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Guest Posts, Divorce, memories

Blossom

March 6, 2022
blossom

The morning after my father announced he and Mom were getting divorced, he made everyone strawberry pancakes for breakfast because it was the sweetest apology he could muster. Afterward, my brother Brian and I went out back and hit golf balls into the woods. One swing and the balls lifted into the trees, gone. Over the summer, Brian and I caddied at a swank country club and scrounged up almost a bucket’s worth of balls. Working them down to a handful, I took a sloppy hack and my ball caromed off the chicken shack and into the mixed elms and birches. I frowned; even at 10-years-old, the metaphor of a jettisoned ball and my father’s imminent departure was not lost on me.

At that point in our lives, we didn’t have much to remedy our parents’ fracture: there was no extended family in the area, we didn’t belong to afterschool clubs or organizations, and we certainly didn’t attend church: one of the reasons we’d moved downstate, besides a job opportunity for my dad, was to escape our Pentecostal church. They were straight up Old Testament fanboys who believed in demonic possession and speaking in tongues. During service, the pastor would step over the bodies of those “overcome” by the spirit of the Lord. They’d be lying on the floor, eyes closed and blissed out, and he’d carry on with his sermon about how to be a good Christian in an ungrateful world. Then he’d flip his mike cord and high step over the pronounced girth of some lady snoozing it off near the podium. “Praise Jesus”, he’d say, and continue on with his motivational speech as if walking over the prone bodies of zonked adults was all perfectly normal.

But I digress.

It would be another month before my dad was fully moved out, but Brian and I found solace in the backyard, the small woods behind it. So did my younger brother, Josh. My little sister Liz was an afterthought, and she mostly stayed inside, not because she wanted to but because we three ignored her. Brothers are cruel like that. The backyard became our go-to, our refuge in a time of complete uncertainty. Out back, we were the ones in charge.

In the center of the yard was an overgrown grape vine. We ate some of the fruit but were grossed out by their abundance of seeds. So instead, we whipped them at each other in impromptu battles, splotching our shirts like blood.

Once, the two boys across the street that used to pummel Brian and me for sport came over and the four of us pretended to make wine, crushing the grapes and filling an empty soda bottle with the run-off. We drank it and acted like what we thought drunk people acted like, which was to giggle and walk in circles. We’d later learn at various neighborhood blowouts that drunk people mostly complained loudly about each other, air guitared to Iron Maiden, and threw up in the rhododendrons. But that was still a few years away. Sensibly, my mom decided to make jam with the grapes and that was probably the smartest thing anyone did with them.

Alone after school, we rummaged through the basement to find curious odds and ends, stuff both there when we moved in and items our father hadn’t taken with him: spooky chemicals in ancient brown bottles lined the shelves in one corner, along with crooked boxes filled with European history books, maps, old clothes, and sword and sorcery paperbacks. We also discovered our dad’s record collection. He used to be a disc jockey, and we admired the colorful copies of folk and rock artists none of us had heard of: The Who, Bob Dylan, The Kingston Trio. One box held these odd, extra thick albums with no covers at all. The artists were old blues and jazz musicians, and today, I’m sure these records would be worth the price of tuition at an elite college. We were duly unimpressed. And since they were made by a bunch of guys who were probably dead anyway, we figured the records would be perfect for a lively discus competition.

At first, we hucked the albums toward the trees, but they didn’t fly straight and kept smashing sideways into the ground. So we threw them straight up in the air and ran away as they hurtled back towards us. We agreed to add a marksman category, and after one of us tossed an album, another took aim with a pellet gun. Our aim wasn’t half bad. And we took safety very seriously, pointing the gun away from most windows and sometimes each other.

The dimensions of the backyard were just right for Wiffle ball and we declared it our own Fenway Park. Brian and I grew up watching the Red Sox on Channel 38 with our parents. I watched Carlton Fisk wave the ball fair in the ‘75 Series and suffered the humiliation of Bucky-Bleeping-Dent in ‘78. In the backyard, I was Yaz, and the chicken shack served as a kind of Green Monster. Even the grape vine was in play, like the outfield ivy at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Nothing was better than smacking the ball into the grapes as one of us frantically tried to dig it out, wild eyed and cursing. Many a single was stretched into a double courtesy of that vine.

We decided to best way to utilize the woods was by setting up animal snares we read about in one of the books we hauled out of the basement. We bent the necks of saplings down and used carrots as bait. We’d check the snares faithfully each day, but to our disappointment, no rabbits. Not even an unlucky squirrel.

On my birthday, my friend Jamie and I blew up a can of Renuzit air freshener in a makeshift campfire in the woods. We had hoped for fireworks and got it: the can rocketing up about 20 feet. Afterward, Jamie and I put the campfire out with sand and went over to his house to shoot hoops. I was excited as my dad was going to be home that night to help me celebrate turning 11.

Later, as I made my way back home, I kept hearing sirens and noticed a small cloud of smoke hovering over my road, and then over the woods. The closer I got, the more I became filled with an increasing sense of doom.

I stood around with my brothers and sister in the backyard as a couple of firemen zipped this way and that. They came in through the backside of the woods and quickly contained the blaze. My father came right up to Brian and me, and for the first time in my life he looked scared.

“Do you boys know anything about this?” A fireman clad in yellow stood behind my dad, waiting.

Brian and I looked at each other and did the right thing: we lied.

“What? No. No way. I was over Jamie’s house,” I said. Which was technically true.

Brian denied culpability as well, even though he knew what Jamie and I were up to.

“Well, this is certainly one hell of a set of birthday candles,” my dad said, and walked back to the fireman, arms raised.

I should have felt guilty for lying, but I didn’t. Why ruin a perfectly good birthday with the enormity of truth? Truth, I thought, only spoke of painful things: that our dad was gone, that I could daily see the struggle of being a single parent in my mother’s eyes, that our family had very little money and even less reasons to be happy. Birthdays were supposed to be a once-a-year moratorium on all of that. I couldn’t sacrifice my brief window to joy.

Somehow, we all got through that mess. And as fall stretched to winter, and winter to spring, it became increasingly apparent that dad was never coming back, that this really was permanent. But we all did something extraordinary: we persevered.

As we got older, the yard morphed into a different kind of haven; our mother slowly cultivated it into a dazzling flower garden. She tore out the grape vine and almost every corner of the yard now billows with (nonlethal) explosions of pink, purple, white, and red. There is a small koi pond. Japanese maples. The chicken shack has been removed in favor of French lilac. Butterflies are the new rulers of this domain.

In fact, when her grown-up sons and daughter now come to visit, she takes them on tours to show them what she has added, points out what is thriving or what still remains stubborn to rise. I wonder at it all. And am amazed. Because I remember a time, however misguided, when the yard was overrun by those seeking their own path to blossom.

Christopher Locke was born in New Hampshire and received his MFA from Goddard College. His essays can be found in The Sun, The Rumpus, JMWW, Parents, Slice, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. His memoir “Without Saints” (Black Lawrence Press) and poetry collection “Music For Ghosts” (NYQ Books) are both due in 2022. Chris lives and writes in the Adirondacks. Chris can be found online here.

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Guest Posts, Divorce, pandemic

Covid-19 and My Ultra-Orthodox Children

April 14, 2021
children

by Beatrice Weber

I am a mother of ten Hasidic children, and I couldn’t protect many of them from the virus. The community they live in has flouted restrictions—and while I know my children are at risk, my hands are tied.

In mid-March 2020, my 7-year-old son, my youngest child, and one of three who lives with me told me he knows why this virus happened. “Oh?” I asked. I was in bed, sleep teasing me, hoping he’d get tired, too, and go to his room. “My teacher told me it is because we don’t say enough blessings. He said that if we say 100 blessings a day it will go away.”

My son is innocent. Like kids his age, he is impressionable. He was one and half years old when I left my abusive marriage, six years ago with four of my ten children. He attends a yeshiva and visits his father, a rabbi in Monsey, New York, every second weekend for Shabbos. I am fiercely protective of him, but when he is not with me, I cannot control what he is taught or what happens to him.

Sleep now a distant memory, I caressed his face and assured him that the virus is not his fault and cannot be undone with blessings. “We need to be careful, and we will be okay.”

But the next day, I was not so sure we would be okay. On my way to work, I see a message that had been making its rounds on WhatsApp groups. In pink letters, adorned with lilac flowers and green leaves, the virtual flyer, titled “Unique Protection,” stated that rabbis encourage women to upgrade their head covering from wigs to kerchiefs (more pious), and in this merit, we will be saved.

I closed my phone and continued walking. I spotted a Yiddish notice on a lamppost stating that the contagion is a punishment for schmoozing during prayers. We must be quiet, and this disease will go away. Quiet, I thought—the one thing I fail miserably at.

For many years, I had prayed daily, fervently. “God, please help me to become a ‘Kosher woman who does the will of her husband,’” I would plead, quoting the words of the Talmud. Please help me to do this. I want to be a good wife to my husband. I prayed and trusted that things would get better in my marriage. But it did not.

I was expected to be a meek, obedient wife. When I would try to voice an opinion, my husband would shut me down and get the children to mock me, until, finally, I broke.

It was seven years ago on Passover eve, before the first Seder when I left. My parents, older children, and the rabbis vehemently opposed me leaving. When my parents found out, they worked with the rabbis to try and take away my younger children. The six I left behind were lost and confused. They were angry at me for abandoning them. They couldn’t fathom the idea that I would leave. I was their mother who had always been there for them. And I left with a heavy heart, the most excruciating decisions I ever made.

I eventually received a Jewish Get from the rabbis and custody and a divorce in family court, but the feelings of betrayal never left me. Betrayal by my own family and my own God.

I felt lost and bereft, and I searched for another way to live.

Before Passover last year, a month into quarantine, my son pled with me to let him go to his father for the Seders. “I want to be there with my nephews,” he said. I assured my son that his nephews won’t be at his father’s Seder, since it is not safe to travel now. But I was not convinced of my own words. I had heard the rumors and seen the flouting of coronavirus restrictions. I knew that his father would risk infection—for himself and his children—to host a proper Seder with our grandchildren from New Jersey, against all guidelines. And I was not wrong – he did indeed invite our  children and grandchildren and

Quarantined in my house, I lead a Seder with three of my children, joyfully singing the traditional songs and searching for the hidden matzoh, the afikomen. The sirens outside wailed, reminding me of the predicament we were in. The deaths in my former community mounted, peaking over Passover.

My friend who runs a nonprofit supporting young orphans in the community told me of the huge increase in requests for services. Families lost grandparents and parents, and communities lost rabbis, leaders, and congregants.

This became very real to me. The virus had infiltrated the community. And while I was hopeful that my children’s father and their community would take it seriously because the sheer numbers of infected and the dead pointed to a danger that required action, I was also skeptical because I knew what I would have done a decade ago. Instead of following the guidelines, I would have encouraged my sons to gather and study and covered for the men’s prayer gatherings. My belief that God would save us was so strong, I may have been compelled to trade my wig for a kerchief.

My skepticism was well-founded. By September, the second wave had reached the Haredi Jewish community in Brooklyn. My son’s yeshiva opened its doors while ostensibly following the rules that had been put in place to prevent the spread of the virus. One day I found myself in front of the dark grey building. My son’s teacher had called to ask me to pick him up. He had come down with a strep throat the week before, and he was still not feeling well.

I hesitated before entering the building. Though I am a mother of six boys, I have rarely ventured into the all-boys’ yeshiva building. It was considered immodest and unacceptable for a woman to walk the hallways—and besides, I never had a reason to.

There is another reason I hesitated: I no longer follow the strict dress code of my former community. On that day, I wore my curly bob and black slacks instead of the black mid-thigh skirt and beige tights expected of me. I had never gone near the yeshiva without my hair covered and a skirt over my knees, but I had no time to go home and change. My son wasn’t feeling well, and I was going to pick him up. He needed me.

I peered into the classroom over the teacher’s head and saw the children gathered, with no sign of any social distancing or facial covering.

I suspected that the guidelines were not being followed but seeing this blatant violation of the rules horrified me. What was I supposed to do now with my son? He was required to attend yeshiva, whether it felt safe to me or not. If I chose to keep him home, my ex-husband would use it as leverage and surely come after me for custody. I was torn between doing what was expected of me by my ex-husband and the community my son still belonged to or following my maternal instincts.

I chose the latter, filing complaints with the city and state health departments. I pulled my son from yeshiva, knowing I risked a potential battle with my ex who might take me to family court, a serendipitous reason why he should be granted custody of my son.

Weeks later, a judge in family court ordered my son to return to school, disregarding the flagrant violations.  I comply, worried for my son’s health but also fearful of losing custody.

But for now, for then, I am still in charge. I do what I can protect my younger children, but what about my older ones. Who will protect them?

I don’t hear much from them. Since I left the marriage six years ago, there has been limited communication and it has tragically stripped me of any real relationship with them. They are angry that I left. I ruined their lives, they say. They went from being the children of highly respected parents to the children of divorce, shamed in the community. No one will want to marry them. They are damaged goods.

I don’t blame them; my heart bleeds but I could no longer sacrifice myself and my sanity.

Should I have stayed?

I have seven grandchildren whom I haven’t seen in years. I yearn to see and hold them. My children, too. I ache to be part of their lives and know how they are faring in these challenging times. But I am scared to call.

Will my daughter hang up on me like she did when I last called?

Will my son yell at me? I am too fearful, too vulnerable— so I sit at home and worry.

I worry that my children and grandchildren may not be okay. I am angry at a system that encourages them to ignore public health guidelines and rules meant to protect them. But I also envy them. I envy their faith and the unshakable belief that God will protect them.

But who will protect the rest of us?

Beatrice Weber is an Interspirtual Minister, writer, speaker, and coach. She empowers people who have experienced religious, familial, or community trauma connect with their own inner voice and create empowered and joyful lives. She was born and raised in the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Community and was married off to a Rabbi when she was 18, never having graduated High School. After 22 years of marriage and 10 children, she left the marriage with her four youngest children, despite severe opposition from her family and the community.

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Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress “being good” in order to reclaim your own life.

Pick up a copy at Bookshop.org or Amazon.

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Guest Posts, Divorce

She Cannot Make It Out

September 22, 2020
water

By Stina French

He isn’t grieving but she imagines him grieving. Maybe he’s grieving. She dreams he is talking to others about her as if she is dead, though they are only divorcing. He says she loved the moon. She loved the moon so much she told our daughter her first word was moon. Though it maybe wasn’t. It made for a good story, and she loved a good story. A lot could be spared with one good story. He says she loved to swim. She loved to swim so much everyone said she was a mermaid. She loved the moon and she loved to swim so much that sometimes she would swim in the ocean at night. He says I was never so brave. He says she cried and cried. Sometimes she cried so much I thought the water she swam in was her tears. She knows he is no poet and would not speak this way.  But maybe in her dreams he is a poet. Maybe he would speak this way if she were dead.

In the dream, she is swimming in a vast sea cave. Other women swim with her. Some girls, some grown.  One watches her jealously or with desire. One doesn’t watch her at all, a small girl. Not her daughter but someone else’s daughter. Someone else’s mother, maybe one day. Surely, she will cry waters of her own making. Some breaststroke in straight lines, some backstroke in circles. This is what they know to do–to cut the water with their bodies. To make the water with their bodies.

She cuts the water with her body as if she could swim a story across and wide.  A story she could live inside. He is on the shore saying I wish I knew what to do. I wish I knew how to help her stop crying. And she is shrinking now hearing these things. She would rather hear him talk about her love for the moon again. The way she is cutting the water with her body. He is holding their daughter. Their daughter she made herself with her body.

The daughter is laughing. He has given the daughter this, and she has given the daughter story. Story does not come without cost. Laughter is free and easy, as he is free and easy. She wonders why she wants him so badly to sink. And though he could not keep her afloat, he wants her there on the surface. He would not begrudge her a view of the moon, from any angle. He wants her alive and happy even if it means swimming alone without him under the moon at night. He does not understand the ocean under the moon at night because the things in the water at a certain depth scare him. He is on the shore saying more things about her as if she is dead, but it is so far now and she cannot make it out.

Now, there is only the story of water. It sloshes, dividing and rejoining. When she left him, maybe she was just parting the water. Maybe all these bodies in the water are parts of herself dividing and rejoining. Water fingers her hair, tugging tendrils into rays, a corona wet and waving. A crown for the Queen of the Unconstituted, Beloved Dissolved. Fluid surrender, shapes spells the moon could cipher if it were watching. Her pulse beats blood in ear canals, her red tide internal. She dreams she is not dead, only swimming. Only swimming beyond bereft, beyond the leaving of a life.

Stina French writes mystery, magic-realist memoir, flash fiction, and poetry. She has featured in many venues in Denver and Boulder, Co., and her work has appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Punch Drunk Press, and on the podcast Witchcraftsy. She is scratching at the window of her body, writing poems like passwords to get back in. To get forgived. To get at something like the truth. To get it to go down easy, or at all. She wears welts from the Bible Belt, her mother’s eyes in the red fall. She’s gone, hypergraphic. Writes on mirrors, car windows, shower walls. Buy her a drink or an expo marker. She’s shopping her manuscript, Also Arc, Also Offering, a Southern-queerdo memoir in flash non-fiction and verse.

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Guest Posts, Divorce

From the Rock to the Pines

August 12, 2020
pines

By Destiny Irons

The frigid wind assaulted and fumbled me, rolling my shirt up over my pale stomach and pulling the crotch of my yoga pants down mid-thigh. I looked up at my chalked, bleeding fingertips digging into impossibly minute protrusions, and down at my toes crimping into barely perceptible fissures. My legs shivered and bounced from adrenaline. The sunny granite warmed my cheek as I flattened my torso and face against it. I took a deep breath in, letting it out slowly, repeating my mantra for the past year in my head: You’re okay. You’ve got this. Just keep moving. The bouncing slowed and stopped.

They say that divorce is like death, but from my experience, it’s really like a violent murder, with everyone trying to figure out whodunit. I’ve been playing a very old American murder ballad, “In the Pines,” over and over again, obsessing over its history, metaphor and haunting melody because the theme so strongly parallels my life over the past year.

In the song, depending on which artist covers it (pretty much everyone from Dolly Parton to Nirvana) the victim changes: the husband/father or the woman. In every version, the woman is always guilty and ashamed, even if she was the one murdered. It’s always her fault, somehow. She runs away to hide in the pines. Like the woman in the song, I had been metaphorically hiding for the past year in what can only be described as a dark, freezing pine forest. Being fully exposed on a sunlit, smooth rock, sixty feet in the air was essentially my coming out party.

In the song, the pines are interpreted in “The Haunting Power of ‘In The Pines’”  on Slate.com, as a “cold, dark wilderness” where “a person has left to be by themselves to face what they are and what they have done.” The chorus goes:

In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun never shines
I shiver when the cold winds blow

My journey through my divorce began in victimhood. A woman at a cocktail party, in a similar place, shared her story with me. She kept repeating the phrase “I had no choice,” like a chorus, and I kept murmuring back to her, “of course you didn’t,” like a refrain. Just like me, she “killed” her marriage. She felt compelled to confess to everyone who would listen, justifying herself in order to seek absolution in the court of public opinion. What I see now is that we were both ashamed, wanting to paint ourselves as victims, so we didn’t have to take responsibility for our choices. We didn’t want to kill our marriage, we told everyone who would listen. It was self-defense.

When I listen to Loretta Lynn’s “In the Pines,” it’s like an anthem of victimhood—the abused woman who still loves her man. In this song, the husband murders the wife and her spirit, betrayed and yearning, wanders the cold forest. She sings:

My love, my love
What have I done to make you treat me so? 

You’ve caused me to weep,
You’ve caused me to mourn
You caused me to lose my home.

Victims are just like ghosts—stuck between worlds. They can’t move on until they get some sort of closure. If I stayed that way, I would have eternally haunted those cold pines without resolution, never moving on or learning how to live my best life. I quickly got tired of hearing myself whine, at cocktail parties and everywhere else. It dawned on me that all along I had choices, because everyone does. I could’ve chosen to stay, but I chose to leave. It was my choice.

On the rock, I knew I had to keep going. I couldn’t hang suspended forever. I looked at my feet and calculated my next move. My right foot needed to get into a crevice 12-15 inches above my waist…I slipped, scraping my left elbow and leaving a trail of blood as I fought to hold on. Fuck! I screamed, irrationally angry at the rock. I wanted to destroy it before it destroyed me.

All of my anger at myself for playing the victim I turned right back onto my ex. I was angry and defensive. Whenever someone asked me to explain whodunit, (Gosh…What happened?!”) I would brazenly stare them down and say, “I chose to end it.” I made him the victim. A lot of people I loved turned against me, cutting me with their words, or worse, rejection. I took it. It wounded me deeply, but I didn’t show it. I bled internally. I was ashamed of myself for what I did to him. I completely isolated from anyone and everything. I didn’t need anyone.

This echoes The Louvin Brothers’ version of the song, where the husband-murder victim accuses the wife-murderer. In that one, they sing about how the husband gets hit by a train. They find his severed head in the engineer car, “behind the wheel,” but they never find his body. The wife, it’s implied, was the instrument of the husband’s gruesome death. She runs away to the pines in shame. He sings from the grave:

Little girl, little girl
What have I done that’s made you treat me so?

You caused me to weep
You caused me to mourn
You’ve caused me to leave my home

On the rock, as I slipped and started to panic, I remembered my belayer. I wasn’t alone. I had ninety pounds of fierceness below me, my tiny-yet-mighty-attorney-friend hanging onto my life by a very thin rope.

“You got this!” She yelled.

She caught me, taking up the slack and leaning back to brake. I swung over to a ledge and stood on it, looking up to where I had been, seeing the bloody marks left on the surface of the rock.

My friends and family called me out of the pines. They were my tether back to myself. I sought support from groups of people with similar experiences, therapy, yoga. Gradually, I began to arrive at an acceptance phase. The marriage had been long dead before my decision. I didn’t kill it, nor did he. All I did was call the time of death.

Like the woman in Nirvana’s cover of “In the Pines,” re-titled: “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” I had been hiding in shame, but needed love and support to get out. This is my favorite version of this song, because the singer, Kurt Cobain, has so much kindness for the woman. He’s asking her where she’s been and what she’s going to do, and answers in her own voice, full of pain. The chorus:

My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me, where did you sleep last night?

In the pines, in the pines,
where the sun don’t ever shine.
I would shiver the whole night through. 

My girl, my girl where will you go?

I’m going where the cold wind blows.
I would shiver the whole night through.

Cobain is having a conversation with the woman, whom he lovingly calls “my girl.” He gently coaxes her to “tell me” the truth about where she’s been and where she’s going. None of the verses focus on the murder, only her shame and getting her to talk about it. If you watch the YouTube unplugged performance, there’s a moment of pure empathy in the song when Cobain sharply inhales and looks up, eyes open, full of hurt. Then he screams out the last mournful note.

I needed the people I loved to empathize with me, listen to me, and help me. I knew next to nothing about climbing. Even after losing those five feet and the skin on my elbow, I wouldn’t give up.

“Beta!” I shouted down to my belayer. This is how climbers ask for advice. A good belayer will never tell the climber where to put their hands or feet unless the she asks. A climber has to learn from her mistakes, or she’ll never get stronger or more experienced. That being said, no climber climbs alone.

“Look at your left knee,” she shouted. “Put your left foot in the hold where your knee is and push. Then you can reach up to that crack with your right hand.”

“Where? I don’t see it!” I yelled.

“It’s because you’re too close. Trust me!” She answered.

I trusted her. It was like magic. Somehow, my left foot found a solution that I couldn’t even see. I pushed and reached out, wedging my fingers into the fissure. From then on, I didn’t need any more beta. This new route was so much clearer than what I had been trying to do on my own.

I quickly made it to the top, thrilled and out of breath. When I got there, I yanked my pants up and my shirt down, then turned around and enjoyed the view. My belayer cheered, her voice going hoarse from whooping. No pines, just wide-open expanses bathed in orange desert sunlight as far as I could see. Smiling widely, I posed for a picture.

Destiny Irons is a digital content editor for a kick-ass, female-owned company whose entire goal is to save people money, called The Krazy Coupon Lady. She is also attending graduate school at Chapman University for an MFA in Creative Writing. Destiny lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking, backpacking and climbing with an amazing, strong, funny group of women who are her tribe. She has two teenagers, Jude and Ruby, and a good dog named Blackjack. Destiny chooses to be happy and grateful every single day.

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Divorce, Family, Guest Posts, motherhood

Coda

October 20, 2019
affair

By Erin Branning

It was the day after Mother’s Day that Myles, my then twelve-year-old son, started questioning me. The night before, he’d gone to dinner with my husband alone – I forget now why I agreed to this on Mother’s Day – and the next afternoon on the drive home from school the questions began. “Mom, tell me what really happened, tell me the real reason you and Dad are getting divorced.”

“We told you,” I answered, praying to god the questions would stop, reciting the lines that the therapist had given us.

“The adjustment of your dad being back in Chicago after working in New York has been difficult.”

“We’ve tried very hard to work things out, but we can’t.”

“We love you and we promise to make this as painless for you as possible.”

My husband and I had agreed there was no reason for our children to know the specific conditions of the dissolution of our marriage. They’d simply know that things had been bad and now they were going to be better. This was the only truth they needed to know. This was what I told myself, what the therapist had said and what I thought my husband felt as well.

But all the things that sounded so good in the therapist’s office now sounded ridiculous and hollow. They weren’t answers and Myles knew it. He wouldn’t stop probing, wanted specifics. I stayed to the script. This went on for a few days until my husband called me a few minutes after I’d dropped the children off at school.

“I told Myles the truth at dinner the other night,” he said.

“The truth?” An emptiness, a pit, opened up below my heart.

“I told him you’ve been having an affair and I was willing to forgive you, but you had decided to choose him over our family.”

“You told him what?” I felt lightheaded, like the ground had given way. I gripped the steering wheel and pulled over.

“That you’re having an affair and that’s why we’re getting divorced. And I’m going to tell the other kids too. There’s been enough lying.”

Our other children were ten, seven and three.

“The therapist said not to tell them. You promised me you wouldn’t.”

“A marriage is a promise to stay faithful. I wouldn’t bring up promises if I were you.”

***

The truth was this: A few weeks earlier, while I was out at breakfast with our four children, he went through my computer and found texts and emails with a man who had become the love of my life, the person I could not imagine living without.  Matt was my chiropractor but his methods encompassed everything – the full range of body, mind and soul. We connected on music initially – Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Jeff Tweedy—and then books. At some point I realized every book I had read over the past year that wasn’t required as part of my MFA program, was recommended by him.

During the winter, Matt and I, who had always confined our communication to his office, slipped into texting. A lot. First daily, then a few times a day, then hundreds. It was a numinous relationship, one therapist said. Numinous – spiritual, divine. Of course, it was meant to be. Never mind the fact that at the time my husband discovered our correspondence, we had not done so much as kissed.

The texting made it all too easy – the distance and time to be witty and use innuendo, to share thoughts, photos, articles, music. An entire consciousness can be sent through a phone. Of course, I couldn’t just delete the messages as they came, I had to save them by sending them to myself. I needed proof of what was happening. My inability to let things go into the ether was ultimately how my husband found out about our emotional affair. Since my divorce, I’ve had friends tell me about phone flirtations because they know I won’t judge. I have a hard time telling them to walk away. For me, my virtual relationship with Matt was a lifeline – what ultimately what got me out of something I’d been very unhappy in for a very long time.

In the weeks leading up to Chris’s and my separation, when I was in the throes of my texting with Matt, Myles played “Layla” on repeat in the car. I wondered if he was reading my mind, if he knew what was going on with me and if that was why he constantly played a song about an affair, about longing, about forbidden love, about betrayal.

When I used to hear stories of people cheating on their spouses I would think: how awful; if you can’t stay faithful, don’t stay married, and certainly don’t have kids. What I used to think about Eric Clapton and “Layla” was that he was a terrible person for falling in love with his friend’s wife. But when Myles played that song I thought, what incredible art. Clapton knew.

***

So why didn’t I leave earlier if it was so bad?  We had four kids, a full life, lots of friends. I adored his family. He had a high-profile job that “needed” a wife. How could I abandon him? Marriage was supposed to be hard and I wasn’t trying hard enough. I always thought I should be able to do better and my husband constantly told me so. For years, I thought the despair I was feeling was because of my own failing at love.

I never told anyone how suffocated I felt. My husband told everyone how much he loved me, all the time. But behind closed doors he loved me so much I couldn’t see friends if he was in town, couldn’t speak on the phone if he was home, couldn’t have male friends. When we moved to Beijing for his job, he asked me why I was making friends – wasn’t he enough? I read old journals. Five years before, as the movers were packing up our apartment in Beijing for a move to Tokyo, I had written – I don’t know if I can move to Tokyo with him.

I told my children and friends that I wasn’t leaving my marriage for Matt. I said falling in love with someone else was just the final thing beating me over the head telling me to leave – something I’d felt I had to do for a long time but been too scared to. And I wonder whether I let the marriage end as it did so that he wouldn’t be blamed, so that he could look like the “better person” and whether I was performing a service I had done for most of our marriage -protecting him at the expense of myself.

***

So, the narrative of our divorce became this: I was solely responsible for the end of our marriage because I had an affair. Chris told the children and anyone else who would listen that he was the victim and I was the victimizer. I imagined my children thinking of me kissing this man, wasn’t sure if they imagined sex too. At twelve, Myles certainly might have been, but I didn’t know about the others. I told them nothing physical had happened when their dad found our texts, but what did this mean to them? To them, their mother had fallen in love with another man while married to their father and wasn’t able to stop it, couldn’t walk away, was reckless with their lives and her own. In committing infidelity, emotional or otherwise, I’d lost all standing, not just as a wife, but as a person – especially as a mother.

And, while I felt shame standing in front of my children, I also felt relief. The worst thing I could have imagined had happened – my husband telling my children I’d had an affair – and yet, I was oddly okay. It clarified everything; I knew couldn’t go back. Every day I steeled myself for the children’s questions: What did Dad do to you that’s worse than cheating? Why do you want a divorce if he wants to forgive you? Why don’t you love Dad anymore? In my best moments I would say: I’m not going to talk badly about your dad.  And in my worst moments: God help you if you think this is the worst thing that could ever happen to you.

***

One afternoon in July, two months after Chris and I had separated, Myles and I were driving to a Jay-Z/Beyonce concert.

Shortly into the drive he looked up from his phone and said, “You’re not wearing that to the concert, are you?”

I was wearing a black motorcycle jacket that I’d recently bought, edgy, unlike anything I’d worn before I left Chris.

“You look stupid. Take it off.”

“I’m wearing it. I like it.”

“I’m not going into the concert with you then.”

“Look at me and apologize right now,” I said.

“Apologize for what? I’m allowed to have an opinion.” He said this, looking down at his phone.

And I suddenly felt overwhelming rage – rage that this night with my son already felt ruined, rage at my own impotence in the face of my son’s anger, and rage at the fact that I knew this argument wasn’t about my jacket. We were sitting at a stoplight and I ripped his phone out of his hands.

“Give it back!” he shouted at me.

“Not until you apologize.”

“You know the family is ashamed of you, right? You know that Dad’s family hates you and that even your own mom sent Dad an email saying how you made her sick.” He screamed at me, his face red now and contorted in pain. His words came at me:

Nothing is worse than what you did.

You’re a cheater.  

A liar.

I hate you.

And without even thinking, in my own blind rage, I slapped him. His hand went immediately to his face and he looked at me, shocked. “And now you hit me? Good job. Wait until I tell Dad.”

And I started to cry and knew I couldn’t take it back, couldn’t take anything back I’d done to hurt him. The agony on his face in that moment – my heart breaks every time I think of it.

***

Recently, Myles, now seventeen, and I were walking down Michigan Avenue and passed by Lowry’s Prime Rib.

“That’s where your dad and I met,” I said. I remembered what I’d been like that day – so young and hopeful, filled with the excitement of new love.

“What would you say to yourself now if you saw your younger self standing there with him?” he asked. I understood what he was really asking. He wanted to know if my marriage to his father had been a mistake, if I’d take it back if I could. The relationship with Matt had been short-lived, did I think that I’d broken up my family for nothing?

“I would say that you’re going to have a full life together for many years and many adventures. And have four amazing children.”

I wanted to add, “and it won’t be forever and that’s okay.” I wanted to tell him what I’d come to feel – that what I’d done was extremely painful and difficult, but that that didn’t mean it was wrong. I wanted to say I’d struggled and was still struggling to know who I was and what I wanted and how to love, but that didn’t make me bad. I wanted to say what is rarely acknowledged, that as humans – even as adults, even as mothers – we are all just figuring it out.

But that moment in front of Lowry’s I couldn’t say it was okay. I felt his pain and that of his siblings and knew that for them our divorce might never be okay. I felt overwhelmed and heartbroken by what we all had lost. So I said, “and it won’t be forever and I’m so sorry for that.”

He nodded and said, “I know Mom, its okay.”

I turned to look at him, tears threatening to spill down my face, and hugged him.

***

Layla has a coda – a piano solo that contains a shift, a calmness and peace in contrast to the rest of the song that precedes it. Not long ago, I asked Myles how that coda made him feel. He said it was like rebirth. New life.

Erin Branning holds an MFA from Northwestern and lives in Chicago with her four children. She is working on her first novel.

 

Upcoming events with Jen

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THE ALEKSANDER SCHOLARSHIP FUND

Guest Posts, Divorce

Answering the Call

August 14, 2019
oprah

By Audra Carmine

My current divorce coping strategy– I walk my dog, I cry and I listen to Oprah Winfrey’s Supersoul Conversations on headphones so that no one will talk to me. My husband and I are on our second separation, and we aren’t even actually divorced yet.  There’s still time for a few more break-ups, a few more punches to the heart, and honestly, there’s a chance I’d totally do it again, get back together, be reckless like that. Say the word, almost ex-husband, and I’d jump back in, heart on my sleeve, divorce papers burning in my wake. If anyone ever told you that divorce is clean cut and the best decision they ever made, well, I am not that person. And the world needs to hear from more than just the people whose divorces served as an instant reincarnation machine, a propeller toward success, a doorway to a life they never dreamed they could have lived. I kinda want to punch that person in the face. Because the truth is, I long for my marriage. I long for it in a way that feels like an addiction. I yearn. I crave. I have withdrawls. I sweat it out. I ache. I fantasize, I idealize. I want to recreate that first blissful hit of togetherness over and over again. My abandonment issues have never been louder, and no matter how many pictures I see of happy divorced women with surfboards and small dogs living in LA, I just don’t buy it. I’m not there yet. Continue Reading…

Divorce, Guest Posts, Self Image

A False Sense of Security

August 1, 2019
self-worth

By  Jamie Carmichael

It’s 6:50pm when I pull in to the condo complex in the minivan. My 12-year old daughter is next to me and her toddler sister is in the back.  The timing is deliberate.  I don’t want to be home too early and I don’t want to be back so late that we have to stress through the nighttime routine. The large white van is parked in front and I sigh. He’s home.  Not surprisingly since he usually gets home between 330 and 5 but still.  Once in a while he’ll work late and I’ll be giddy with the quiet space that will welcome us. I can unload the bags. The girls will shake off their coats and let out some energy. We’ll eat whatever we picked up from McDonald’s or the pizza place or I’ll make something and then put the dishes in the dishwasher, fold the laundry and just be in peace.

But those days are few and far between.

Usually what happens is that we’ll come back from the library or the grocery store and my husband will be upstairs in the bathroom where he spends an inordinate amount of time doing whatever it is that he does.  I’ll be in the kitchen or helping with homework with our older daughter and then at some point he’ll come down instantly ramping up the tension.

Will he acknowledge me or go straight to asking the girls how they are as if I’m not there?  Will I greet him in a measured way so I’m not being superficially upbeat but also not ignoring him? The thing is that I’m not ever entirely sure where we stand that day.

Partial disclosure:  We have been married for 16 years. We haven’t slept in the same bed for 12.

Full disclosure:  I had an affair 6 years ago and filed for divorce.  After confessing both to my husband said he eventually said he wanted to stay together.  I didn’t think it would work out but the fact that he wanted to stay together automatically made me want to too. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Divorce, moving on

My Ex-Husband is Getting Remarried

May 2, 2019

By Robin Rapaport

Three weeks before Thanksgiving, my 28 year old daughter told me during dinner that her dad intended to propose to his girlfriend of two years, after the holiday. My daughter asked if I was okay with the news, and I said “Yes, I am fine. I let go a long time ago”. I desperately tried to control the code red alarm sounding off inside me. I feigned joyous enthusiasm by displaying an inauthentic I’m- Happy For- Your- Father smile. My perceptive daughter didn’t further question me. After dinner, I was left with a mess bigger than dirty dishes to clean up.

The news leaned in with force and threw me off balance, sending my head spinning. I even woke up the next morning with my frenemy, Vertigo, who commands thoughts, actions and life to slow down to a near halt, when I can’t downshift on my own. By afternoon, reeling in a vertigo hangover, I tried to organize and clean up the reactive thoughts in my head – mental dirty dishes, piling up and ready for a good soaking and scrubbing. Please. Where can I get a brain washing?

Why did I care, 19 years later? I have little to do with him anymore. Except that he will forever be the father of my children, the grandfather of my grandchildren. That’s about it.  He is only the father of the most important people in my world, who I love with all my heart.

I am a single 62 year old divorcee of 19 years. I have been almost married 3 times since the breakup. Almost being the key word, which loosely translates as I was unable to love, unwilling to share, and unable to commit to men who saw me as their absolute life partner. I am more ready now to raise the almost bar, but that’s a different story. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Divorce

The Perfect Blue: A Restless Bird, a Good Dog, and The End of a Marriage

April 7, 2019
blue

By Wendy Cohan

I drive too fast from Missoula, west through Spokane and the scablands of Eastern Washington, through the industrial maze of the Tri-Cities, along the other-worldly beauty of the Columbia Gorge and on into Portland. I drive up to our family home—painted a color that we worked so hard to choose: the perfect blue. Now, my husband and I face the task of going through our remaining belongings, separating his life from mine, over the next five days.

I’m staying at my friend’s empty house, just up the street, to limit any awkwardness and to give myself some private time and space. I play it cool: I’m helpful, generous, and not too inquisitive about his new life and new love. Although it’s difficult, I avoid playing “Do you remember?” too much. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Divorce, No Bullshit Motherhood

Seven Cupcakes

January 14, 2019
cupcakes

By Sara Rayfield

Seven is an odd number. It’s also prime.

“Hi, baby!” I greet my son warmly, as if doing custody exchanges at the police station is totally normal. Just like prime, odd numbers – this is our normal. It’s where shit like this happens when you have a restraining order against your ex. When things are bad enough, he’s not even allowed in the police station, so I get the pure sarcastic joy of my former in-laws every other weekend. That’s also what happens.

“How was your birthday party?” I ask, while getting a weekend’s worth of dirty clothes shoved into my arms. And cotton candy. And McDonald’s bags. And the packages of cupcakes that I had packed with care on Friday afternoon. Seven cupcakes: one for my son. One for his grandmother, one for his grandfather. Two for his aunt and uncle. Two final ones: one for my son’s dad, one for his stepmom. Continue Reading…