Even when it's good, it's bad

He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, smiling, and said, "So are all of your friends married and having kids right now?"

"All of them." I laughed. "Actually, so was I, but I separated last year."

"Really!"

It's so strange to think of all of my friends just entering the funhouse as I'm leaving it. So many engagement rings and wedding rings and ultrasound photos and baby showers; and stranger still is, we're all the same age. But as out-of-step as I must be with the typical life cycle of my actual generation, it's hard for me to think of my life as inappropriate: my mother was married when she was 17. Seventeen! And still married, 37 years later. So for me to be married at 24 was practically delinquent. I was pushing spinster status.

So there they all are, getting married and having babies, and I'm getting divorced and (unless something changes in the next few years) probably done with having babies, as sad as that makes me.

Except that another friend or two and a colleague are in marriages that are either crumbling or have crumbled. You're told to go out and get this thing and then build your life on it, but then sometimes in a matter of hours it vanishes; this thing that was supposed to be the foundation of your adult life turns into gravel. All of a sudden all the other things you thought you had, you don't have either. The job and the house and the neighbourhood and the family and the friends and the finances and the plans and the retirement and all the other things you built on top of this one thing that was supposed to be the foundation; the foundation gets whisked away like the magician's tablecloth, only nothing else stays standing. When you lose your spouse you don't just lose your spouse. You lose everything else.

Sunday morning I woke from a dream where it was last summer again, and I was moving out of my house. Sorting through all the paperwork, choosing what to bring, what to shred, what to throw away, what to leave. I emptied can after can of recycled paper, carried boxes into the truck. My father and mother and brother were there, for some reason, though my brother lives out east and wouldn't have come for such an occasion in any case. Coming back from carrying one box into the truck, I walked down the hall, into the old kitchen, and put my palms flat onto the countertop, rested my forehead between them, and cried.

Now: I don't miss my ex-husband, and I don't miss that house; but all of the things I built on the assumption that they would be forever, and which were lost too--I suppose, the paperwork; what to keep, what to leave, what to destroy--all of that, Frances riding her tricycle down the driveway and walking to find toads in the woods nearby and the picture of the family I thought I was going to have all those years ago, the one with a happy child between two happy parents who are happy with each other, maybe another happy child or two in time, the one that proved itself to be so entirely illusory that it could not tolerate the contrast with reality--all of that. So even then, even when all the traces of love in the relationship have been scrubbed out with acid and salt, even when you know it is the right thing to do, even when part of you is looking forward to some of the changes, even then, it's hard. It's a hard thing. Even when it's not the actual person or the actual place that you miss, even when it's just the idea of those things, what they were supposed to represent.

Then I think of what it must be like when the spouse you might lose is someone you still love, the house you might lose is one you still love, and all of the other things depending on that, the entire life built that might be about to crash down, and you'd think I'd have been through this often enough to know what to say or do, but I don't.

Posted by Andrea at January 29, 2008 8:49 AM under Decision 2007 , Friends and Others

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