The Stages of Divorce - Two - Happy Days Are Here Again

It is such a relief to have the staticky dysfunction gone. The contrast between the high-drama last few months of a dying marriage and the new life you gain is palpable. You can eat in peace, sleep in peace, watch whatever you want on TV, and use all the hot water. The world is full of opportunities. And you're sure, absolutely sure, things are gonna be better from now on. It's like that old rock song, "And I'm prob'ly gonna feel a whole lot better, when you're gone!"

I remember my first little post-divorce apartment—I called it "Little Land of Happy." The cats relaxed. I relaxed. My sense of humor came back. I started laughing at things on TV. And my appetite, always the first thing to go in a tense situation, came back in the slyest way. I tried to eat my little six-bite suppers, and I was still hungry. One evening in particular, I had to get up and re-plug-in the George Foreman Grill and simply make myself more food.

I threw a little dinner party, all divorced women. And I met my neighbors, one of whom turned out to be one of my former, favorite students from when I taught college. I found a whiz-bang divorce support group and changed churches. Found a friendly little gas-and go mart that sold Sunday papers. Found the Y's Buys second-hand shop across the street from my new apartment, and every payday, I bought the nicest piece of dove gray clothing I could find. I went to my grad school graduation in a dove gray, secondhand dress. My friend Theresa remarked on my rather-instant transition from Yuppie Homeowner to Broke Divorcee. She called me the most alarmingly downwardly mobile person she knew. And I remember telling her, "As long as ramen is 12 for a dollar, I don't have to go back to that man."

My pal Barbara invited me to join her group of friends on that first on-my-own Fourth of July, for a big outdoor Pointer Sisters reunion rock concert and fireworks—bring your own lawn chair. I had to buy a lawn chair, but I showed up. Barbara stared in wonder at the chair, "You know," she told me, "that right there is nicer than anything your ex-husband ever bought you." And she was right. The music was wonderful, the fireworks were wonderful. Barbara's husband went and bought us all gloriously salty and hot and greasy cottage fries, and I was so happy. I had a real sense of getting to do something that made me so happy without having to (a) drag an unwilling spouse along, or (b) go alone and then (c) paying for every ounce of happiness the minute I got home from going out without him.

Have there been hard times? Yes. But they are few and far between. And I have coped—without my Ex—through them all. And there have been many, many occasions when I went through something breaking, something gone wrong, something awful, that I thought, "Gee, this sure is easier without the Shame and Intimidation Monday Morning Quarterbacking Spin from a bad spouse."

And sooner or later the euphoria wears off and The Urban Grind wends its way back in. But I still am very (VERY) happy living alone and the peacefulness of it all. I tell people, "I was married for 11 years and then a nice judge gave me time off for good behavior."

And enjoy this time for what it is—a gift. Don't be rushed into anything, not even a new hairstyle. Just take your time. This is part of your healing, a time to do the emotional processing you need to do, not a time to jump into a new relationship or a 30-year mortgage or a navel piercing. They tell those'uns at A.A. to wait a year before entering into any kind of new relationship. That's an excellent rule of thumb for us all.

The Stages of Divorce - One - A Calmer Place to Sleep

My friend Beth thought she had the ideal marriage right up until her husband came home and told her that he was in love with somebody else. That if Beth truly loved him, she would want him to be happy.

The problem was, he would not Establish Separate Residence. He kept his clothes at Beth's house. He came over once a day, around 5 a.m., showered, and changed clothes. This was lawyer-advice for holding on to the financial asset of the house. (When I got divorced, the lawyer told me to move my clothes out last, the very last.) He also had the receipts for his new Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous goings-ons mailed to Beth's house. And it all had the effect of making Beth even more miserable. She was stuck in a very early stage of divorce – that place where you hurt so much, so often, so actively that you feel like you're being peeled by the world's largest potato peeler. And all you want is a little something pleasant and familiar and good and not-not-sad.

Divorce is a form of processing. You move through the stages, maybe at your own pace, but you do move through the stages. You have to, to stay healthy and actively involved in life and to keep from scaring your loved ones and boring your friends.

The first stage is often a dichotomous blend of abject calm and abject misery. This is because as your physical and emotional surroundings calm down, your mind starts to process. At its worst, this can take on a form similar to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. At the best, the former spouse will get out of your life enough to let you start processing. You will come back to equilibrium in your own time.

The opposite of Love is not Hate. The opposite of Love is Indifference. Hate takes tremendous psychic energy and eats you up inside. And, as Mark Twain said, "Always be pleasant to your enemies. It costs you nothing and it annoys your enemies." You don't have to be a doormat, but just refuse to participate in any type of dysfunction. Then you will have a calmer place to sleep.

And remember, getting out of a bad relationship is like throwing out old underwear. It feels so much better when the creep is gone.

Watchin' The Indian

My beloved Minnesota Public Radio did a report earlier this year on how nobody knows how to be bored anymore. Everywhere we go we have music, phone service, coffee in dandy to go cups, and advertising. And those advertisers have had to go from 60 second commercials to 30 second commercials to 15 second commercials as the national tolerance for Attention Span Theater has dropped straight into the cellar. We need to be bored, we were taught when we were young, so we could learn what to do when we are bored. 1950's Zen, but Zen, n'est pas?

Us kids, in my mother's huge Victorian house, used to get up early on Saturday morning and wait for the TV to come back on. We would curl up in my mother's soft blankets, with bowls of cereal and the front parlor TV on with the sound turned completely down, watching for the test pattern to turn into the Mighty Mouse cartoon show. We were allowed to do this because all the adults back then, including the adults in Mama's house, considered this placid waiting charmingly goofy and filled with self-entertaining boredom-dealing that was considered a virtue in those days. Back before cable TV, little towns only got TV signals between about seven a.m. and midnight. The rest of the time, they put up a test pattern, with a profile of a very politically incorrect Indian on it. We called it "Watchin' The Indian."

There used to be huge stretches of great gobbly boredom built into this society. We were raised to tolerate boredom. Remember visiting elderly friends and relatives of your parents? You were expected to sit on the secondarily nice furniture and behave yourself by being politely and quietly bored out of your mind. Sermons were 90 minutes to two hours long. Special events often involved speeches. Big. Long. Speeches. Sometimes one right after the other.

School used to incorporate boredom as a social skill. And the art of entertaining oneself, once again very quietly, in queues and waiting rooms, was the stuff of legends. When all we had was one another, the braver ones of us interacted with each other. I was in a Carlos O'Kelly's waiting area when an impromptu spelling bee broke out. I have been at a big outdoor concert where a series of objects for a homemade wine and cheese sampling were passed down the long, long rows of audients. And my pal Andy, the absolute King of Boredom Management, can recite whole movie plots from memory in the most fascinating way. He is the absolute best companion in the world to fall into a good two-hour wait with.

All this came to mind because I was in the girly-girl scary waiting room of the Mammography Unit at the big, downtown St. Paul hospital yesterday early. They took away our purses and cell phones and water bottles, put us all in matching mauve kimono tops and put us in this waiting room. There was a very elderly Hispanic woman with a hospital translator, a woman who was crying, a very quiet obviously lesbian woman, a teenager, and me. When i realized that they were going to take everything away from us, I very quietly kept my newspaper with me. I learned in grad school how to read the daily paper in about five minutes flat, and I knew I could get rid of the paper before I got busted. I sat down between the lesbian and the crying woman. Minnesotans can be a very preternaturally quiet, self-contained bunch, but the next woman that came in said, "Let's read the newspaper together." We got the crying woman to stop crying and start talking about the obituary pictures. We got the lesbian to show us how she had smuggled in her cell phone in her cargo shorts. And we made fun of our mauve tops and got the teenager to giggle for us. It was just a little bit of Watchin' the Indian but it surely was nice. In such a scary situation, with nothing but ourselves. The Cameraderie of Boredom.

It Takes Two

There is a calmness that comes after a divorce. It can be rather immediate. Sometimes all it takes is finding a calmer place to sleep—what the lawyers call "Establishing Separate Residences." Sometimes it takes getting through to the other side of the un-co-mingling of the family finances. Sometimes it just takes hanging out with enough Normals to where you get where you trust your instincts and your feelings again.

Dear Abby last week had a letter from a young woman who found out that her father was binge-drinking again. He started up when his wife, the writer's mother, went away on a vacation with her sister. The writer wanted to know whether or not to tell her mother. Abby told the writer that the family dynamic was this – Husband was punishing Wife for going on vacation. It was a startling thing to read in the newspaper in the broad daylight—that people who love you so much that they went and married you could punish you. Oh, what an Elephant on the Sofa Moment!

If you stay in a dysfunctional marriage long enough, you begin to self-monitor yourself to avoid this punishment. You will, literally, catch yourself being happy and check yourself, knowing what will happen later on. I have always gone through life lucky—things just happen to me, good things, happy things. And the saddest part of my life was being married to a man who resented any happy thing—and I mean anything that could put a smile on my face—that did not come from him.

I remember taking him along to my Senior Convocation, when I got my bachelor's degree at age 40. My voice teacher had urged me, "Bring your husband," and I remember having a little mental blip of "Why would I do that?" It turned out that I was the only triple-dipper, the only triple honoree. It was more than my husband could stand. And then, afterwards, over by the red-punch-and-cookies that the nuns supplied in endless quantities for all Catholic college occasions, people came up and hugged me, told me congratulations, told my stoic husband how proud he must be of me. My teenaged daughter could see him getting tenser and tenser and then start to twitch ("like a popcorn machine, Ma."). He could hardly wait long enough to get to the car, where he turned to me, still with the three parchment certificates in my hand, and sneered, "You just think you're such Hot Sh*t."

I remember thinking, "I do not have a normal marriage."

There's psychology behind all this—Google "abandonment-engulfment cycle" sometime, or "Narcissism." But it mainly amounts to hostage taking. You are punished for being a "Bad Hostage, Bad, Bad!"

My neighbor lady works two jobs to support a husband who will not hold down even one job if it gets in the way of his drinking. He punishes her for working that second job by doing things like letting her beloved little dog out loose, cooking up all the meat in the freezer and gobbling it down in her absence, and—just last week--getting her little car impounded when he went out driving at night, with no valid driver's license and his third OMVI, and he got a mandatory four days in County Jail. She did a very brave, un-Hostagy thing—she did not go down to Payday Loans and get the money to bail him out. She, instead, had four days without him. She told me, "It's so-o peaceful." Yes, Dear Heart, it is.

Janelle