Here is something no one tells you about divorce: you will be on your hands and knees, forehead to the floor, nearly two years after you and your husband decide to separate, overcome by the enormous riptide of loss it took you both of those years to comprehend.
Here is something else no one tells you: you will feel so vulnerable and so afraid that you will change who you are just to be close to someone...and you will spend the next year filled with confusion and regret and rage at how much you sacrificed for that one sliver of peace.
Once you are alone, you will, at times, question your sanity. You will move through moments of estrangement from your own life, and you will lay face-down in your endlessly streaming tears, well past midnight, desperate for help with your child who won't sleep or listen or give you 5 seconds to think, and still manage to get up when the alarm goes off the next morning to do it all again.
Two years into your "new" life, you will crumple in front of a friend when you tell her it might be time to move on. You will sob on your couch at night, and while your child is in the bath, and when your dreams take you to places you'd rather never revisit.
And you will, without question, arrive at that tender place where you finally realize you are tired of crying, tired of placing cold packs on your eyes so that they're not so swollen in the morning, and tired of putting your hand up whenever someone tries to love you, even though this feels like your only protection at times.
You will talk to your divorced friends and find out that the grief never really goes away, it just changes into something you can live with most of the time. You will hear that there is always a little bit of guilt, always a sensation of failure, especially around the holidays, when it comes to your children. You will adapt, and you will move on, but you will always feel like a little bit less of a good enough mother when you recall the things you couldn't repair.
Waking up on Christmas morning without your child will never get easier. You will spend a lot of time coordinating holiday schedules and trying to read between the lines while focusing on the positive. You will communicate with your ex-spouse better than you did when you were married in order to siphon out the challenges and filter in the love you both share for your child. You will have to forgive and you will have to forget in order to cope. And you will have to extend more faith than you did when you brushed your teeth together every night.
In the early months, you will feel more like strangers than you did before your very first date, and upon seeing your in-laws for the first time after you separate, you will understand that the circle of people with whom you celebrate the miracle of your child's life has just gotten smaller.
You will exhaust yourself holding open doors that simply want to close, and sometimes you'll be the only thing bracing the walls when they want to come tumbling down. You will teach yourself how to fix your shower drain, repair a crack in your windshield, and troubleshoot your computer problems. You will sleep with the windows open during summer's hottest nights because you can't find the time to properly install your swamp coolers.
Good friends will become your saviors, and you will look to them for guidance during your darkest hours. Without a partner, you will have the space and time to let people in who will protect you from the scorching flames of your guilt and regret; and you will learn, eventually, how to ask for help. Forgiving indiscretions will be difficult since you are now your own gatekeeper, but your life will be cleaner and safer in the end.
There will come a point, maybe sooner, maybe later, when life will threaten to topple the delicate balance you have worked so hard to achieve in the aftermath. Knocking on your door will be opportunities you've always dreamed of, but require a loosening of your vice grip on the type of parenting that allows for little else. And it will break your heart to love again because the doors left open by the sheer force of your unrelenting hope will close.
Surprisingly, you will find that the final heartbreak that divides two people is not the last, but the first of many to come. You won't know how much you treasured laughing about your child's antics together until you're suddenly laughing alone. And you won't fully understand the enormity of raising a child by yourself until you're the only adult in the house at night and no one else is coming home.
And yet, what emerges from the unspooling of a family is more than devastation...and just as inexplicable. Grief eventually becomes a setting sun that will always rise again, bringing with it a newness terrifying in its unfamiliarity but necessary in its illumination of everything beautiful and whole and unchanged by your tragedy. You will lose yourself in moments of despair, and tire of chasing your sanity around the labyrinth of your life, but you will learn - because you have to - how to love even the most despicable pieces of yourself so that you can present to your child the person you've always wanted to be.
On difficult days, you will raise the clear, glass sharpness of yourself to the light and find a way to smooth the edges, and you will know that the person you see in the mirror each night has the strength to get through tomorrow because she just survived today. And as simple as it sounds, you will power yourself through impossible moments by powering yourself through all the preceding impossible moments. No matter what, you will put one foot in front of the other because that's the only way forward even when you're lost.
I wish I knew two years ago what this separation would do to my family and what it would ultimately do to me. When the decision was made, I saw divorce through a pinhole, and as the days have gone by and that tiny hole has split, widened, gaped, and finally opened completely to expose the whole of single-parenthood, I finally understand its impact.
For me, divorce meant jumping into a new existence and finding, once submerged, that nothing was any easier...only different and, in some ways, harder that it had been when it seemed impossible. But, eventually, I learned how to swim and, in most cases, protect myself from the sharks that circle every once in a while. And, in finding ways to keep my head above water, I have created an island for my child: safe, dry, and sometimes magical.
My life is no longer contracting but expanding to include new people, ideas, and a kind of serenity I never imagined. Sure the peace sometimes feels like isolation, and the silence in my house sometimes leaves too much room for sadness, and calling my daughter at night rather than tucking her in feels like the worst kind of pain, but this is all part of the life I am blessed to lead. I don't always understand it, I don't always like it, and sometimes I cry for days, but there is always something at the end of the day to hold on to. Always. Even if it's just a glimmer of hope that tomorrow will be a little bit better or a little bit easier than today.
Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love." I can say with absolute certainty that the last two years have brought with them the darkest, most frightful moments I have known in my life thus far. But, they have also brought with them the opportunity to survive. And with that survival comes an appreciation for the forces in me that refuse to be overcome, and sometimes, in brief moments of clarity, a genuine appreciation for the struggles themselves.
~ Katie
