To another woman, beginning her divorce… If a lady has been so unfortunate as to have married a man not a gentleman, to draw attention to his behavior would put herself on his level. Emily Post, 1922 Divorce is a process. Often a long drawn out one, like extensive dental surgery. You want it to be over, immediately. Just yank it out now and be done with it. But it takes much longer than you want to tolerate. It’s expensive and some costs are hyper-inflated. A one hour lawyer consult costs how much? Even though you know the final outcome and have made all of your decisions to go ahead, you are still required to endure visits to finish this procedure. Divorce takes place on an emotional, social, financial and legal level. It takes time. You have to complete all of them before you can be done. That’s quite a mound of paperwork. The last one is the both easiest and most complicated. It tends to take the longest, but it’s the most official. You have to be meticulous because there are loopholes, hidden agendas, partial sharing of truths, and games of manipulation intended to protect or hide financial assets. You must speak and write carefully in order to insulate yourself from damages. Document everything, trust nothing. Time is its own player. You must always be aware that either party can choose at any instant to detract themselves from civility, sling mud, or play hardball. The counselor tells you all of this. One must be prepared, but not afraid. It is frustrating. You realize certain things are simply not worth the argument or the fear. He does not tell you any of that. Some relationships need to end in divorce. The people inside of them are inherently too different and unchangeable. They define reality in different ways. They do not accept one another’s needs, they can’t see why the other person wants particular dreams and aspirations. They just expect the other will grow out of them, like a phase. Except who you are isn’t a phase. And there is the problem-two people can not, do not and will not accept each other. It’s sort of like the tundra and the rainforest. The flora and fauna native to each cannot survive or be sustained in the other’s realm. You can only stay so long in that kind of environment before it starts to whither you. And your souls would be crushed and misplaced if you allowed them in each other’s hearts. Like a wildflowers in the snow, they just can’t take root there. They are not welcomed. But you know that. Then you find yourself in the odd juxtaposition of having made a promise but are faced with a heavier solemnity from the realization you must break it. People don’t change, they only become more themselves as they grow older. It’s harder to make fake curves in a girdle when you are nearly 40 with fallen breasts and a paunchy little belly. You peek out in the lines of thoughts that have carved their way across your head. There are stages of the feelings you go through, consistent with what Ms. Kubler-Ross first noted in 1969 as how people deal with catastrophic news. You are your own messenger with the telegraph to get out of Dodge. It doesn’t say when, just that you need to go. You deal with it in steps with different speeds. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance that’s the first part. But there are things you feel after that. Life continues. We all privately know how long we chose not to see, call attention to, or politely swept over small stage relational problems. The sorts of things that only our grandmothers or closest friends would mention to us afterwards as seeming a bit off. We changed the subject. We didn’t want to listen. We avoided the things we didn’t want to see. We made excuses. We got so good at them, we almost believed them. We thought certain problems, if we just put up with them for a long enough while, would just go away on their own. They would be self limiting like a twenty-four hour virus. Until they did not. At all. They only proliferated out in other places. This was not the resolution we hoped would grow out of our quiet. That’s when we got mad, really mad and spent some hours, arguments, or years directing the issue elsewhere. Anger and blame are interrelated. It’s easier when it’s someone else’s fault. We dug our heels in and pointed fingers at other things. To do otherwise would be admitting to our making a mistake. This can’t happen to me. Then we got scared, because this was becoming real. A bit too real and uncomfortable. Life hadn’t changed on paper or in process yet, but these times, which were not halcyon, were changing. Maybe we sang Bob Dylan while we got drenched outside in the rain and realized we would have to stand up or fall down. Period. Maybe there were marital counseling classes, as a sort of hospice care before the reality would slam into our faces. A gentle mapping aloud of all we knew was broken and structurally unsound. It reminded us of what that little telegram said. A lady always knows when and how to leave. We got sad. Life would change. It would be very different. It would be hard. We would not have financial security. We might have to live with our parents again. We would have to answer a lot of questions. And we didn’t know what that would be like. Would we be okay? What if we weren’t ok? What if it was too hard? What if no one accepted this? What would it be like to start all over again? From the beginning, with nothing? Could we do that? What if we failed? Were we really strong? How strong would we need to be? What if we were too old to start over? What if we never got another hug? What if we lost everything? What if we had nothing else but our name? Absolutely nothing else but our own name? Could we still walk on? And then something happened. We got to the end of those questions and fears. There actually is an end to them. Divorce is not an eternity of emotional earthquakes. Because life does change. You packed out and it wasn’t that bad. You smiled at garbagemen who took away all the things you didn’t need. You giggled at the height of the piles. You wore the clothes that you liked again. This was a whole new reality. You had nothing but your own name. No other attachment by which you were defined. You get to reinvent, except it’s not a reinventing it’s a becoming back to yourself. And you kind of liked that. This reality was a cleaner one with no excuses. One in which you discovered you had to be accountable to yourself and no one else. It was hard, but not how you expected. You found you were resilient. “Illegitimis nil carborundum” The bastard didn’t get you down. You found you could do a lot, but not everything. You learned how to be patient. You remembered to be polite. “Meglio sola che male accompagnata”. And it is better to be alone than in bad company. But you are not alone. Divorce is ultimately the ending of a relationship in a permanent way. Ties are not only broken, they become cauterized. You may maintain civilities and exchange necessary conversations, but there is no friendship. You will fall out of one another’s lives, even if there are children. Part of why you can and do sever the bond in that way is a very simple but poignant acceptance. The two of you were never honest friends. This happens.