Divorce
How Divorce Changes a Woman
I lost not only a person but years of my life
There will always be a before and after in my life.
The one where I created this beautiful family and the place where it broke apart. An untimely divide. A shift where I felt forced to cling to the new while I lost my grip on the old.
My before and after.
I couldn’t look back where pain lived.
Nor could I gaze forward where uncertainty called me.
I hear from people who tell me of their own beginning and end. That they didn’t lose just a person but that divorce devoured an entire chunk of their lives.
People experience endings.
They move, change jobs, and friendships falter, — ordinary change. These can still be unwanted but can also be building blocks. You don’t have to abandon yourself and decades of your life.
You take yourself with you.
But there are more catastrophic events that halt one period in our lives, not in the direction of a shift but a complete redirection.
Where you must disregard huge lumps of the life you thought you were creating.
Because it no longer exists.
The idealized version of my world would be left behind, exactly where life interrupted it.
Until now, every period in my life had traveled with me.
My childhood followed me to college and college to my first job. My first job to my second job and so on. A continuum that gained momentum with every original face, new face, new job, new location, and new home.
I was building me.
The good, the bad, the happy, the unhappy, and the unwanted.
But divorce was different.
It was a severe halt.
I could only take a part of myself with me.
It didn’t feel like the familiar ‘building’ of me but rather the ‘shedding’ of me.
Years of my life were now irrelevant.
I wasn’t gaining momentum I was losing it. Along with my home, my finances, a few friends, and a family who began as in-laws but eventually felt like mine.
None of these things could come with me.
Divorce isn’t the only before and after. There are others. A spouse lost too soon, a traumatic injury, or an illness. Or other things that signal a dreaded permanence.
I am no stranger to struggles. I lost my parents at a young age and I’ve experienced other difficulties. These things shaped and built me. But somehow the motion felt forward and my path an evolution.
Divorce was different.
This time, moving ahead required abandoning years of my past.
And being thrown out of the arms of what had once been my people, my safety, and my comfort zone. My life.
Nothing felt natural or comfortable about that.
This was not life-shifting.
It was redirecting.
And it changed me not necessarily in good ways.
At least temporarily. Until I let go. I mean really let go. Of the dream, of the fantasy, of the fairy tale, and of perfection.
And accepted my life needed that redirection.
Divorce wasn’t the real reason I wasn’t taking all of me with me.
In truth, I had abandoned a large part of that woman long before. In the time I spent looking for a marriage that had already vanished.
I only had a ‘part of me’ because that’s all that was left.
I lost a man and a portion of time.
But I found a woman who had waited years for my return.
A woman resurrected.
