The Luxuries of Divorce
Everyone needs a cup of tea and a good lie down.
I am shifting in the aluminium tubed chair. The news is blasting from the flatscreen on the wall, failing to drown out the rotund man coughing up a lung across from me. The impatient hum of the crowd is building as we all wait for our white piece of paper to be selected.
‘Mrs Maggs?’ Comes a call from the far end of the room. Finally.
He ushers me into the room. Before he can say anything else I correct him, ‘I’m not Mrs anymore.’
‘You will have to update that with the girls at the front desk.’
Them and everyone else, I think.
‘I’m Dr Potter, what can I help you with?’
Shame is a wily creature. It pounces on me when I least expect it, disorientating and overwhelming, and then gone in a flash. The heat blooming inside my throat and chest the only trace that it was ever here. Shame is as illusive and potent as encountering a drop bear after guzzling high proof tequila.
It dawns on me that this will be the first time that I have had to say the words, all of the words. Everyone else has been there for the unraveling.
‘Um, well, apparently my husband of 12 years is gay.’ His expression is one I have come to recognise. ‘I know, it is a surprise. But it’s ok, I’ll be ok.’ My face begins to crumble. ‘…it turns out I might need a full STI screen.’
‘Right.’ As he turns back to the computer he elbow nudges the tissue box towards me. ‘Let me print up the request and you can take it around to pathology.’
I wonder what he will say about me in his notes? Woman scorned. Sorrowful wife. Fool.
I am sent to pathology with the form and a sympathetic nod, where a chirpy 20-something extracts my blood and my pride.
And just like that I was back to the floor-lying days. Only this time, I indulged in car sobbing at various locations around town – the headland, the garage, the public car park at work. More than once I called one of my team asking them to take the alarm off the emergency exit so that I didn’t have to walk through the arcade with a blotched and snotty face.
The months following a separation are shrouded in the same fog as the months after you have a child. Everything seems soft around the edges and it’s difficult to place happenings into any clear timeline. Except only this time, instead of nursing a newborn I was nursing a broken heart.
Despite this, there were a few moments that cut through the funk. Financial settlements and custody negotiations are the expected items on the divorce agenda, but what is not is how I felt the first time I went to pick up the kids from his place.
I walk up to the screen door. Inside is the furniture we picked together and I can hear the kids chatting in a distant room. I reach out to open the door before recoiling, remembering that this isn’t my house. I am completely unprepared for how painful this is. I have never felt more isolated as in this moment, standing outside his house, listening to my family carry on with their lives inside. I won’t be doing this again.
Other things I was not prepared for:
- Bumping into the kids at the local shopping centre. This completely sucks. Imagine not knowing where your children are at any given time? To this day I’m still apprehensive about random meetings, scoping out my surroundings with the eagle eye of a petty thief. It unsettles me for at least a day and I can only imagine how the kids must feel having a superficial ‘how is your day’ conversation with their own mother, in the same way you would an acquaintance who you run into at the grocery store.
- The way the kids smell when they come home to me. I am upset by this more than anything else I think. Silly really, but their different odour feels like a personal attack on my motherhood. In the early days I tried to influence him to use the same washing powder, and even considered writing it into our formal agreement, but I understood early on that I have no control over his choices. Instead, I opt for washing all of their clothes again, even though he has gone to the trouble of making sure everything is clean to make it easier on me.
- His generosity. There were a handful of times when I needed him, and even though he resented the hell out of me, he was there. Two to be exact. One wintery day Ed Sheeran and I were enjoying a tearful sing-along and I found myself dialing his number. Hey, where are you? Just around the corner. Can you come by? Why? Because I need you. He arrived five minutes later and sat on the bottom step with me while I cried for the duration of one or two songs. Another evening I found myself sitting next to him on his lounge just holding his hand and saying nothing. By then we had exhausted all of our words. I am grateful for his presence while I weaned myself off him. The path from the intimate to the unknown is fraught with danger, until all they are to you is someone you used to know.
I decided right at the beginning to be a grown-up and this meant that I had to wrangle this second wave of grief quick smart. I needed to find a way to swallow down the rejection, discomfort and shame, now that divorce was inevitable. There was no time to dilly dally.
And here we find ourselves at the gifts of divorce. The greatest of these being TIME. Not one person behaves rationally, deep-heartedly or gently when they are in a state of perpetual exhaustion.
Suddenly I found myself with four days a fortnight to myself. At first I felt guilty. I would reach for my phone to call or text the kids, but it became apparent that frequent contact from the other parent was more of a disruption than a comfort. However, it wasn’t long before I began to relish the space to just be me. Not a mother or a wife. Just Brooke. Liz Tuccillo writes in How to Be Single:
In the tiny moments where you are truly alone, not intertwined in a friendship or relationship and not in the company of others, that is what should be cherished. It is rare.
I felt like a princess waking from a cursed slumber, unfolding my soul one day at a time. I took up drinking herbal tea, I yoga’d, planted a veggie garden, and spent hours sitting on the beach brooding and writing. I read alot and I slept even more than that. So many hours horizontal after so many years of broken sleep. It felt incredible! There’s a scene in The Holiday where Kate Winslet’s character jumps onto the bed and starts flailing her arms and legs like she is having a joyful epileptic fit. This was me after my second and third sleep-ins in a row. A large percentage of problems can be solved after a good lie down, just ask a toddler.
I went to a silent retreat to heal some hurts and to learn how to be quiet in a space. To say this was life changing would be a gross understatement. To be quiet means to be comfortable with one’s own self and that was absolutely not me prior to my separation. But after the retreat, I craved silence and would switch off my phone for the odd weekend and just journal, read or go out into nature. I basically became a hippie sans floppy felt hat and floral jumpsuit.
I knew that I was becoming more myself than ever before and others began to notice the difference too. One afternoon my sister-in-law came by. We were sitting on the front steps when she turned to me in the orange glow of the setting sun and said, ‘We’ve all been waiting for you to come back to us. We didn’t recognise you for the longest time.’
I had been waiting for me too.
