One Day--A Poem by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

ONE DAY
by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Love Song for the Newly Divorced


One day, you will awake from your covering
and that heart of yours will be totally mended,
and there will be no more burning within.
The owl, calling in the setting of the sun
and the deer path, all erased.
And there will be no more need for love
or lovers or fears of losing lovers
and there will be no more burning timbers
with which to light a new fire,
and there will be no more husbands or people
related to husbands, and there will be no more
tears or reason to shed your tears.
You will be as mended as the  bridge
the working crew has just reopened.
The thick air will be vanquished with the tide
and the river that was corrupted by lies
will be cleansed and totally free.
And the rooster will call in the setting sun
and the sun will beckon homeward,
hiding behind your one tree that was not felled.

A REALLY EMPTY NEST

I find myself alone with time on my hands. J has taken the kids on vacation. They'll be back next week. It struck me earlier today that this will be the shape of my life after everyone goes off to college, so I'd better get used to it, or nudge my life into a different shape if I don't like it.


I generally do like my solitude and independence, and I've never in my life been bored. I'm much more likely to be stressed and overextended than find myself drifting around with nothing to do. But since the divorce I've felt like I'm waiting for something to happen. Waiting for something to be different. Then I watch myself waiting, and watch myself watching.... and I get rather sick of it.


I'm starting to tell people. I ran into a colleague today--someone I like but don't know well. He asked how my summer has been and I could feel myself hedging. "It's been interesting," I told him. I wanted to tell him and I didn't want to. Of course he wanted to know what I meant, and asked a few more times until I spilled it. What did I think he would do? You can't just give a loaded answer like that and expect people to not press forward. But I can't seem to give the light and breezy answer, either. "Oh, my summer was great. Everything's fine. If you don't count my broken heart." (See, that always sneaks in, even if I don't really say it.) He was kind about it when I told him, and I think I saw tears welling in his eyes, but I'm not sure. I liked him better for those tears, and wondered about them, too. Maybe he knows what a broken heart is. Or maybe it was just sympathy, or knowing how much his own divorce might hurt.


Another friend told me she wanted to celebrate her divorce. Every marriage is different. I was glad to hear her story, too. It helped me realize that I can make my life into what I want it to be.


Here are my challenges: I hear myself telling friends that I need to figure out how to make my life work again. Maybe I need to begin to visualize a new life. What do I want it to look like? Maybe I should write a recipe.

• family (which is mostly my kids and my sister, now)
• meaningful work (I sort of have that)
• living within my means (working on that one)
• close friends with lots of visiting (I've been low on that lately. my fault for hunkering down.)
• social network
• regular rhythm
• good health
• fitness
• nature

I'll have to tinker with the portions of each ingredient. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

D-Day

I have been in limbo for so long that it began to feel normal. I've been waiting for the court date, waiting to feel human again, waiting for the heat wave to pass, waiting for the rain that's not even in the forecast yet. It's been almost two years since J moved out, a year and a half since he asked for this divorce. I vaguely understood that life would be somehow better on the other side of the court date, and now here I am.


How do I feel? Numb, still, but yes. Better. I feel not so stuck. I feel lonely and kind of old. Still waiting for the rain.


Getting divorced in a small county is probably different from doing it in a large county. The courtroom was empty--only ours was scheduled for that morning. I risked running into family and friends, which I didn't particularly want to do, at least until after it was over. I thought about wearing movie star sunglasses and a floppy hat to guard my face.


I had already planned to ask S to come with me for support. I had plenty of people I could have asked, but she is a relatively new friend, and had never met J. I felt like that was better. When I told another friend about the court date he suggested that I would need someone to be my eyes and ears, because I would not be able to remember anything. It turned out to be good advice.


It was eerily like another traumatic experience I had years ago, where all these professionals were just doing their job like they do it every day, making small talk about the weather, and I was just trying to keep myself from falling apart.


I put on a nice dress, a blue and white print cotton summer dress. It was kind of like a blue willow pattern, probably too festive for the occasion, but I wanted to look nice, and to feel cool, and crisp. I passed through the metal detector and stopped. I didn't know where to go, and I wasn't about to ask Harry, the sheriff's deputy who guards the door, where I had to go to get divorced. Usually, I do ask him. "How are you doing, Harry? Where do I go to pay my land tax?" Not today. I just stood for a moment considering the staircase up to the courtrooms, and then I saw my attorney's legs, then the rest of her, coming down the stairs. She told me everyone was up in the library, and S and I followed her up the heavy staircase.  J was seated with his lawyer, wearing a blue shirt and silk tie. He looked nice, but uncomfortable. He said hello, and I introduced him to S. We sat down, and that's when the nervous small talk began and I just sat there blinking. J didn't look at me anymore, and my lawyer gave me a stack of papers to sign. I didn't read anything, just started signing copies and copies. J's signature was already there. I usually take pride in my signature. These days I write longhand so seldom that when I do, it feels artistic. In the courthouse library I just scribbled my name so it was barely legible on all the copies of the dreaded document. I thought about how that messy signature would be in the courthouse for generations, how my grandkids might look it up someday if they want to study their genealogy, and that messy signature made me sad. But they might correctly read my sadness into that scribble.


Finally I finished signing and we were in the courtroom, rising for the judge. The judge was the same one who married my sister ten years ago, and that felt like a nice symmetry. I know the court reporter a little, and she waited until the end of the hearing to give me a small wave. I appreciated her waiting, and appreciated the wave. I waved back. Nobody asked me to testify, and when J did, he was crying a little. I appreciated that too. He is not a crier. In 25 years I would only need one hand to count the times I've seen him cry. It was a simple ceremony, and took about 20 minutes. The judge had some questions about the arrangements, and then rubber-stamped our split. We stood up again as he left the room.


We were done. It was over. Twenty five years of marriage. And now on to something else.


Some things have obviously changed, but some things will be the same. I had a few things in my car to give J. Just some things he left at the house last week. He said, "I'm really sorry." And I said, "I'm sorry too." I said, "J, we should be friends," and he said, "Of course." He drove me to my car so I could return his things.


We said more to each other after he drove me to my car, and I treasure those things. I asked for a hug and he gave me one. This has been a very amicable divorce. Even amiable if such a thing is possible. Does that make me feel better or worse? Better, I'm sure, in the long run. I wouldn't pull bitterness down on us or our family, though it might make it easier if I could hate him.


Afterwards I felt utterly drained, washed out and rinsed. All I could think to do was sleep, and I'd already been doing that for days.


Where do I go from here? I'll need to recover my strength and vitality. A broken heart sure takes a lot out of you. But I know it's better to have this finally behind me.

What Can I Control?

Anger was a big problem in my marriage--my anger, his anger, and our different and incompatible ways of dealing (or not dealing) with it. And guess what: even though the marriage is over, I still trip over this problem. Sometimes the wrinkle in the rug is my anger; sometimes it's someone else's. Here is a quote I found a while back. I keep returning to it to let the same lesson settle in. It's from Harriet Goldhor Lerner's The Dance of Anger. "Most of us want the impossible. We want to control not only our own decisions and choices but also the other person's reactions to them. We not only want to make a change; we want the other person to like the change that we make. We want to move ahead to a higher level of assertiveness and clarity and then receive praise and reinforcement from those very people who have chosen us for our own familiar ways" (Lerner, page 35 italics in original).

This quote intersects perfectly with what I hope I'm learning about control. That is, the only thing I can hope to control is my own behavior, my own attitude. I can't even always do that. Or maybe I could, if I were very careful and very clear. I certainly can't control what other people think or feel or do or write or gossip about any more than I can control the weather. If I tried I will probably exhaust myself and frustrate myself. And come to think of it, controlling my behavior and attitude is a big enough job for the rest of my life.

On one hand, I could get frustrated that I can't control what someone says or does or feels. Instead, I'm choosing to feel relief that I can stop trying.

A Hopeful Practice

I've been spending some time with a new friend. Not a romantic friend, but I've been enjoying his company quite a bit. I think I was supposed to meet him because among many things we have in common, he is also recently divorced after a long marriage. He is a few years ahead of me on this journey, and has some good advice and guidance. Talking with him helps me process. Just hearing his story and sharing mine is therapeutic. Both the similarities and the differences are helpful. He is actually at the point that I'd like to arrive at soon. He is happily dating someone. I'm envious, but I also appreciate his warm presence in my life. In a way, I feel like I'm using him for practice. I'm not dating him, but I do sit with him in coffee shops and share ideas, stories, hopes and fears. It's good practice to converse with an attractive guy in a public place. I try not to think too much about where I'm going to find a nice guy who enjoys my company, one I'm attracted to enough to climb out on this new limb. I haven't told him yet, that I'm practicing on him. :)


I have many questions for him about his journey, his process. And I hope that sharing mine will be helpful to him, too.

Clarity, Guidance, and Grace

I haven't written in awhile. I go along and things feel okay--pretty good in fact. But once in a while I hit a patch of panic, and I wonder if feeling okay means I'm really just in denial. Suddenly I see my future yawning before me without J or anyone else to love me or touch me ever again.


When J first left, about eighteen months ago my sister told me to pray for Clarity and Guidance. I'm not a real church-y type, and what I do is more meditation than prayer, but I added Grace to the list and wrote it on a heart shaped post it note. It kept falling off my computer monitor where I stuck it, and now it floats to the top of the mess on my desk periodically. Here it is now: Clarity, Guidance, Grace. And I think about those three gifts.

Clarity--I think in order to understand how I arrived here, I need to let the chaos of feelings settle. That takes time. I think of a muddy pool that's been stirred up by a storm. Only with stillness will the particles settle to the bottom and the water clarify. In some ways eighteen months seems like such a long time, but only recently have I begun to feel like I'm going to someday understand.


Guidance--I am just now learning where to look for guidance. I've come to ignore much well-meaning, but sometimes painful advice. I've found a few trusted sources, and stick with them for support, keeping most things to myself. Mostly I'm learning to trust my own instinct about what's helpful and healing.


Grace--the slipperiest one of all. Once in awhile I think I see it out of the corner of my eye. It is what comes to me when I'm running and first so wrapped up in my troubles that I forget to pay attention to my breathing. Only later I realized that the strict rhythm I have always tried to force myself to achieve--four paces breathing in, four paces breathing out--is exactly what causes the stitch in my side and the ragged pain in my chest. Only when I forget about the breathing because I'm attending to my troubles, do I run like I'm in a dream. Only when I suddenly realize I've gone twice as far as I meant to and still nothing hurts do I forget to attend to my troubles. It's circular, and now it's just slipped away from me again. Can anyone tell me what Grace means?

New Definitions--Gifts of the Marriage

We didn't have the traditional marriage--I didn't take my husband's name, didn't have a big blowout wedding--or even a small family gathering. We got married in a campground without any family present. We sort of eloped. Now I don't want the traditional divorce either.We're both trying very hard not to drag our kids through a bitter firestorm, and I think we're doing a dang fine job.


I keep looking for positives amidst the pain. Here's one golden nugget that a friend gave me. She said that her Taikwando instructor defines a successful marriage like this: A marriage is successful, regardless of duration, if each person has been enriched by the marriage. I can say without a doubt, that living with J for 25 years enriched my life in myriad ways. Here are a few:

• We raised beautiful children together.
• I went places I never would have gone on my own.
• I learned a little about sailing.
• I learned to love seafood.
• I gained confidence and finished my degree.
• I learned to think of myself as a professional.
• I learned to take care of the car.
• I got in the habit of flossing.
• I learned to run.

I feel confident that living with me enriched his life, too--but that's a list for his own blog.