by Audrey Faye
Sleeping Solo
One Woman’s Journey into Life After Marriage
Audrey Faye
© 2014
Disclaimer. This is a very personal essay, and unlike most of my writing, it’s not fiction. It is my opinions, my recollections, my interpretations of some of the events of my life. It’s not intended to be definitive, factual, or to speak for anyone other than me.
Dedication
To Maia, to Casey, and to Jill.
You know why.
(If you don’t, keep reading!)
An introduction of sorts. On December 2, 2013, my marriage of twelve years exploded. It left little bits of brain and heart matter all over the walls, and the certain, irrevocable knowledge that my life had just radically changed shape forever.
So I did what all courageous, independent, strong women do when such things happen—I curled up into a tiny ball in a corner of my couch and wished piteously for it to all go away.
It didn’t, and eight months later, I don’t assume the fetal position all that much anymore. I’ve made peace with some of what happened and kicked some of it to the curb. I’ve figured out how to step around and over marital debris without tripping every time, and learned some new definitions for what it means to be strong and courageous.
And because I am a writer, I feel a need to commit this journey to the black-and-white page.
I could have waited until I arrived at some kind of destination to begin the writing, and I’m sure the neat-and-tidy part of my soul would have preferred that. But that’s not the message that the words knocking at my door are delivering. They’re telling me that the power lies in speaking now, in writing now while all of this feels very immediate and real and the frothing waters of this particular river are still flowing around my legs.
I can do that because this isn’t advice. I’m not trying to tell anyone else how to move on after their marriage ends, gracefully or otherwise. I’m offering up the very personal brushstrokes of my own experience while the painting is still underway. Partly because the words are gushing from my fingertips, insisting on being heard. Partly because it is exactly these intimate bits from other travelers on the road that I most appreciate reading right now.
And partly because what I’ve found in this stream is too good to keep to myself.
On the 2nd of December, I knew only that I’d been unceremoniously dumped out onto the road of a new journey. I expected it to be dusty and hard and short on food and water, a gut-wrenching endurance test that would take a long time to wind its way to ease and peace and a modicum of happiness.
That’s not what happened at all.
Even as I write that sentence, I am so damn grateful.
That’s not what happened at all.
There have been hard days and dusty ones, and I’ll do my best, in this missive from the road, to speak the truth of those moments too. But the words clamoring at my door aren’t the dusty ones—they’re the ones full of surprised pride in the journey that has actually happened instead. The ones full of abundance and purpose and happiness and the wild, bubbling need to dance.
Yeah. Not what I expected from my post-marriage apocalypse either.
This isn’t one of those organized tales with a purpose and a coherent message with lots of supporting facts. Which is ironic, because I’m actually pretty good at writing those.
This is a trail of little jewels hidden in the grass. Or chocolate bread crumbs. The nuggets that smile at me and ask to be written, and the less polite ones that wake me up at night and insist at their turn on the page. Some of them are about my bed and my kids and some are about the importance of the right word and at least one is apparently going to be about my sex life.
All of them are honest, and all of them say something that seems to matter to me as I stand here in this particular part of this particular stream.
There are so many of us on variations of this journey, picking ourselves and our various battered pieces up after a crash and taking the steps that walk us to the rest of our lives.
And I bet I’m not the only one who is really surprised by where those steps have gone.
So have fun meandering through my breadcrumbs. See if anything in the dusty bits or the dancing ones speaks to your heart, or simply walk with me a while and enjoy the glimpse of someone else’s road.
Ground zero. I know, I know. I just enticed you in the door with promises of happy dancing in the streets and shiny, pretty things in the grass. Don’t worry, we’ll get there. But first I have to take you back to the 2nd of December and the bomb blast that took out everything good in my marriage and set a whole lot of other things on fire too.
I’m not going to get into the specifics of what went down. Baring my soul is one thing, but I don’t intend to strip several other people naked too. What matters is that the blast was big and ugly and very, very permanent. There would be no gluing the shrapnel of my marriage back together, no repairing the shreds of the intimate connection I had belonged to for more than twelve years.
If I could have run for the hills at that point, I would have. I’d have gotten as far away as I could from the damage, built a really bad-ass brick wall up to the sky, and started a new life. Everything in me screamed for distance and safety.
But I couldn’t do that.
I have two kids—and the guy who had just detonated the explosion is their dad. We were a family of four who had just been blown to smithereens. Which meant I had responsibilities, and my heart, killer bruises and all, knew it. I had to stay at ground zero and keep the promises I’d made, twice, on the glorious, crazy, life-changing days when each of my children were born.
I’m good in a crisis, the kind of person you want in charge of triage and handing out the bandages and setting up search parties to find traces of life under the rubble. So I started taking action. Research, lawyers, house hunting—applying bandages to the worst of the bleeding and desperately trying to figure out how to keep as little of this from landing on my kids as humanly possible.
I also had a book to release. Oh, and Christmas. Of all the pure, clear instincts that rose up right after the explosion, one of the fiercest was that I would not let my kids’ world fall apart during the holiday they and I love so very much.
So most people, watching from the outside, saw a flurry of action. And rightly so, I think—my house was on fire.
Here’s what people didn’t see so much in those early days.
I was cold. Deep-freeze winter-tundra cold in every cell of my body. I’ve never been so cold in my entire life, and that’s saying something when you grew up in the Canadian prairies. Emotional-onset hypothermia—my body’s way of responding to the blast that had just hit.
I might have managed to ignore the chattering cold, even as I layered on sweaters and socks and huddled under piles of blankets, trying desperately to shelter my inner fires. But the cold came with a friend—I also wasn’t eating.
You have to understand—I can always eat, and when things get tough, I comfort eat. Food is one of my constants, and if you’d asked me how I expected to respond in the days following nuclear meltdown, I would have sighed and started inventorying my chocolate stash.
So when all I could manage to get down for days at a time were small bowls of yogurt and a little fruit, it made a very big impression. I lost weight, fast—not something that had ever happened in my world. And all this on the heels of a doctor’s visit in November where it was clear I was borderline anemic and fighting adrenal fatigue.
My body was teetering on the brink of something dark and dangerous.
Which was
a huge gift—I just didn’t know it then. Because it’s pretty much impossible to ignore your body turning into an ice cube.
The monsters under the bed. I’m one of those people who spends a lot of time wandering my inner landscapes. Even as my teeth chattered, I knew I was scared, and I knew quite a bit of why.
The dangers stalking my kids were the most obvious of the monsters.
My son is severely autistic. He’s a gorgeous little guy with brown curls and big eyes that study the world and a laugh that gurgles from his belly. He loves to be outside—I think the drumbeat that he follows is easier to hear out there. He doesn’t speak, and his brain doesn’t make much sense of the words we say to him, either. He communicates through touch and love and sound and the persistent patience of a child who has never known anything different.
I love him with a fierceness that flattens me sometimes, but I was not ready for what faced me in the aftermath of December 2nd. Our boy had always had two parents in the house—literally. We both worked from home since before he was born, and that shaped every aspect of how we parented. There was always backup, always a second pair of hands to call on, even if those hands were technically busy writing a book or shipping a package or attempting to eke out five minutes of peace.
The idea of parenting my son without that backup was overwhelming. And my fears for his future, never entirely quiescent, were breeding horrible monster babies in the night.
My daughter doesn’t have the obvious life challenges her brother faces. She’s my sensitive, musical, imaginative child—what you might get if you crossed a dragon and a fairy. A girl who feels everything deeply, standing on the cusp of where childhood ends and the wild teenage lands beyond begin. She loves so very much, and change always shakes her hard.
Of all of us, I expected her to feel the cracks in the foundation of our family most deeply, and I felt entirely helpless to protect her. I also had no idea how to juggle her needs while taking care of her brother. Two parents and two kids had always been our family math. Two kids and one mama felt like a one-way trip to parenting on fumes. Or worse.
Somewhere, buried beyond the fears for my kids, was a horrible grief for the man I had married, and utter confusion about what my promises to him meant in all of this.
And the last person I was so very scared for was me. I’d been handed something I wasn’t at all sure I could handle—and I was going to have to handle it alone.
Alone.
Two syllables quietly causing devastating tremors in the cracks of my heart.
I’d been alone, you see. I’d had an important relationship crash once before, and I knew what it was to walk bravely through my days and work on healing and deliver on my responsibilities and gamely seek out the things that would make me a fulfilled human being. I’d done it. And while that was a time long before kids and marriage and the life I had now, I remembered two things very clearly.
It had been very hard work. And at the bottom of it all, I hadn’t been very happy. I’d yearned for many of the things that come only with a partner. Shared roots, love, an ineffable sense of belonging.
I’d survived alone, but I hadn’t thrived there. I’d passed the endurance test, that was all.
And now it was back—and I was exhausted, heart sick, living in a new town hundreds of miles from my old home, and responsible to two kids and my own frozen self.
Words weren’t going to fix this. About three days after nuclear meltdown, I sat down in a counselor’s office. I’d been through a relationship crash once before, and therapy was hugely helpful in getting me back on my feet. So being the responsible medic that I was, I triaged the mess and decided that getting me some help was a pretty big priority.
This psychologist was a lovely lady, full of empathy and smart questions. She’d clearly dealt with frozen bodies and shell-shocked hearts before, and we spent an hour together, exploring how she might help me find my feet.
I left knowing that therapy wouldn’t be the path for me. Not this time. I could feel the truth of it clamoring in my ribs—the ribs that belonged to the body that wasn’t eating or sleeping or keeping itself warm.
I’m a writer, and a talker—someone who has always done some of my best thinking out loud. I’ve got good intuition, I love to wrap my head around ideas, and I have the courage to hold up a mirror and take a look. I trust the realm between my ears to help me make things better.
And yet, my ribs clamored. Not this time.
I still don’t know how I knew so clearly that the lovely lady and her smart questions were entirely the wrong choice this time around. There was simply the persistent conviction, coming from somewhere deep under my frozen ribs, that I needed a very different kind of push, something where my usual choice for how to process things wasn’t allowed to be front and center, running the show.
Words weren’t going to fix the monsters under this bed.
This was too big to trust my strengths. Too important.
I know that sounds strange, but when business as usual has just had a fairly spectacular failure, it’s kind of a wake-up call. My head had seen the evidence of the months leading up to nuclear meltdown—but it hadn’t followed that data to the right place. I’d seen splinters on the decking, not the impending fracture of the whole damn boat.
And my best instincts, the ones that felt the energy shift and had no words to communicate that the boat didn’t feel right anymore, hadn’t been the ones in my head.
I was also in a hurry. I wanted far out of this place of frozen yuckiness, and I needed—really, really needed—to set my feet on solid parenting ground. For all the words I knew I could spill into the lovely lady’s lap, that wasn’t the way. Not fast enough, not solid enough.
My house was on fire, and I wanted a fire hose.
And a new house.
So I listened to my ribs—and a house is exactly what came next.
Four walls, a roof, and hope. I remember the first time that I took a full, deep, free breath after the 2nd of December. It was less than a week later, and I had left my son and my husband sitting in the car and followed a realtor into a vacant house.
It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, and I probably didn’t look like a serious buyer. I had no agent, I had no questions, I just walked in the door of the brand-new listing and meandered slowly through the main floor of the cozy, newly renovated ranch house. Here in Victoria that era still built houses with modest amounts of character—textured walls and coved ceilings and big, beautiful windows that even in the gloom of December called in beautiful, slanted light.
I’m sure the realtor was talking, but I didn’t hear a word he said.
I was listening to my ribs breathe.
Most people thought I was crazy to be looking for a new house. Driven by pollen allergies and overcrowded schools, we’d just uprooted ourselves from our home of seven years and moved across international borders to Victoria, BC. A place none of us had ever lived before, where we had no close family, no credit history, no idea where to find the right kind of hot dogs.
For me, it was a kind of coming home—I grew up in Canada, just not this part. We had a week to scout the city, find a neighborhood, choose a house. The one we settled on was the best option available at the time, and I figured I was adaptable enough to adjust to the things about it that weren’t ideal.
Four months later, I was already browsing real estate listings, sobered by the new realization that I was a lot pickier about the space I called home than I had understood.
Then the bomb of December 2nd went off, and my less-than-ideal house was suddenly ground zero and I was the cold, sad body curled up on one end of a couch in a home that wasn’t ever going to meet my needs for safety and security and privacy. Or anyone else’s, either.
It didn’t take long for clarity to work its way through the cold. I had to move—we had to move. There had to be a very different kind of space supporting us as a family if we were going to keep things remotely sane for the kids. One with d
ifferent energy and better separation of space, and one that would drain our finances less.
I didn’t actually expect such a house to materialize. But even as I tried to figure out how to erect emergency shelter in the home I had, I began to look for an alternative.
The first couple I toured had possibilities—if we had still been an intact family. It was a spiking, terrible sadness to know that we weren’t.
And then I found the brand-new listing for a small, freshly renovated ranch house with big windows and a separate suite downstairs. It was tucked away in a nearby neighborhood I hadn’t even known existed, four blocks from the beach.
That’s the house where I left my son and husband sitting in the car outside.
It only took about ten seconds to know I’d found refuge. Maybe two minutes longer for my brain to agree with the certainty in my ribs.
In this house, I could breathe. Here, I could create a home for my family in whatever form that took in the coming months and years.
A nest, cozy and full of light. That was the promise of the tiny dining nook with windows on two sides and the old, gnarled tree just out the window, glistening with shiny drops of winter rain. The home stager had put a high table and bar stools in the small space, and it was exactly right for perching.
There were lots of good reasons to like this house—practical, sane, rational arguments for uprooting us all from the place we’d barely landed. My lawyer’s daughter brain marshalled them all, and finally agreed with my ribs that this was a smart decision.
But it was my ribs that knew the most important thing. When airplane disaster strikes, put on your own air mask first. A house is a pretty oversized air mask, but I could tell, even then, that it was going to be a rockstar one.
The outlines of a space where I could breathe.
Air masks aren’t panacea—they don’t fix everything. I was still really cold on a dismayingly regular basis, eating was hit or miss, and I still spent every night dozing fitfully on a couch in a house full of ghosts and sadness. But every time I felt all the air squeeze out of me, I pulled up the pictures of my little ranch home on my laptop.
