CuppaGemma

It was nearly ten years ago, Thursday morning playgroup. It was for all official intents and purposes a time for a pile of little ones to get together and schooch, crawl, or otherwise interact with one another for a few hours.

The mothers were there for a different reason entirely. We were glad for the hours of uninterrupted semi quiet. This gave us a chance to talk over more important matters. It kept the isolation away and was like a beacon around which the rest of the week was drawn. We’d start with bagels and finish with curry then move onto chocolate. We learned a lot in those Sag Panir conversations.

None of us knew what it was we were getting into when we agreed to, pleaded for, or otherwise found ourselves in the situation of being with child in a foreign country. We got the isolation lesson firsthand first trimester as hours were spent in the washroom, forehead pressed against the cool tile and breathing kept in a slow still way so as to stave off nausea or an afternoon spent on the sofa with two Premium crackers which might have been the world’s most perfect food if they only had a few more ingredients. These were days when we learned most of life is walked alone.

Some of us were trailing spouses. It was a term that made all of the aforementioned seethe in frustration, as though our only role in life was to jangle behind another person’s career or otherwise important stuff to do. But a formal dining room and enough disposal income (cost of living adjustment, COLA to some, but with the effect of Tab Soda on others) to finance house help or some fancy crockery was meant to distill this reality. Except the result was more akin to trying to make wine into water by shaking it vigorously.

There were others who left their home countries because they didn’t like the place, the job potential or mainly the men that they had met there. But several years down the road the barriers of language and culture wore through their relationships like a street on a shoe. They found that this new world of permanency here brought a whole new kind of disconnection to get accustomed to. Like how to make miso instead of stew. You missed the stew alot, you missed anybody wanting stew more. Obachans who would never accept our okayu, even though it came from the rice cooker, or any kind of accent in the children. Women who had to fight a careful battle to give their children English and a sense of home from a place they only visited in the summer.

And of course there were some of us who had chosen to pause work for this child, but it turned out like a vacation which came with the wrong travel brochure. It would take longer, be more expensive and the lack of free space in which to think as an adult commingled with the exhaustion that comes from raising children hurt their spirit. “I’m bored, I’m tired, I hate Barney. I want to be able to do something without the words “But mommy” piercing my head, and I don’t want it to be three o’clock in the fricking morning.”

Had we known…

Now that’s a question we all knew the answer to but wouldn’t say till all the chocolates had been finished and the children asleep in piles throughout the living room floor. Had we known more than half of us would have said no, and on both counts. We did not have a friend in the person that we shoved our elbows into hard at night. “You get up.” We did not have compassion when sick beat out tired and we were flat out with the flu or a back ache for several days. We just had more stuff to get back to. So we found our dearest companions elsewhere, in other women who shared similar silent grievances.

Because we hadn’t understood. We were lopped with children and husbands, often in a neck and neck race of immaturity, frustration, heightened expectations and general strain to the point of breaking something other than our hearts. These sorts of conversations happened when the nan was half finished. We were cold then, like men drafting war plans, except we had no cigarettes and alcohol. We hoped the Lego, Brio and wooden blocks would keep the little ones engaged until we had had our chance to draw out our battlefields.

Humor started it all, and let us feel safe. One day one of the girls shared she wanted some help with the housework. She was tired of doing it. But her spouse refused all housework on grounds that he worked long hours for real money. Mundane things like laundry and diaper changes were, “beneath” a man of his stature. She told us she wasn’t going to be mad about it. But from that day forward she washed the vice president’s briefs and undershirts in the same load as the soiled cloth diapers. No pre-soak or bleach. It was beneath her to sort laundry.

We cried into each other’s arguments. Like the day another of us was working on a big dinner for company colleagues only to have her significant other throw a fit over what she was preparing. “My boss is coming. We will be eating on china. China. Do you understand, china? This is not your family’s house.” She seared the pudding on purpose and found polite excuses to pass the afternoon in the kitchen. He got a maid who cooked after that and she spent a good number of afternoons at department stores buying silk pillows and appropriate brick a brack for the house. “I’m the Bombay Catalog gone mad.” But it was a weekly joke that one of us would have to say, “China, do you understand, china” as we would start to serve out the cheerios and apples for the children.

We needed things to do to preserve ourselves. Some of us fell into crusades of volunteering. We would help someone else. Lots of long hours for causes. Continuing education. It could mean Saturdays out of the house and away from being Mrs. Mommy. A chance to be defined as someone with an existence all her own again. Her first name got used. It became almost full time work for quite a few of us. Phone calls, consults, conferences. A drive to make a difference in someone else’s world, stuff the status quo. There is another way. And for some this altruism was self serving. It sowed the seeds of determination that changes in their own world were actually possible. It was a dry run for a different life.

We all wanted our children to grow up and our lives to go on. We agreed we had to teach them not to need us one day. To walk their lives alone. But in the meantime, we all needed something more than this world of mommying. Sometimes it was as comfortable as a nursing room with metal folding chairs and no ventilation. We refused to be defined as the disheveled woman with screaming kids that everyone shakes their head at on the train. Or the obsessive one with all the right learning toys and coordinating clothes. Or the flake who was too natural to belong anywhere inside. Or the worrier at the doc with the slightest sniffle. There was more to us than that, if only we could get some sleep. There were more to children that that too, if they had had a good nap as well.

We coped with coffee and excessively long trips to the grocery store on Sunday mornings. We called each other and had intense talks from 11pm till 1 am when we knew no one else would be home. We were almost like school girls sneaking out past curfew, saying we would have to get off the phone and pretend to be asleep because, “I gotta go, now. I hear the door.” Click. We didn’t have much to say to the person who was arriving. Some of them would come in stenching and red-faced from a night of company drinks, or bloated from big dinners from places were children and women in common clothes were not welcomed. Or swallowed up in the big machine of the company to which they were so important and invaluable, they couldn’t leave till ten on an average night. “Huh, I’m sleeping.” Snore.

None of us were exactly happy with the life that we found raising children and husbands. (But you wouldn’t know unless it was Thursday and we gave you some of our curry. We never shared these words in the mixed company of men or female acquaintances.) The first we would try to teach and let go and this would take a couple of decades, and the latter simply refused to grow up.

We talked of plans. We understood who would not stick out things for the long run. For them, it had everything to do with making a choice between being alive or atrophying into someone else’s expectation. None of us wanted to be that kind of anorexic. We knew who was staying for the big Toll Brothers house and the later years of spending retirement on separate vacations. We knew who hoped another child might fix all of this or at least fill a few years with busy. We knew who was just huffing and who actually researched divorce statutes. We watched out that no one got too upset, we all knew that brink where you stand and say, “I just don’t care.” We would only allow each other to peek at the edge and never let them stand there for too long. We ate a lot of chocolate and licorice. We did not judge one another’s sins or dreams. We remembered to listen and to look into each other’s eyes like old women. That’s the only way we could be so blunt.

Because it was the children that kept us locked in this place of limbo. We loved them and we learned to be alone. We had all had the moment of saying to our little one, “Unless there is a fire, flood, or locusts you will -not- disturb me”. We all knew what it was like to be in the middle of an intense conversation interrupted without half a pause for the terse comment, “The cat does not want the pencil stuck there,” and then return like a singer who does both the harmony and vocals in one straight take. We all knew the particular feeling of holding this little bundle asleep while the rain poured on the windows and nothing but life seemed so important. We all knew what it was like when they were sick and we were actually worried. We all knew the weary walk when fits of crying and fever did not end and there were still dishes, laundry and some reason the house had to be tidy on Saturday.

We all knew that place where you sit with tears at night and realize there are parts of this life which are non refundable, non changeable and on occasion stick on you like garish clothes. And we let ourselves say so late in the afternoon.

We’d swap books and magazines. We would complain unabashedly, while co-mingling the benefits of giving nurturing. We would all say, “Please grow up”. We learned how to hide our aches from everyone but each other. Almost.

Because we knew playtime was short and soon enough everyone would be wrestled into preschools and onto other places. We might not find this again to be a new young mother who could ramble and winge over Sag Panir. We would have to learn to grow up as well and stand without the safety net of our Thursdays. We’d adapt, we’d balance and we would go on with our lives. We would change, much in the same way we each gave birth. Completely alone and when we were exactly ready.

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.