HOW DID I GET HERE?
BRIT WASHBURN, (PART II)
Aftermath
February 2022
It has been a dozen years now since my separation after fourteen years of marriage. Sometimes, I feel as though I have at long last achieved a fine balance: teaching and tending three of my children four children (two teen-aged sons and a six year-old little girl) during the week, spending every other weekend with my long-distance love while my daughter is with her dad. The comfort of being home, reading and cooking and baking and cleaning house; the decadence of the weekends with R., which also include travel and time outside. When I think of it this way, I love my life. But the balance is precarious: this week, both my young daughter and R. tested positive for Covid. The former asymptomatic, the latter suffering a mild case.
There comes a time, when one’s children have been weaned and toilet trained, are perhaps school-aged, when one begins to reclaim what had been the occupied territory of one’s mind and body. Seemingly suddenly, talk of nursing and naps are no longer of particular interest. It is too soon to be nostalgic, in the way that it can be too soon to be humorous after a tragedy. Time is required in order to make the space necessary for sentiment, for feeling anything. When we are too close, we are numb, as when nerves are severed by a gash. Only when we have begun to heal can we begin to feel pain, feel love.
The same is true for me now, in the wake of my separation. Everywhere I turn, (men and) women seem to be writing about their divorces, in the way they had once spoken of their pregnancies and babies: as though it is all they think about, all they are. There is at once solidarity in feeling as though I am far from alone in what I’ve experienced, but also aversion in seeing it reduced to rite of passage or cliché. And boredom: as though there were nothing unique about the most devastating failure of one’s life, in the same way that there may be nothing unique about one’s greatest loves. Maybe cancer patients feel this way, and veterans, and addicts: ambivalent about membership in a club they would have given anything not to join.
Once out of the treatment center, the trenches, one wants nothing more than to be seen as someone other than a patient, a victim, a soldier. As a teenager, I wanted nothing more than to be seen as an adult. As a young woman, I wanted nothing more than to be seen as and, importantly, nothing more than to be a mother. And, eventually, as a mother, I wanted nothing more than to be seen as and to be a woman again, an object of desire. At this cultural juncture “objectification” has been demonized, but I don’t think I am entirely alone in having felt more agency, more independence, more power as a sex object than as a mother, though this may well be yet another layer of the patriarchy’s thousand veils. By definition, however, as long as one has dependents, one cannot be independent per se.
But back to the divorce narratives. I can’t resist and read with curiosity descriptions of the claustrophobia, the impulse to flee, the hunger for freedom, and then the inevitable, debilitating guilt and regret. I read about how these women can’t eat, and shrink back into girlish versions of themselves. I sympathize. I also judge and disdain, especially those who seem to leave their marriages for “no good reason,” in the absence of abject abuse. And yet it is precisely this seeming arbitrariness, this inexplicability, that is ultimately most vindicating, most exonerating, as though if they couldn’t resist the urge to escape with ample support and psychologically sound husbands, then I am that much more justified in having fled.
Though that is not how it works, of course, that is me still seeking absolution, when what I really want is to know what’s next. What comes after the dust of having demolished one’s life and family settles?
Love is the answer, I hope, as it almost always is. That peace-of-equality Rachel Cusk writes of vis a vis Clytemnestra and Aegysthus in the Oresteia (‘the pure peace of equality (that) begets nothing”), but maybe also the pure passion of equality? Romantic relationships freed from the bonds of bearing and nurturing children, and parental relationships freed from the burden of triangulation, of coming between? Romantic and parental relationships each maintained and enjoyed for their own sake, that fine balance, and in the center, while I’m waxing idealistic, space and time for study and creative work.
Or solitude, but that is not primarily what I aspire to. I appreciate time alone, but only in moderation, in contrast. I do believe loneliness can be instructive, but mainly as a means of cultivating compassion for oneself and others in their isolation and estrangement. I do not believe that a capacity for solitude is a virtue so much as it is a coping mechanism, a forge in which the heart’s craft is honed. We learn to do without connection so that we can survive in its absence, and feel for others who must, not because it is inherently better to go without. God knows learning to love well is at least as hard as learning to live alone.
Triple vaccinated and having already had Covid once myself, I decide to visit my plagued love. I make soup, and pack most of my kitchen so that I can make another while I’m there. Red borscht and pumpernickel bread, vodka and ginger beer, fresh ginger and lemons for tea, greens for breakfast, garlic and shallots and basil for a bread-and-tomato soup the second night. In an effort to remember to bring all of these ingredients, I leave without the backpack containing my computer and clothes, and don’t realize it until just before my arrival, after a three-hour drive. I decide this means I am meant to spend the weekend naked and not working.
It is heavenly. He is not too sick, but subdued and so we mostly stay in bed. I give him a massage with lavender oil and we shower together, allowing the steam to work its magic. By the second day, he is up for a walk in the sun.
It is over too quickly, but I drive home deeply nourished, happy to see my children and ready for the work week ahead. Two days later, I wake with a scratchy throat, make it through half the school day (in isolation), then leave at lunchtime to get tested. The first test comes back negative, but my condition deteriorates and I test positive the next day. My whole body begins to ache, there are waves of chills and sniffles, and I have to call in sick to work. It feels like a guilty secret though I feel justified in having nursed the man I love as I would have had we shared a home (or even a hometown). I hope, though, that I am not exposing my children to a new variant, that this is the same strain my daughter was carrying the week before, and I realize that this is one of the drawbacks of compartmentalizing, literally and conceptually, my romantic relationship and my children: that we are not a family, that we are not exactly “all in this together.” That in order to be alone with him, I am on my own with them, in sickness and in crises, which seem to crop up constantly between my troubled teenagers and my ailing parents, and amid all of the day-to-day demands of working single motherhood. This allows me to protect my romantic relationship from the stresses of domesticity, and it allows me to give my children my undivided attention when I am with them, but there are times when I could do with some help.
But Covid, at least, lasts only a few days. Quarantining comes easily to me. I like staying home, reading, writing, editing. As my strength returns, I can begin cleaning the house, which it always requires. When the weather warms, I do a little work in the yard, take my daughter out to practice riding her bike in the parking lot across the street. And suddenly, she’s doing it, just like that: launched. My heart soars and I take her to ride the lake trail, feeling as though a whole new world is opening to us both.
It is Valentine’s Day weekend. My daughter and I watch a Jane Austen movie, bake raspberry thumbprint cookies, have pasta for dinner by candlelight, slow dance to Chet Baker. It is an imperfect solution, but it is mine.
(You can find out more about Brit and read Part I of the series here.)