Like A Leaf on the Wind
In my life, divorce was the pinnacle of internalizing that I was allowed to think, want, and do things that other people didn’t like or understand. Something is not morally wrong just because other people don’t understand it or want it to happen. It took me 34 years to fully embrace this idea and be able to act on it in every area of my life. Undoing a life you mostly constructed so that other people would tell you, “Good job, good girl, you followed the rules,” has been an arduous project, to put it romantically. It has been the most costly decision of my life to date in every sense. It’s been lonely as a woman, specifically (because I submit with no apology that mothers in heteronormative divorces bare the brunt of it, financially and socially). What am I doing, where am I going, why is this so painful, why do I feel so alone? I am reminded of one of my favorite follows on Instagram, Colin Bedell, who recently said this:
You wanna play? You gotta pay. You want love, intimacy, and romance? Ok! You’re gonna have that! Though you will also experience heartbreak, loss, and grief. You want to have a creative, courageous, vulnerable life? Ok, let’s see what you got. Though you will also need to brace yourself for rejection, disappointment, and failure! You *can’t* separate: pain from pleasure, love from loss, life from death, joy from heartbreak.
You wanna play? You gotta pay.
And recently, those six words have been ringing in my ears like an advertisement jingle I cannot get out of my head.
You wanna play? You gotta pay.
I pack up my children’s belongings on a Wednesday morning with the sun pouring through the windows. I travel quietly from room to room, gathering their stuffies, their school papers, the current collection of assorted junk they are attached to: tiny erasers shaped like animals you can deconstruct, candy hoards, little notebooks with secrets written in them. I focus my mind on the basic mechanics of the tasks lest I get pulled under the water of grief and resistance. Body: walk to the room. Hands: pick up the bag. Fingers, zip it up. I clean up their bathroom sink so it will be ready for them on their return. I listen to the quiet empty of the house, I try to dissociate from the idea that I will be sending them off for a week every other week until they grow up and begin their own lives. I sit to cry.