Celebrating Our Wedding Anniversary as Exes

Layla's altar constructed twelve years to the day on which we made our own trip to the wedding altar

Yesterday was August 29, a date that I will always remember because it is the day when my ex and I got married.  This year was the 12^th anniversary of that moment in which we pledged to spend our lives together.  We may no longer be romantically involved or living together, but we are still very much a part of each other’s lives.

We celebrated this date with our kids, who were very excited about it.  My daughter asked to see my wedding ring and made me wear it.  I put it on my right hand, where it was a bit small but nonetheless fit.  As luck would have it, however, we got a late summer heat wave and my hands swelled so it seems I may be wearing it for a while.  It’s a beautiful “dinner” ring from the 1920’s that never was meant to be a wedding ring so I am considering that I might enjoy keeping it on.  Three years time from our original breakup allows me to feel okay with that. Read the rest of this entry »

Tell a Different Story

You know those moments when everything seems bleak?  You go out on a bad date and fret that there are no interesting men left in the world.  You find yourself getting older, definitely wiser, but not prettier.   You don’t have enough money to pay the bills.  You’ve got physical ailments, arthritis, allergies, back pain, ulcers, you name it.  Or maybe these problems are mundane in comparison to this.  I met a man in yoga whose wife of ten years suddenly died six weeks ago in a traffic accident.  Imagine the pain that he feels.

Wow, you didn’t expect this from me, I know.  Recently I have been following a blogger Big Little Wolf who, like me, is a divorcee with kids, except she is doing all the parenting.  She has written a series of posts that have really cut me to the core.  First, there was one about how alone she feels, especially in the middle of the night when she can’t sleep.  Why does everything seem particularly grim in the dead of night?  I used to wake up with anxiety attacks where everything I thought of was a worry, but then in the morning, those fears just didn’t grip me.  The dark night, while being the inspiration for much beautiful poetry, can also really play with your mind.

Then she wrote a post that many of us parents can relate to, her inability to pay for her son’s college tuition.  She called it “Numbers do not Lie.”  God, we love our kids so much and want nothing but to secure them a bright, successful and fulfilling future.  That’s our duty, right?

As positive as I am, her fears and concerns cut through my serenity like a knife gash in a bag of rice, allowing all the inner contents to come spilling out.  Once I saw the rice on the floor, however, I knew that I couldn’t just leave it there.  I had to take action.  That’s when I remembered positive denial.

When my ex lost his job a year and a half ago, leaving little me, a college lecturer, the main breadwinner of the family, I remember what I did.  After my initial breakdown and freak out and the subsequent cost cutting (of course), I stopped thinking about it and started focusing on my desires instead.  I dreamed of us living in California near my loving family where the kids would have the best support network ever.  I imagined myself married to a rich man who took care of all of our needs.  I fantasized about being independently wealthy and having no cares in the world about money.  And of course, I looked at was underneath my nose, which were two adorable, loving kids who have fun playing with cardboard boxes, flowers and sticks (and library books!).  We didn’t need money to enjoy all that.  No long thereafter, I was back to my cheery self, enjoying all that life had to offer.

Positive denial, a therapist friend called it.  When you have done all that you can do to remedy a situation and yet it is still painful, I find it helpful to rewrite it.  To tell a different story, one that is so much more pleasant.  A story more fitting to my truly deserving nature.  A fantastic piece of fiction that makes me excited to get up in the morning to see what will happen next.  Maybe it’s someone else’s story (or what you think their story is) of true love and living happily ever after.  Maybe it’s a story that you read somewhere, the Vows section of the New York Times or a novel.  Perhaps it’s something you saw on TV or in a movie.  Or maybe you have the ability to imagine a wonderful alternate reality all by yourself.  Fantasy has its purpose, and for me it is to make me feel better and to get me through the day with a smile on my face.  And you know what?  It works.  I am more than what the numbers show.

Last night as I was contemplating this, one of my favorite bloggers, Kris from Pretty All True, wrote a lyrical piece about having a migraine.  She went to sit on a hammock and then had the most wonderful memory of a perfect moment in her life lying on a hammock on the beaches of Hawaii with her loving husband and her two sweet girls.  She told the story like it was one of those transcendent and resplendent moments in time in which you feel so grateful to be alive.  As her head was exploding in pain, she wrote that story.  I don’t know if this memory was real or if she made it up, but as it wound down, I could feel the tension draining from make my body and a great sense of ease and wellbeing flooded through me.  Go read this story now.  Print it out and keep it somewhere for the next time you are feeling pain, heartbreak or fear.  Re-read it and make it your own beautiful story.  I’ve already made it mine.

Weeding through the Detritus of My Former Life

A blurry old snapshot of us in grad school

Last weekend my friend Jane organized a multi-family tag sale and I was finally able to sell my kids’ baby equipment and simultaneously empty some things out of my very cluttered basement.  One of the other women at the sale said that when she became a parent, she didn’t sign up for “stuff management.”  I definitely resonated with that statement.  My friend Sarah (who has four children!) has been mulling over stuff management recently and mentioned how she finds herself drawn to design blogs where everything is so lovely and orderly.  Yesterday she said that gardening is overrated when she can “weed” through clothing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lessons That I Have Learned from Friends and Family

One of the things that I do to stay positive is to read uplifting articles, which usually rules out the newspaper.  A great place to turn for that, I have learned, is the Living section of The Huffington Post (warning: stay away from the current news though, it is always upsetting).  A couple of days ago, I read an article there, 18 Life Lessons from Family and Friends, that inspired me to imitate it.  Imitation being the highest form of flattery, the author, Susan Orlins, said she would be honored if I did and she told me that her niece had printed out the post and put it on the wall to look at it everyday.

So here goes the partial list of the lessons that I have personally learned from my family and friends because how could I really mention everything anyone has ever taught me:

1)  From my mom, I learned how to love my children deeply and fearlessly without holding on too tight, giving them the opportunity to develop their own identities.

Read the rest of this entry »

Field Notes on a Child of Divorce: My Son Gets It

Jonah, deep in thought, with his Egyptian headdress

Jonah and I have started a summer ritual of reading the Harry Potter novels together.  It’s become our thing, and we’ve never really had a thing before.  One of the most endearing (and also exasperating) parts of this ritual is Jonah’s non-stop analysis of the book.  I know my friends right now are simply laughing at me.  What did I expect when his two parents have doctorates in literature?

Yesterday we were reading the fourth volume The Goblet of Fire.  Harry and his best friend Ron are mad at each other over issues of trust and are not speaking to each other, although they clearly miss one another.  Ron is really the first person in Harry’s life that he has been able to count on.  So as we are reading yet another scene where they have a chance to make up but simply get more pissed off, Jonah says to me, I think Ron and Harry still really have love in their hearts for each other even though they are fighting.  I was stopped dead in my tracks because I realized in that moment, He gets it.  He understands that conflict doesn’t have to destroy love.

Jonah has always been a psychologically savvy boy.  He has told me a few times that he doesn’t understand why some people have a hard time getting along with others because he learned that in pre-school (with the presumption, Didn’t everyone learn that too?).  He always asks me about people’s motivations and wants to hear stories about everyone in my life.  When his dad was moving out of our house, he asked him why.  My ex took a deep breath to contemplate his response.  Before he could even reply, Jonah said, It’s so that you don’t get mad at Mama anymore, isn’t it?  That pretty much summed it up.  And that was all the explanation he needed.  He got it.

When I wrote the article about my ex losing his license and being grumpy and tense for a day, my friend Sarah, who has a beautiful parenting blog, asked me a poignant question.  Do I feel like I am leaving my kids vulnerable to my ex’s bad moods?  That was certainly something that I asked myself.

We have talked about my ex’s temper and what they do when it flares up.  They know that it is never their fault because that is just part of his personality.  They have learned to ignore him and find other activities to do until he calms down.  In a nutshell, they have learned to love someone even when that person seems unlovable.  They have learned not to take another person’s actions personally.  And they have learned that with enough patience, their adored father will return to his loving tender self.

The interesting answer, then to Sarah’s question, is that having to deal with their father’s moods (or by extension their parents’ breakup) has left them anything but vulnerable.  Instead it has empowered them to deal at an early age with some of life’s inevitable realities.  We all have our complexities and idiosyncrasies, but if we learn to accept others as they are, we can appreciate their wonderful characteristics as well.  People aren’t always easy to get along with, but we can love them anyway.

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Has there ever been a time when your children learned something important from a difficult situation?

Do you have any childhood memories of someone who was challenging yet instructive at the same time?

If you are a child of divorce, did you learn anything positive from your parents’ breakup or marital conflict?