It’s a strange thing, learning to be alone again.
For so many years, loneliness was a commodity to lust after. No matter how much love there is in a home, at the end of the day, four is a lot of kids. I have always equated being a mother of young children to receiving a back massage. Even if you desperately want a back massage, no matter how nice it feels at first, if someone touches you for 15 hours straight, your skin is going to be raw, and you’re going to need a break.
For so many years I dreamed of a break, drinking in tiny sips of freedom through late night trips to the grocery store, or stolen hours at the barn. Those brief moments of quiet fed my parched, raw soul.
And now?
Now I have a whole river of solitude, dark and unending, every other week. I stand at its silent banks and long for noise.
The end of a marriage is so very, very sad. That part was never a shock. The hurt feelings, the deep emotions, the feeling of loss…. none of that was a surprise.
What I wasn’t emotionally prepared for was how logical it was, or how very much it reminded me of playing the world’s most depressing game of Monopoly.
Trying to boil down 14 years of love, heartache, work, laughter and tears into a series of financial transactions… To be honest, it felt dirty.
I’ll trade you a share of the retirement for a share of equity in the home, and switching the kids on Mondays. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.
All I can say is that I’m glad it’s behind me.
The truth is, the divorce isn’t new. I’m nearly a year and a half into this not-married life. I keep running into people who haven’t heard about it, which I suppose is my fault. It’s a hard thing to discuss. Do you post on Facebook? Do you let the information drip out of you, leak by leak, one friend at a time? Do you elaborate everything, in hopes the rumor mill does the job for you?
Or do you just sit there, hurting, and silently wish it would all go away?
2020 was…well, 2020. I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to simultaneously homeschool a bunch of kids while struggling in the death throes of a marriage, while working the front lines of social worker through a global pandemic…. but you know, I honestly just can’t recommend it.
At all.
2020 culminated in the wonderful December fanfare of getting a 4 am phone call from my uncle, his voice heavy with tears, letting me know my dad had passed. It was completely and totally unexpected, and I spent the next month just sort of swimming through a blur of post-death paperwork. One bad year just kind of drifted into the next, which drifted into the separation, which drifted into long Covid, which drifted into one altering catastrophe after another.
At some point life just stopped being hard, and life-numbing blows became… well, just life. There’s something very humbling about being at the end of your rope, about having nothing left to give… and then just getting up and continuing to trudge along. It’s not depressing. Analyzing something as depressing requires energy, and energy is something that doesn’t exist when you’re that low. What it is, is bleak. And what do you do with bleak?
Well, I don’t know about you, but I hunkered down, quarantine style, and kept to myself. And then I just slowly lived out what may very well be the most meaningful Disney song ever to be written:
I won’t look too far ahead
It’s too much for me to take
But break it down to this next breath
This next step
This next choice is one that I can make
For the most part it was easy to do. I switched positions at work. I got Covid, and experienced months of low heart rate and exhaustion afterwards. I threw myself into making the change as easy as possible for the kids, if there even is such a thing. I refinanced the house into my name. I painted the walls. I redecorated the garage and turned it into a bedroom. I hired someone to put in walls down in the basement. I worked overtime to make ends meet.
My therapist is always telling me I should learn to feel my feelings, instead of eating or repressing them, but she never said anything about outworking them.
Busy hands are happy hands?
Life even conspired with me to make it easy to focus on the here and now. For a while there it felt like each week brought a fresh new horrifically life-altering event. They say that grief comes in waves, but the wires on my life kept getting crossed, so instead of waves of sadness I just got hit with waves of tragedies and mishaps.
At some point, it almost became funny. “Wait, wait, wait… you’re never gonna believe what else happened this week,” I would tell my therapist, giggling out the story in shell-shocked laughter. “The extra photos they needed on my mammogram turned out clear, so that’s nice, but the dog’s cancer has spread, and also the lawn mower broke again. My amazing church helped me with my broken car, but now the check engine light is on, right before I start another new position at work that requires two hours of driving a day…. and remember how last week literally every single aspect of my life simultaneously caught fire? Well, the latest catastrophe has a new twist! But before I get into all that, can I just brag? I rearranged the entire living room and repainted the entire downstairs according to some Feng Shui video I saw on Tiktok. Dude, you should see it. It’s legit!”
BUSY HANDS ARE HAPPY HANDS, ALRIGHT?
Eventually life settled down, or at least stopped crashing on me in waves, and I began trying to figure out who the heck I was. That sounds cliche, but after so many years of putting everything else on hold, I had absolutely no idea what to do with myself for half the month.
Besides, it turns out that who I was in the past is not who I am today, so it didn’t quite work. That’s the problem with growth. You don’t fit into your old, discarded habits, and it leaves you too exhausted to try anything else.
Writing was the only thing that still felt good, but I found that I couldn’t. The words would blur and hammer around inside me, so I would open the laptop and stare at the blank screen. After a bit I would quietly close the lid on the laptop, page still blank.
There are some things that are just too raw for words, especially if your kids have learned how to Google your name and regularly snoop on you.
On the weeks the kids were with me, it felt almost like it always did. School, then work, then dinner, then homework, then showers, then bed. No, you can’t play video games on the weekdays. Yes, you need to brush your teeth. Break up a squabble. Cuddle on the couch. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat.
It’s every other week that’s the problem.
At first it was easy, with the Covid exhaustion and the rush of getting the house together, and catching up on housework. Eventually though, I ran out of things to catch up on. It’s mind boggling how tidy a house stays when there is only your stuff to pick up.
Busy. Hands. Are. Happy. Hands.
I started reading up on DnD. I dragged out my old guitar. I did all of my laundry, and put it all away. I took loads of things to Goodwill. I watched a lot of SG1. I tried to teach myself to sleep in the middle of the bed, instead of just the corner edge. I let myself go back to my natural rhythm of early bedtimes and pre-dawn risings. I let the backyard grass grow wild, so the horses could graze by the kitchen. I took long, long walks.
I developed insomnia and crept around the house, listening to the way the walls echoed and the floorboards creaked under my feet. You wouldn’t think the presence of other people sleeping could have a weight, but it does. Without them the house felt eerie, like it could float away at any second.
It was easiest just to put my head down,and keep trudging through. Summer faded into fall, fall faded into winter, winter faded into… well, less wintery winter? The Pacific Northwest decided to skip this last spring. Winter Part Two faded into summer, or so they said. It was a bit hard to tell.
Fourth of July was always more of the Bean’s holiday than mine, so it was an easy one to give up… in theory.
The reality of it was a lot rougher than I imagined. I volunteered to work On Call at my job. Busy hands are happy hands, after all? I called my kids and enthused with them about their plans. I locked up the horses to keep them from panicking, as there’s a neighbor nearby who occasionally likes to set off tannerite.
Eventually there was nothing more to be done inside the house. Have I mentioned how mind boggling it is how clean a house can stay without kids? I thought about accepting my friend’s offer to join their family’s celebration, but something about borrowed family seemed worse than nobody at all. The on call phone refused to ring. Eventually the silence of the home got to me, so I crept out into the backyard.
The thing with being alone is that silence can be almost louder than noise. After so many years of shrieking laughter and sibling squabbles, the dull roar of silence sinks into my bones, overwhelming me with its weight.
There’s a large swing under the giant maple tree in my backyard, so I wrapped myself up into a blanket and climbed on it, pulling the rope to set it swinging. I wrapped myself up in a blanket to watch the crescent moon while I listened to the sound of fireworks all around me. That’s one of my favorite things about living in the country – the sounds float over the hillsides, and if you are still enough, you can hear them all. Muted booms from distant city-led fireworks, nearby scratchy explosions from someone’s driveway., someone’s loud laughter… if you close your eyes, it can sound almost like a song.
The neighbors beyond the big hay field were setting off those rat-a-tat-tat fireworks, punctuated by the sound of a too-tired child starting to cry. Their dog was barking, either out of excitement or because he was locked away. I’m not quite fluent in my Twilight Bark anymore, but whatever he was saying, he was definitely repeating himself. Three sharp barks, a pause, and then four slower barks. Three sharp barks, then four. He didn’t sound upset, just insistent.
In the distance, the muted booms of distant cities and their professional fireworks, all competing.
Up the hill, the neighbors were gathered together and using the long stretch of pavement for what I think must be an annual party. They were setting off something shrill, and possibly large. It whistled up into the air, ending in a loud crack. I heard a woman’s “oooh” of appreciation float over on the evening air.
All around me, the clamor of a rural Fourth of July pounded, and screeched, and shrilled through the air.
I closed my eyes, and slept.
