you'll find me, I guess."