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My Husband and I Are Together Again, But It’s Not the Same
Perfect closure is a myth after a marriage flies apart
Seven years ago, after a 43-year marriage, my husband had an affair and moved out to live with another woman. To say I was decimated underestimates the word.
The wreckage
I was like one of those old buildings or casinos where people gather to watch them explode and collapse, completely. The buildings implode and thousands of pieces fly apart.
My husband was a good guy (with that one exception). Our marriage seemed solid. I had nothing to worry about.
I don’t know my life
When life-altering events knock you down without warning, you question your prior perceptions about yourself and the life you thought you knew. Hot rage alternates with the feeling that you are flattened in the middle of a crowded street, certain you will never move again.
I sleepwalked through the first two years of separation. I wondered if people could tell that an empty shell had just passed them on the street. My lease might have been signed, but I felt homeless.
Alone
Eventually, I accommodated to being alone, a Herculean achievement since I was 15 when we got together. So many of life’s daily tasks were totally unfamiliar but demanded attention anyway.
Slowly I began to take small pleasures in unclogging the sink or changing the dryer filters. I replaced some of those pieces that flew off when he left me.
I began to “learn myself.” It wasn’t a pretty picture, but it was mine, nonetheless. I took pleasure in my essential sloppiness, which allowed me to bypass a knife and slide my fingers deep into the peanut butter jar or eat old spaghetti, naked, in the middle of the bed at two in the morning.
There were many days in which breakfast, lunch and dinner were all Fruit Loops, or Hostess Chocolate cupcakes.
All of the negotiations that come with living with another person evaporated, leaving me able to watch entire anthologies about Nazi Germany or Henry VIII without stopping.
