Pancakes Taste Like Poverty: And Other Post-Divorce Revelations

by Jessica Vivian

  For Shirley, Sherrie, Christopher and

  my babies most of all.

  Preface

  A box of condoms started all of this.

  Well, to be perfectly honest it was a garbage can full of maggots, as you'll soon learn, and then a box of condoms.

  You see, I was ten years into an obligatory marriage when, during a family trip to get blueberry pancakes, I opened the glove box of my then-husband's car to stow away my cumbersome clutch and came to find a bright blue box of condoms tucked away inside.

  He froze. His face was all guilt, remorse, fear, panic, mouth agape, eyes wide. But I was awash with calm and blessed with a surprising lightness and relief.

  There was only one option. This was the end. This box of condoms was just one in a long list of symptoms of a poisonous, destructive marriage.

  I was staring right at my exit, my reality, my last straw.

  The last straw wasn't the time he skipped our first Christmas together to do cocaine all night.

  The last straw wasn't the time he cheated with the checkout girl from the title loan shop.

  The last straw wasn't the fact that the kids and I went without dental or medical care while he collected RC cars and swords and went on yoga retreats.

  The last straw wasn't when we moved into his parents house, having lost our house, and him asking if he could date one of his former classmates.

  And the last straw wasn't the love letter I found written to one of his ex-girlfriends a few weeks earlier.

  Nope, this was it.

  Shortly thereafter I scraped together enough money for a deposit on an apartment nearby. We'd been saving to get a house and move out of his parents house. I called my mom to help with the rest. Our belongings had been absorbed into his family with his siblings and parents borrowing and using and rarely replacing or returning. Boxes of our memories had been shoved into the deepest corners of closets and garages.

  I didn't care.

  I just wanted out.

  So I took my three children, a few backpacks of clothing and a mattress that his mother offered me and left the rest behind. The mattress was twenty years old, bowed in the middle, chewed by dogs and peed on by my bed-wetting children.

  It was more than enough. I just wanted out.

  And so there I was with three kids looking to me to handle everything. The fear couldn't show. The pain couldn't show. I had to be strong for them. And so, I took to journaling or, rather, blogging as a means of relieving the pressure.

  I just needed to be heard.

  What follows are my blog posts between 2011 and 2014. During that period I contemplated prostitution, dreamed about suicide, ate a lot of beans, moved, met amazing people, rebuilt myself, learned some parenting lessons, got Catfished, went back to college twice and found love.

  In addition to my blog posts are entries from a personal diary I was keeping at the time with the intention of publishing on the blog which never made it for one reason or another.

  Reading my blog posts now, the ups and downs seem to happen very quickly and I go from feeling powerful and full of light to murderous and sorrowful within a few sentences. I apologize in advance. But, if anything, it's an honest account of the post-divorce rollercoaster.

  I'd like to thank my mother for supporting me so endlessly, my sister for being my champion, my father and stepmother for depositing parcels of wisdom into my heart, the crazy blonde lady for showing me what community and solidarity mean, all my sisterwolves who roam and hunt together, my children who are so wise and patient, and Christopher, one of the loves of my life.

  And thank you, dear reader.

  J. Viv

  TAMPA

  Stuffed – February 2011

  I’m Jessica.

  I’m twenty-nine.

  I’m a mom of three.

  I’m very recently single after almost a decade of marriage.

  Yes, that would mean I got married before I could drink legally.

  No, I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.

  Getting divorced feels a bit like leaving one of those cults Dr. Phil is always trying to infiltrate. Any hopeful moments of freedom-triggered ecstasy is met with the terrifying and nauseating realization that you don’t know anything and the rest of the world evolved and expanded while you wiped spit-up from your bargain bin maternity tee.

  I spent my entire adult life identifying myself with the moods, thoughts and idiosyncrasies of one person.

  Add to that a lonely, latch-key childhood and an almost insatiable addiction to male attention and you’re left with one seriously lost individual.

  And so my quest begins to…

  (I can hardly type it, clichés make me gag)

  …to…find myself.

  Really. I don’t know how else to say it.

  Or, instead of finding myself, I am building myself. I'm sewing all the pieces together, stuffing myself with the love and attention I wasted on others, picking out a cute little outfit to wear so that I am irresistible to shoppers.

  There are some things I do know:

  I know I’m funny.

  I know I’m a good friend.

  I like to cook.

  I want Joseph Gordon-Levitt to be my next ex-husband.

  I love the Earth.

  My belief system is not exactly mainstream.

  I’m a good mom.

  I was a good wife.

  The rest will fall into place.

  I think that was another cliché. Sorry. I'll work on that.

  The Beginning of the End

  What's interesting about leaving a marriage is that what looks like the end is never the end for the person who's choosing to go.

  My eventual acceptance of my dead marriage came in the form of a few pivotal moments. It wasn't the fights or the drama or the transgressions. There were so many I couldn't begin to remember them all. But I do remember when the Universe first whispered for me to go.

  It was 2009 and we had been fighting for days. I have no idea what about. I was taking out the trash. I could hear the garbage truck coming.

  I lifted the lid of the giant trash can, already teeming with this week's batch of maggots, and the top- heavy container tipped over, spilling rotten food, fermenting garbage water and maggots all over my driveway.

  And then it hit me.

  Right in the chest.

  A sledgehammer.

  But the pain never let up.

  I gasped.

  I couldn't get air.

  A fist was squeezing my heart.

  Tighter and tighter

  I collapsed on the driveway.

  No air.

  Blackness.

  Stars.

  Slow down.

  Breathe.

  With each desperate gasp I could feel my throat closing, despite my attempts to control my body. My heart was pounding in my ears.

  I don't want my kids to find me. I don't want to die in my driveway.

  I don't want to die.

  I don't want to die fat.

  I don't want to die uneducated.

  I don't want the last decade to be the way I spent my adult life.

  I don't want this to be the last day.

  I heard a voice through the muddy drumming of my heartbeat. A vague figure came toward me. There was the faint, fruity stench of the garbage truck.

  You are in control.

  The drumming slowed.

  You are in control.

  I forced my lungs to work f
or me.

  This marriage will kill you.

  The garbage man helped me up and insisted we call an ambulance. Having no insurance, I insisted he didn't.

  I think it was a panic attack. It could have been a heart attack. Either way, the message was clear. My marriage was going to kill me. Maybe not immediately, but the stress and the holding in and the lack of respect/love/excitement/trust – all of it – would kill me.

  I looked at my life as someone's wife: I didn't finish college. I quit a job I was good at and that I loved, to support my husband's goals. I was forty pounds overweight. I was sleepy. I was angry. I was vengeful. I was getting migraines. I was miserable.

  And one day, I will die.

  There is nothing – absolutely not ONE thing – more valuable or precious than peace of mind. It's not security It's not what-your-family-will-think. It's not the-next-obvious-step-in-the-relationship.

  Nothing.

  From that point on, I told myself that even if I file for divorce and then turn around and get struck by a truck the fact that I finally put my happiness on the to-do list would be worth it. It would be worth it for my two girls. It would be worth it for my son.

  I do not believe, for a second, that I will get a gold star when I die and go to Heaven or wherever on my how-I-lived-my-life essay for my "Excellent Martyrdom."

  I had become one of those Oprah makeover "before" moms, something I had vowed NEVER to be. When I was just me, I thought I'd be a cast member on SNL or an English teacher or a sex therapist.

  I was none of the above.

  I was not much aside from embarrassed and ashamed.

  How did I get there?

  How did I get to the driveway, in Mobile, Alabama, covered in garbage juice, with a maggot in my hair, having a panic attack, with three barefoot kids in my rented house.

  HOW!?!?!

  And more importantly, how the hell do I get out?

  That was the day. That was when the seed was planted.

  I did not immediately file for divorce but we talked about it.

  Shortly after that, we found out we were getting evicted and decided to give each other “one last try” by starting afresh in Tampa, Florida near his family.

  Shortly after that the five of us were living in two rooms in his parents house, forced witnesses to their own crumbling marriage.

  Shortly after that he dated other women and wrote love notes to even more.

  And shortly after that, I saved myself and left.

  Moving Day

  He and I had a tendency to overestimate our ability to earn a living. We were perpetual minimalists; chronic purgers.

  If we didn't want to move something, we just threw it away.

  This wasn't my natural state, but he conditioned me to be this way.

  Only now, looking back, I know this is a manipulation tactic.

  When we first moved in together after finding out I was pregnant with our first child, while packing the things from my single-girl apartment he edited me aggressively.

  My beloved New Kids on the Block blanket that I'd had since I was ten, soft and heavily hugged. It was THE most comfortable thing. I used it to envelop drunk friends who stayed the night and they always woke up expressing exactly that.

  “This blanket is THE most comfortable thing.”

  It had to go because it was “stupid.”

  I went to the same small private school from first grade until graduation. Like all kids, the majority of my formative years were spent at school. It was my dysfunctional family. My yearbooks were my dysfunctional family album.

  They had to go because they were “heavy.”

  Piece by piece my “before” was erased and being so young and so scared and so desperate I didn't put up much of a fight.

  The pictures of his pre-Jessica partying and pre-Jessica girlfriends became shrined in his memories got to stay despite my protests.

  It was so subtle but so obvious looking back.

  But then I didn't know anything. I was brainless.

  So again, when I was manipulated into leaving my turf and coming back to Tampa, I was advised to leave it all behind because “the kids and I are already here, just bring what you can fit in your car. We can replace the stuff. It's just stuff.”

  This resulted in ten years of existence being reduced to little more than a few boxes of essential books and photo albums, suitcases of clothing and little else.

  We were “starting over.”

  This proved to be extremely inconvenient when it was time to move out on my own.

  When we moved into his parents' house it was made clear our presence, rightfully, was not exactly welcome.

  It wasn't long before our boxes got shoved and dumped and upended into random closets already stuffed to the brim with however many years worth of his parents' stuff.

  The archaeological mission of finding our things, which had already been squished and integrated into their things was, frankly, not worth it.

  I just wanted out.

  I wanted out.

  I did manage to find one box of books.

  I never found another, full of my smutty books of erotica and studies of Japanese sex clubs. It is still lost, somewhere, in my conservative Christian ex-mother-in-law's house both to my dismay and delight.

  My in-laws let me take the mattress our family had been sleeping on. My kids had taken to bed-wetting and the twenty-something year old mattress had already been chewed by its previous occupant's pet Chihuahuas.

  It was holey and pissy and, apparently, now mine.

  And that was about it.

  I'd been planning my escape for longer than I realized, squirreling away money when I worked at my last job as a hotel concierge. I'd been away from that job for about six months under his advice. The schedule was too hard with three little ones and getting them to school was too much. I should just let him handle the work and bills and find another job with a better schedule.

  With this squirreled money and a huge, huge amount from my mom I was able to get an apartment less than five minutes from the majority of his family. I had no family nor friends of my own in Tampa so I figured close would be better.

  His mom and I moved my three boxes, three kids, piss-mattress and I to the new place.

  And despite having no furniture, no toiletries, no groceries, no toys and now, no father in the home my kids were shockingly...light.

  They were giggly and happy and buoyant and sunshiny.

  To them, the lack didn't matter. This place was new and it was ours.

  It was ours.

  We didn't have to follow his mom's rules or dodge his dad. We didn't have that constant unwelcome guest feeling. We could do whatever we wanted.

  I should have been relieved that my kids were adjusting so well but honestly, it stung. This could have been my kids all along. I'd kept them from feeling like this. Because I wanted to make it work with their father. I was so caught up in trying to make peace and do what's right that I didn't even notice the effect all of the dysfunction had on my kids. They were the way they were because life had always been the way it was. And life with him was unpredictable, mad, unstable, highly sensitive, fragile, precarious, dizzying, obligatory...

  And my kids had developed coping strategies or no strategies at all. And I thought it was just “who they were.” But it wasn't...

  In “doing what's right” I'd actively taken place in the breaking of my children. And here I was, in my absolute darkest and most lacking and I was seeing them for the first time ever.

  But they'd seen me. They'd seen him and his family and all of it.

  I hadn't protected them from anything. I'd exposed them to far too much by doing “what's right.”

  But the apartment was the end of that and the beginning of putting us first.

  For lunch that day we had pizza. We ate it on the floor near the piss-mattress in the living room and huddled watching DVDs o
n my laptop. Then we unpacked what little we had and giggled and checked in with the family.

  His sisters came by gifting us our first set of much needed and much appreciated groceries.

  As night fell, we realized we didn't have lamps for any of the rooms with the only light coming from the bathroom.

  That's an easy fix. We can get lamps.

  I was just so happy to cuddle and hold my new children. Their energy fed me.

  But alas it was time for dinner so we decided to reheat the leftover pizza in the oven. But when I went to retrieve the piping hot pizza to deliver it to my bright, delighted children who were high on the novelty of the new space I realized I had no oven mitts.

  And I had no towels.

  I had no rubber gloves.

  I had no paper towels.

  I had no tongs.

  I had no forks.

  I had no foil.

  I had absolutely no method of retrieving the pizza from the oven.

  It was at that moment I realized:

  Jessica,

  You're fucked.

  D-Day

  The process of the actual divorce was easy - too easy I would later find out. Since I had no money it was cheap to file. Since we had no things there was nothing to split.

  I literally printed the divorce off the county clerk's website and filled it out myself. I decided on a reasonable amount for child support and mapped out visitation.

  Neither was an issue.

  He had since been kicked out of his parents' house and was living with a roommate somewhere across town. Since his living situation was less conducive to overnight stays he would come spend the weekends at the apartment with us.

  It seems strange but I had no anger toward him. There was nothing to fight about. So we could get on co-parenting and just being teammates without all the messy business of loving each other or being faithful or sober.

  He could spend his week being as drunk and promiscuous as he pleased. I didn't know. It wasn't my business anymore and I didn't care.