Fortunately, no one was armed

Two years to the day after we signed our divorce papers, my ex-husband and my boyfriend met face to face.

I’ve just wasted five minutes sitting here counting on my fingers.  When did we separate, when did we sign the papers, when did we actually divorce?  Looking back some of it seems improbably sudden; some of it seems bizarrely prolonged, even belated.  We separated in February when my younger son was five. He’s now nine.  The divorce was final in October, which means we signed in June, which must mean we separated…a year and a bit earlier? Oh, hell.  There’s a lost summer in there, a summer during which I drank too much and we tried and failed to share both a house and an apartment, a summer I don’t like to think about if I don’t have to.

Peaceful, eh?

The word “eirene” means “peace” in ancient Greek.  Seriously.

I posted on the other blog that I was not where I was supposed to be. Not home, not with my kids, who are still across the country with their father.

That particular feeling–the feeling of not being where one belongs–is, for me, the most pervasive and persistent legacy of separation.  When you’re married, you are always home.  Even if you’re temporarily somewhere else, everyone’s waiting for you to get back; in a crisis or calamity, you know exactly where you need to go.  You know your place.

Having driven to see my boyfriend last night for all the right reasons, I woke up this morning climbing the walls.  I found it difficult to be blithe; a hurricane was coming, my house, a hundred miles to the south, was a sitting duck.  I hadn’t taken down the birdfeeders or taken in the plants.  The porch furniture was just waiting to get blown around and rained on and ruined.  I didn’t have any candles, or a flashlight, or bottles of drinking water, or a cooler, or a stash of nonperishable food.  I wasn’t ready.  The cat was alone, and if a tree fell on the house she’d be in trouble.  I fretted and agitated and called people, asking them what I should do.  Predictably, those who tend to worry a lot (and who had been through hurricanes) told me to go home.  Those who don’t, and who hadn’t, told me to chill out.

Polly Tropos and sons

Remember that scandal a few years ago, when, for a week, the real identities of Amazon reviewers became visible on their Canadian website?  (Oh, Canada.) No?  Here.  If this doesn’t make you cackle with glee, I’ll eat my hat.

I’ll eat my son’s plastic Fisher Price hat, that is–the one that appears on his head in the photo above.  (That’s my younger son.  Hard to tell them apart when they’re identically dressed, I know.)  For those just coming across this blog as part of Babble Voices, I’m the writer sometimes known as Irretrievably Broken, sometimes known as Divorced With Kids.  And sometimes, due to a couple of hiccups on the Babble site, as Polly Tropos, which is not my real name. Confused?

Crookshanks

If you are my younger son, then you were born in the middle of July, which happened to coincide with a rather hotly anticipated movie release this summer.  When you’re nine, and the seventh and final Harry Potter film opens the very weekend that follows your birthday, your birthday party becomes (in your mind, at least) a total no-brainer. This will dismay your mother, who prefers birthday parties with goofy homemade cakes and crooked streamers and pin the tail on the donkey and three legged races and other olde games of yore.  Of course, she’ll see your point, and agree (with convincing enthusiasm) that of course, of COURSE you may take two friends, and your brother, and maybe one of his friends as well, to see Harry Potter (in 3-D, natch) for your birthday.

Don't bee an ass

Several months ago, the Huffington Post added a “Divorce” section to its website. They’ve linked to a couple of essays I’ve written here, and I click over and read what they publish from time to time. The articles themselves are usually pretty anodyne–I may have missed something, but so far I haven’t seen any piece that takes an outrageous or scandalous or even deliberately contrary view of divorce. To me, what’s most striking about the HuffPo divorce page isn’t the articles themselves. It’s the comments that follow the articles.

No need to peck each others' eyes out.

In the bad old days of divorce, back when I was the happy product of a broken (and mended, rebroken, et cetera) home, mothers almost always got full custody of their children.  Fathers often moved away, and contact between the divorced parents was minimal.  Mercifully minimal.  Those days are gone, and while I don’t truly lament their passing (kids need their fathers, and vice versa), I do think the shared-custody-after-divorce paradigm is much, much tougher on parents than most people acknowledge.

Slovenly housekeeping (note dead fly on floor) another harbinger of doom

I realize this is dangerous territory.  If the demise of my marriage taught me anything, it’s that there are no rules, and one couple’s Sign Of Doom can be another couple’s Wee Marital Spat.  But I have had so many people email me asking whether it’s possible to TELL if your marriage is in trouble, and wondering at what point, exactly, I knew we would get divorced.

I apologize in advance for my inability to answer the question decisively. There was no one point.  There was no way to tell.  Ending a relationship is as complicated (and impossible to quantify) as beginning one.  You can hardly wax eloquent on just what drew you to the person you ended up with, as a million hackneyed self-authored wedding vows attest.  (“Jennifer, you’re not just my lover, you’re my BEST FRIEND.”)  What attracts people to each other is always a mystery; what drives them apart is similarly ineffable.  I make no claims that my particular observations are universal or even symptomatic.  I’m just answering, as best I can, the dozens of readers who’ve wondered if there were specific tip-offs.

Looking back, of course there were.  They won’t be yours, necessarily, but the following bullet list describes, in brutal outline, and in emotion-avoiding hyperbolic stabs at humor, the demise of my particular once delightful marriage.

Me, beating my brother at Connect Four

When your parents split up as early as mine did, it’s practically inevitable they’ll remarry.  Odds are, they’ll want children too.  At my father’s I was eventually the oldest of four–me, then a brother, then a sister, then another sister. At my mother’s I was eventually the oldest of three– me, then a sister, then a brother.  (I missed everyone’s birth, save my oldest sister’s, because I was in the wrong household at the wrong time.  My youngest brother, for instance, whose gestation I’d followed closely, patting my mom’s swelling tummy throughout, was born the summer I was nine years old, a few weeks after I’d left for my dad’s.)

Perhaps it was coincidence, or just a nine-year-old thing, but that particular summer stands out as the year I was most homesick on both ends of the visit–terribly miserable and bereft when I got to my dad’s, and equally miserable and bereft when I left.

Happily, though, there was a fascinating new addition at my father’s house that summer–a cheerful bald big-eyed baby sister, born in September, just after my visit the year before.  We’d never met till now.  She was a highly amusing little baby, and my stepmother, who knew I’d been taking care of younger siblings since I was in first grade, gave us free rein and allowed me plenty of responsibility.  My sweet sister, just crawling, just babbling, entranced by everything my brother and I did and perfectly happy to be dragged along in our wake, was a delight.  I  carried her around on my hip all day and we made her the focus of every game we played.

So pretend for a minute you’re a young divorcée with a three year old son, and you meet a man you really, really like.  He’s divorced, too, and has a daughter off somewhere far away–both pluses, in your mind.  He’s not some dope without a past, he’s a real grown-up who understands what you, too, have already lived through–marriage, divorce, and even a kid.  What’s more, he’s phenomenal with your son, and your son–whose father lives far away, in the accepted tradition of 1970s divorced fathers–instantly, unstintingly adores him.

Pretend you move in together in a haze of bliss and good fortune, ecstatic to have found each other, not really thinking about the future, because who knows what the future might bring?  And then pretend it’s your very first summer under the same roof, and his six-year-old daughter suddenly appears for her yearly five week visitation.  You’re slightly nervous, the way one is often nervous with kids who are older than one’s own.  (Three-year-olds you understand.  Six-year-olds?  An undiscovered country.)  You’re determined to do your best, though, both for this unknown little kid (whose situation you sympathize with, since you’ve often thought about your own son’s once-yearly custodial visit to his father and new stepmother) and for your boyfriend, whom you’re still, let’s be honest, eager to impress.

Athena, patron goddess of sensible family relations.

Two roads diverged, and somehow I managed to travel both.

My parents, as I said, split up when I was very young.  I was born in 1968.  By 1970 it was clear they were headed separate ways, and my mother and soon-to-be-stepfather moved with me to Montana the summer I was four years old.

That same summer my father, who had no money, drove thousands of miles in order to see me.  Back then, divorce was very different.  Women got primary custody of their children almost without exception, and my mother didn’t mean to hurt my father by taking me away.  She was my mother, in love with a new guy, and they were moving out west–what was the problem?  I think she assumed it would have been easier and more convenient for my father just to let me disappear.  And I know a lot of kids whose fathers did more or less vanish, since that was the custom at the time.