Pinterest still sends me emails with subject lines such as ‘wedding hairstyle’ or ‘bridal bouquets,’ which is—quite frankly—satanic, and also calls into question the veracity of the supposed intelligence of these platforms. Perhaps it really is a malignant gesture—a further prod after proudly displaying me with newsfeeds of betrothals and births, and—quite paradoxically—some friends dancing half-naked with oversized pupils at some quasi-spiritual festival many continents away.
Maybe I should join them, pierce my septum, and get lost in some ayahuasca retreat in Peru. I’m not sure my children would appreciate that; besides, I already behaved like that in my early 20s—thankfully. In fact, I’ve done the opposite—all the boring stuff, like therapy, yoga, meditation, and occasionally sporadically yelling at people when I feel the desire. And clouds, too. Which is fair, I think.
Separation (actual divorce is still a year off!) at this age feels premature, an explosion of the proverbial picket fence, without the countdown; the seven-year itch, the mid-life crisis, the empty nest. These labelled stages of married life no longer apply. What was once mapped out—the Christmases, the holidays, the togetherness—is now a murky brown mass of nothingness.
Confessional poet Sylvia Plath described a fig tree where the branches of her life stretched out before her, and the figs represented the options.
‘I wanted each and every one of them,’ she wrote, ‘but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.’
I do not have figs. Instead, I feel as though I’m driving in the dark with headlights on low, the road appearing before me only metre by metre, except it is not a road I’m familiar with. It’s one I must keep squinting at because the turns and camber are quite unlike any road I’ve ever been on before, and I have terrible eyesight to begin with—an astigmatism, among other things—and shouldn’t be driving in the light, let alone the dark.
There are no directions for this road, no Google Maps, though there are tiny signposts left from people who have been before me. Fifty per cent of marriages fail, I hear frequently, though I still feel as if we are the first in our age group. “No one else’s mummy and daddy live apart,” said my eldest son once on the ride home from school, and my heart splintered.
You wait, son. Or perhaps, more ominously: In time.
There is grief, a lot of it—for the lost time with my children under the shared custody calendar, for the good times, the family times, us as a unit, for the future I had dreamed and spoke to when I said my vows. Vows I sweated over for months, wrote and rewrote, and painstakingly scrawled into a leather-bound notebook ordered from Etsy. The one I struggled to read from as my youngest son attempted to make me flash all the guests. ‘Plane,’ he said, pointing to the sky while also pulling down so hard on my strapless wedding dress I could feel the wind on my left areola.
So now what becomes of the young divorcée? Shall I now go for the hat trick and become thrice divorced, or adopt lots of cats? David the griffon wouldn’t like the cats, and I can’t be bothered with the paperwork involved in another, let alone two, marriages. Plus I quite like my house the way it is now, with the aircon set to 21 and my clothes and shoes dominating the entire wardrobe. David also sleeps in the bed, which he quite likes, and so do the boys, frequently.
‘Tis no room for anyone else in this cold, dark heart ‘a mine.
I also cannot be bothered with small talk to even fathom swiping left or right or up or down apart from doomscrolling in my dressing gown looking quite possibly the ugliest I have ever looked in my entire life. And this is the way I think it should be. For a while, anyway.
When the kids are not home it is eerily quiet. There are no fingerprints on the dining table/fridge/every transparent surface in the entire house, no drawers half open spouting with hurriedly changed decisions of Minecraft versus Rip Curl t-shirts, no late-night visitors clumping down the hallway and into my bed (they always whisper, ‘MUMMY ARE YOU AWAKE????’ —well, I wasn’t, sweetie, but I certainly am now!).
Now, after nearly a year of separation, I relish them in my bed. I also relish my time alone.
After sleepless nights and tears and moments where I thought I CANNOT FUCKING DO THIS, I realised that I can. I feel like swimming in the sea again in the middle of a storm, of sucking the flesh from an orange peel and sunbathing by a pool with my feet bobbing side to side like windscreen wipers while reading Atwood, of laughing at outtakes of Ricky Gervais in Extras until I cry and walking my dog slowly, mindfully, without a phone or watch or an eye for the time, through a reserve until the sky turns pink and tired.
With divorce, we must rip ourselves open to come apart, and part of the recovery is the slow piecing of ourselves back together.
We show up every therapy session to talk through our patterns adopted in childhood and how to let go of them. We learn to regulate our own big emotions as we help our children navigate theirs. We show up, to events and appointments and everything in-between, even if we don’t feel like it.
We show up on the page.
We show up for each run, each Pilates session, each time the tears come at random and force us to take a lay down at 2pm on a random Saturday in January. We show up, but most of all—the most, most of all—we also learn to let go.
Because whatever is meant for us will not pass us by.
hannah norton writes 