My 33-year marriage ended with a quiet whimper, not an explosion.
After rounds and rounds of counseling, unkept promises, empty days – I left.
That morning, I asked if we could talk. He grudgingly sat down, visibly irritated, as usual. Everything I did or said irritated him, causing his deeper withdrawal and palpable resentment.
“How do you think things are going?” I asked. He waited a beat, then stood up, went to get his jacket and his laptop, and left.
And that was it.
I packed some clothes and headed to my sister’s, who has always been my oasis in a storm. “This is it,” I told her.
No more.
What happened next still baffles me. His plan, as disclosed to me, was to go to California to work a 6-month consulting gig. His real plan was to move in with some gal pal there. I later learned there was no consulting gig.
I don’t begrudge him reaching out for some happiness. I hope his mood improves, for her sake.
Had I known he would never come back – abandoning his troubled adult children, his home and his possessions – I might have structured the divorce settlement differently.
As it happened, he never spoke to me after that day. We exchanged documents through my lawyer and easily settled matters between us. And there was never another spoken word.
Such was the silence that when one of the abandoned adult children was in crisis, I had to hire a lawyer to reach out to him to ask if he would help. He said no. On the next occasion of crisis, I hired the lawyer again. He said no. I stopped inquiring.
I reached out to his family to see if they could talk some sense into him during these crises times. They were silent. Good Christians all, they ignored my pleas for assistance with the substantial challenges he left behind. He was the golden boy of his family and could do no wrong.
The silence that had enveloped the marriage extended and expanded.
To be honest, the silence post-divorce feels a lot like the silence of the marriage. Years of no communication, quietly circling one another while we still moved through life together, has now become the norm. I expect nothing. I am never disappointed.
I grieve for my adult children, who are mostly adopted. They were surrendered once already in their lives. Now they have been surrendered again by their father.
I muddle along to be there for them. Some blame me for the divorce and the resulting lack of stability in their lives. I will have to bear that. Others are totally supportive and understand my need to break away from the nothingness. Regardless, I try to demonstrate to them that my love for them is total and complete and I will be there for them in all the ways that I can moving forward.
I am the one who stayed. For them. Not for him.
As for me, my life has blossomed and flourished in ways I would not have imagined. I am resettled in my career and exploring my creative pursuits with an energy and abandon that was not possible while I was stuck in my dead marriage. If indeed I grieved, it was brief. If indeed I was fearful, my fears were quickly laid to rest.
Yet, I grieve for my adult children. We won’t have unified family holidays anymore. They will no longer have the safety of a family home to land in when life crashes around them.
In the end, there is something good and healthy about forced growth. For both my children and I, there is something beautiful about tilling up land that had lain fallow for years. We are all pushed into growing, changing, adapting.
I am excited to see how it all plays out, both for them and for myself.
There is so much more to life than the way we have always done it.
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