My divorce was very public.
I had lived my life online since blogging came to the Berkman Center, my utterly beloved now-former workplace, in late 2002. A year later, I was one of the hosts of the first blogging user conference. And there, I met my husband. Whom many of you know, online or off.
He crashed the party I planned for the first night of the event, and then a priest introduced us. The world already knows this. Because he told them.
I didn’t mind having everyone in on most of our business, because I was happy. We were dorks, aglow in our mutual gooniness, and who cared who knew that we spent our first Valentine’s having him meet my family for the first time and then cooking lasagna in my awesome little apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. That when I went to see him in Toronto we would go sing on Sunday nights at the Rivoli. That everything was fun and light, and I’d never had a relationship like that before, and since that was great and my job was great and my life was super fun I was happy as a pig in shit and everyone could know.
Then we got married and I came to Canada, and things weren’t so great. Fun and light became empty and shallow. I grew lonely.
Five years later, I left.
I left him. I didn’t leave Toronto, or my new network of friends, or my job at U of T (at that point, anyway), or my master’s program. But our marriage wasn’t working, and he had, over time, become someone I didn’t like — a caricature of himself. And I was relegated to the role of sidekick for someone who needed to be in the spotlight all the time. I don’t need to be in the spotlight, but neither can I bear being constant second fiddle. Plus, I was studying post-secondary education at the time, and it was incredibly dissonant to be learning how to be inclusive and encourage a diverse population to learn and grow, and be in a relationship with someone who would sing Bloodhound Gang songs in front of clients. There were more things, too. So after some arguments, some discussion, and some really awkward mornings (never be without a bathrobe, my friends), I moved out.
Divorce is like this: you are apart, but you are still joined by everything that ever happened. You are over, but nothing is ever over.
There is paperwork, at first (and for some, for a very long time). There are forgotten items at the old apartment. There are longed-for shared items that you ask for later, and get or don’t get. There are practicalities.
There are feelings, forever. They aren’t necessarily feelings of love. I lost those a long time ago, though there is a residual sort of “hope he’s doing OK” thing. There can be resentment, jealousy, envy, numbness, all sorts of things.
In the beginning, though, for me, there was anger.
He caught the flu just as I was physically moving out. I wasn’t there to take care of him, to force him to stay in bed, to make him talk to his FAMILY FULL OF DOCTORS about his symptoms. He landed in intensive care with inflammation of his epiglottis that nearly killed him.
He blamed me. In public. On his goddamned blog. Nearly died of a broken heart, he said.
I’m sorry he was too lazy/negligent/sad or whatever it was to seek help. But I am not the one who did that. I am the one who left, yes. I am the one who found our marriage to be unsustainable. I am the one who ignored the plea to stay in the form of a pretty ring on our fifth wedding anniversary. I am the one who encouraged him through job changes, who kept going to Sunday dinners with his family even though they treated him like a second class citizen and me like some sort of space alien, who tried so hard to laugh when he was seriously inappropriate in public. Until I couldn’t anymore.
But he broke my heart first by not being the person I thought he was. And I didn’t blame him in public (until now). And I didn’t let myself go to the point at which I nearly died.
When he blamed me for the illness, I knew for certain that I’d made the right call to leave.
I did our paperwork as soon as I could (Ontario makes you wait a year after you end your relationship). I wanted it legal. I wanted to say, “I am no longer married to that person.” I am no longer tied to someone who had to blame me on the Internet for the flu. It went pretty smoothly. It wasn’t terribly expensive, since we had no children and no real estate and I didn’t want the car, and so no lawyers. He said some nasty things to me, and I said nasty things about him to friends I trusted not to pass them on, just to get them out of my head. There’s much more to it — my family had a hard time with the transition, I lost some friends and learned which others were a lot more wonderful than I had realized, I started a new relationship very quickly and I see now that it was a mistake. But I got through.
And now it’s been three years, and I would be happy for him, because he’s leaving Toronto to be with his new girlfriend.
But he did it again.
As is the wont of the blogger, he again linked back to the post about his near-death flu, saying he almost died of a broken heart.
I’m never going to be fine with that. I’m never going to think it’s remotely my fault. I asked him — screamed at him, in fact — to stop blogging about me when we were split but I hadn’t moved out yet, because he wrote a ridiculously insulting post that he eventually took down. And while technically he does not name me — “Wendy broke my heart and it almost killed me” doesn’t appear anywhere — everyone knows it’s me. Everyone knows he blames me. Well, now everyone knows I don’t blame myself. I’m not without culpability for the end of the marriage. There are things that even he didn’t make public that are wholly or in part my fault and/or because of me. But I didn’t make him sick, and I didn’t make him delay treatment.
But one last thing: I did go to the hospital to see him.
Snapshot of a divorce, it was. I gown up, because he is in isolation. I go into the room, seriously cowering because I am terrified to run into his sister or mother. I’m wrapped in sterile fabric and latex, perched on a chair next to his bed. He’s wrapped in blankets, with oxygen, scruffy facial hair, barely able to talk. I don’t touch him, don’t hold his hand. And I don’t know what to say. But I go. His mother had emailed me that morning, the first I’d heard of the illness, saying he had “asked her to let me know”. And my co-worker took a taxi over with me because I could barely think. So I’m sitting there, and I have nothing to say.
“I’m glad you’re getting better.”
I hope he’s kept doing so.
