Giving Up Something I Love After My Divorce
My heart aches for it.
After divorce, there are little details no one tells you about.
That includes how you’ll share digital pictures with your ex-husband. If Joseph gets hit by a bus, I won’t have any of the pictures he’s taken of the kids. Since I lost half of their little lives, I need to ensure they’re captured somewhere.
I set up a Google Drive with extra storage for us to dump our pictures. As images from my phone appear in large boxes on my computer monitor, an old picture catches my eye.
It’s a picture I took for a friend a few years ago. She gave me a set of fake nails, which I applied from my desk at work. I snapped a quick pic to send and thank her for my pretty hands. Not a picture worth saving.
Except my eye goes straight to my fingers. My ring finger. My wedding rings.
In a panic, I run upstairs to find my rings. I kept my jewelry hidden with the endless construction workers pouring through my house for months. After my heart attack when forgetting their hiding spot, I find the little mints tin with my rings.
I fish out my engagement ring and wedding band set. They’re yellow gold but I had them dipped in white gold a few years ago; the yellow tint is beginning to show through. I’ll need to take them to a jeweler to restore the original finish.
When the pandemic struck, I took my rings off. The excessive hand washing irritated the skin around the ring. This was long before I asked Joseph for a Parenting Marriage and our subsequent divorce. Being stuck indoors, no one saw me anyway; jewelry and makeup took a backseat.
I miss wearing it.
Looking at other women’s hands gives me a tinge of jealousy. A ring symbolizes being part of a team. I went from a team of four to a lone player. I disbanded (that’s a pretty sweet pun) the group and it feels isolating in a sea of other teams.
I love my ring. I’m lucky that Joseph wanted to pick the set out together (dude has horrible taste in jewelry). It’s been a part of my body for almost twenty years. My hand looks naked without those two rings.
A friend suggested I wear the ring on my right hand. It doesn’t fit. Also, it feels disingenuous like I can’t move on from my marriage. If there’s anything I don’t miss, it’s being married to Joseph. But there’s a part of me that feels it’s disrespectful to wear it on another hand.
We’re often told that women reset their diamonds into necklaces or other pieces of jewelry. Are those the same people who insist a bridesmaid’s dress is reusable? It’s not just the center diamond that has meaning for me. It’s the entire set. That’s like taking shoelaces off your favorite sneakers and putting them on another pair. Those laces may be cool but it was the entire shoe that you enjoyed wearing and looking at.
I considered selling the rings when I struggled to raise funds for the divorce. DeBeers created a fucked up industry where we assign emotional and financial value through their shady mob practices combined with powerful marketing. Reselling a diamond is worthless. In the end, I’m glad I didn’t part with them.
So here I sit, staring at my rings…that I can’t wear anymore. It’s a painful, haunting feeling. Like a ghost, the diamond and gold circles are present but untouchable. When I pick them up, my instinct is to put them on and cram them over my knuckle with my teeth like I used to do for almost two decades. But I stop myself and my heart sinks.
Divorce doesn’t just end a marriage. It ends everything you once knew, even things that were part of your physical being. I cry like I’m mourning the death of my best friend.
And so I put them back in the little tin I keep in my dresser like I’m bottling twenty years of memories into a small box. A part of my heart goes with it.
