The Perceived Middle
On the fake purgatory I made for myself
Every day I wake up and think about how much further I have to go between A and B, how much longer I have in the messy middle between then and now, before and after, married and divorced. When do I get my Finished This Shit trophy? This is a fruitless trick, of course, a silly little game I play with myself, pretending like I will get to the Promised Land of No Problems. Life is the messy middle. Still, what I didn’t realize about divorce as a parent is that it’s so much more than the finality of signed papers, custody agreements, the shift of separating households and learning to be alone in a house. All of those changes are real, dramatic, and seismic, but after all that, you are still met with new challenges you couldn’t see at the start: reminders that as a parent the imprint of divorce is forever.
Sometimes on my walks in the morning I go through an entire cycle of resolve to despair to hope to courage to resolve (and back to despair at some point). I know divorce is maybe all I talk about at the moment, but the lessons are transferable. Divorce was my personal portal to recognizing that I am both my problem and my solution, and I think we all have our own portal(s) in this sense, whatever it may be.
My practice as of late is to ease myself into letting go of anything but the now. If divorce handed me anything, it’s the understanding that we aren’t promised any tomorrow, or next week, or next year. No certain future is laid out before us even when it feels like it. Not even tomorrow. Life can and will have us landing on our ass whenever she sees fit. She’ll take away what we thought we wanted, hand us what we didn’t. She’ll snatch the map right out of our hands and force us to scrounge for the paper to draw ourselves a new one. So what we have is this moment, and the energy we generate around it.
And I’ve been thinking so often about that very thing - the energy I generate in each moment, and how it is the only raw currency any of us have. For a while throughout my divorce process (while also witnessing a fair number of my friends going through similar divorces as mothers) I’d get stuck on the parts that weren’t my fault, weren’t in my control, were injustices and judgments so infuriating my body would tremble. I wasn’t wrong - it is objectively shitty to be a mother in America and endure divorce. Still, what I see that life has been trying to push me toward is the calmer place where I realize I still have charge of my energy. And my energy is my whole experience. And my experience, in this very moment, is all I’ve got.
So when the troubling thoughts come, and oh do they come, with each new obstacle and challenge in finances, in co-parenting, in existing, in the heavy load of grief that is always dragging behind me, I fix my mind on the moment in my hands. I set the grief in the corner and notice the way my son’s hair falls over his forehead when he dances. I decide that I’d like to feel good now. I let the rest go, just for a moment, just to see how it might feel to be unburdened. I take the power back. I hold the warm buttery everything bagel in my mouth a little longer, I watch my partner cook breakfast in attentive gratitude, I play a game of Sorry with the kids like it’s my only moment on the planet. Because it is.