‘Into the woods, and out of the woods, and home before dark’
“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”
Hello again, world. It’s been a minute. A lifetime, or several. Layers on layers of my growing self, a tree quietly reaching, widening, drawing life from its roots. Stronger and more knowing with each added ring, each ounce of light and air changed to matter. The me who wrote this blog before feels like a sapling I want to protect- a gentle, swaying thing, the color of new leaves. Looking back, I can feel the cold winds that followed that balmy, domestic spring. I wrestled with my shadow self, fought and lost a battle with restlessness, and reforged it all to make the truest life I could. And before I can blog about that life (and the adventures therein), I need to bridge from here to there and tell the tiniest part of that story- which by rights is its own blog, but not one I’ll write.
For me, reforging it all meant becoming a ‘two-home family’, where freedom and domesticity could be woven together into a whole that felt congruent. I needed to feel fully myself again when I walked through my front door. That meant looking hard in the mirror and curling up with my journal night after night. It meant opening up to adventure, throwing myself into love, wearing heels and drinking martinis, hearing friends’ laughter spilling from my living room. It meant loud music and dinner parties and modern decor and kitchen dance parties with my daughter. It meant lots of time alone.
I’m still not sure where I got lost in those years of marriage. I found myself again, but of course by then I was a different self. New rings on the tree, deeper green leaves, hardier in storms. We all grow in this way- we just differ in the paths we take through it.
I am intensely grateful that when I wandered off my intended path, I didn’t lose my people. D and I parted awkwardly but amicably. We date other people, but we are still affectionately platonic partners. Our daughter is a firecracker who demands all our energy; we strive to be a united front. A few years after the divorce I bought the house next door to him so that A can wander back and forth. She’s still plotting a zip line between her two bedrooms. People seem to think this is either crazy or really cool- I don’t really care. Whatever it is, it works for us. Last summer we bought a cabin in the mountains and found that we could be a family there together. We aren’t emotionally close, but we have the easy banter and politeness of roommates. We cook dinner together, read by the fire in companionable silence, and compare answers to the Sunday crossword. When in Seattle, we wave at each other from our porches, re-enter our private lives, and bask in the spacious silence of living alone. This is more than I thought possible of a divorce. Perhaps I didn’t wander as far off the path as it seemed.
Every marriage is different, and so is every divorce. As a culture we readily explore and embrace the myriad varieties of the former, but shy away from talking about the complexities of the latter. Partnerships are complicated. Current, past, whole, broken, or something in between: the spectrum is as wide as our imaginations, and as big as our needs. Mine may be difficult for others to understand, but I’ve stopped minding. It’s better to just be grateful, know this is my best life, and smile when I walk through my own front door.
