Sleeping Solo: One Woman's Journey into Life after Marriage

by Audrey Faye

  The universe didn’t make me wait long.

  The house was vacant, the realtor and seller were motivated, and I had enough dollars to juggle to somehow make it work. And my ribs never wavered in their certainty that no matter how fast and furious and possibly insane this looked to the rest of the world, it was absolutely right.

  And if I hadn’t been convinced, the universe wasn’t quite done showing off yet.

  Buying a house requires a lot of help. Lawyer, bankers, home insurance agent. I’d worked with these people six months previously, closing on the original home I’d purchased here. They’re the kind of people you want on your team—competent, personable, and obsessive about doing things right.

  I had no idea they were also fairy godmothers.

  It started when I stopped in to ask my banker how fast they could do the mortgage paperwork, so I could pick the date I wanted to close when I put in my offer. I had visions of paperwork vanishing down the black hole of the Christmas holidays, and I wanted to be realistic. She asked me how fast I wanted the house—and I was shell-shocked and bruised enough to tell her the absolute truth.

  As fast as humanly possible.

  I won’t bore you with all the logistical details of this circle of women who rose up to deliver my holiday miracle. I’ll only tell you this—they had me in my new house in just over two weeks.

  TWO WEEKS.

  Fairy. Godmothers.

  I didn’t move in right away—it was a few days before Christmas and I didn’t want to disrupt the kids until the presents were opened and the tree came down. But I spent time there every single day, painting, turning in slow circles, sweeping. Sitting in the middle of an empty living room in grateful tears.

  Beginning to imagine a future in which I could breathe.

  The total awesomeness of my very own bed. I had my nest, but I also needed to be realistic. Lots of the old stuff was moving with me to the new house, including the guy who had just blown up my world. We’d be sleeping separately, but our use of the rest of the house was going to overlap.

  Which meant that the one space that was entirely, completely, totally mine was my bedroom. Four lovely textured plaster walls and a window. Which is about all I had for a bedroom at that point, because after one very miserable, nauseous night spent in the bed of my imploded marriage, I’d been sleeping on a couch ever since.

  So I got to start totally fresh. I splurged on a really amazing mattress and beautiful sheets. Nobody in the whole wide world has a bed as deliciously comfortable as mine, or at least that’s what I believe every night when I slide into it. It is pure, selfish luxury, and I totally adore it.

  The rest, I did on a budget. A cheap bed frame and small dresser in simple white. A plant stand for a touch of whimsy. White shower curtains to cover my window when I want to cocoon.

  And my very favorite part, the bit that makes me happy every time I walk in, wake up, or look up from my laptop. The results of a single can of screaming teal paint.

  I’ve painted a lot of bedrooms in my lifetime. I love paint and the new, clean, personal vibe it can give a room. Even when I was a student on a really tight budget, I found the dollars for a can or two and a way to get it on my walls. But never, in my whole entire life, have I had a color on my walls that is this perfectly me. It’s daring and comforting and bold and cozy and so entirely right.

  I remember very clearly the night that I finally finished building the bed frame and crawled into my luxurious nest of a bed. I was tired, and a little cranky from trying to figure out what to do with eighteen kinds of screws, and still treading gingerly with my very bruised heart. I sat there a moment, ensconced in silk-soft sheets and a pile of pillows, surrounded by my deliriously teal walls—and felt my soul exhale.

  I’d just come home.

  To a small part of the world that was, even as unfinished as it still was, clearly meant to be my oasis. The place where I get, all the time, to be absolutely me.

  I think, even then, the seeds of sleeping solo had taken root.

  It’s been one of my secret joys in the past eight months to continue to decorate this room. I’ve bought very little, other than a small painting called Moonflower that I fell hopelessly in love with at first sight. Mostly it’s been a process of finding treasures. Things I had tucked away in boxes, bits and pieces that I made over the years. Pebbles collected from the beach and trinkets from friends. No clutter—this room is a place of meaning, a place of self-expression. The very first time in a long time that I got to create something that was purely, simply, deeply about me.

  It’s not done yet. There are still bare spaces on a couple of my walls, and a sense that a few things that are meant to be here haven’t quite arrived yet.

  But when I walk into this room, my heart sings.

  I know all that now. Back then, I just knew I finally had my bulwark—my place to stand while the world stormed around me.

  My place to heal.

  Because, silly me, I assumed that’s what the next many months were going to be all about.

  The sneaking of the light. The three weeks of frozen were very scary for me. I’ve never felt my body do that before. I stopped eating—stopped being able to eat all but a very few things without feeling nauseous. I’d already been teetering on the edge of anemia and adrenal fatigue and several other consequences of long-term exhaustion. But I’d always managed to pull it out. To keep feeling okay.

  This was different, and it was a pretty abrupt wake-up call. I have two kids to be present and accounted for, and they need a mom who isn’t sick. My body was sending me a very clear message—that dangerous edge had just gotten a lot less stable.

  It was also, however, sending me these teasing hints of other possibilities.

  I’m a scientist and a data analyst, and I grew up in a lawyer’s house. I don’t embrace the woo all that easily. Until it started showing off. Big things, like pulling a house and a team of fairy godmothers out of its hat.

  But there were little things, too. One afternoon, shortly after the rush and bustle of getting us all over to the new house, I lay on one of the beds in my daughter’s room, cocooned under a duvet (one of my son’s favorite games that month was to hide people like this.) It was warm and cozy, and I drifted, a little sleepy, and listened to the sounds of two mellow, happy kids.

  It took a while for the message seeping out from my ribs to register.

  My marriage had exploded—not my entire world.

  And if I could unfreeze just a little, there was more than survival ahead of me. More than a fight to hold together the ragged pieces of what had once been good.

  In my soft, warm, safe cocoon, I could finally feel it—somewhere under all the ice and cold, embers were slowly fanning. I wasn’t a wimp. I might not have heeded all the warning signs in my marriage, but I didn’t deserve this.

  And I had two kids who were still capable of making happy sounds on an ordinary afternoon.

  I don’t think it was any accident that this clarity hit after I moved into my new house. That was the first big step away from ground zero, and I will always be immensely grateful that I was able to take it. It gave me my first and best beachhead against the cold—and the beginning hints of a sense that the most important part of what came next wouldn’t be what was ending.

  It would be what was beginning.

  I remember how astonished I was as that thought took form, the wild idea that my job right now wasn’t to cry and weep and mourn my marriage. That needed to happen, but it wasn’t the compass point that needed to drive the next few months.

  To find that, I needed to figure out what was fluttering to life inside my ribs.

  A breadcrumb trail to clarity. I didn’t come out of my afternoon in the duvet cocoon as a butterfly. I was still dealing with long stretches of devastated and bleak and flattened, afraid to look forward and terrified not to.

  But in the days that followed, sneaking in around the edges came some small ripples that kept nudging me back t
o that sense that there was something more here than endings. The evenings where I breathed a sigh of anticipation as I closed the doors on my children’s bedrooms and contemplated an entire couple of hours to myself. The laundry that got done in two loads a week instead of five. The creeping pleasure of sitting on the beach alone and letting sand meander through my fingers.

  The slow exhale as dozens of small weights slid off my shoulders.

  My marriage was a good one—I still believe that. But we had accumulated a heaviness that I didn’t really understand until it wasn’t mine to hold anymore. I wish there had been a chance to lighten it together, but one of the gifts of nuclear meltdown is the clear, certain knowledge that things are truly over.

  I didn’t choose to blow things up. And it felt almost wrong at first to acknowledge the lighter places—until I realized they had found me a tiny, chinked-open door to the rest of my life. The explosion of my marriage had created a lot of holes. Big, jagged, bleeding ones. But holes are also doors and opportunities and escape valves and bringers of the light.

  It was time to start finding the good in where I’d landed.

  Collecting traveling companions. I’d figured out that I didn’t need a therapist, and I didn’t want to talk. But I was pretty sure that I still wanted help. Guides, people with a little more experience in this country where my ribs knew things first and decisions got made based on how easy it was to breathe.

  I’ve always been deeply intuitive—I’ve always known things, always gotten to the answers differently than most people I know. But I didn’t come at the outside world that way. I was a rational, articulate, creative thinker who always had words and smart explanations and solid common sense.

  I met the world through my head—not my ribs.

  But I wasn’t trying to meet the world this time. I was trying to meet me. So I let my ribs loose, looking for people, for resources, for tools, for mentors. Followed my intuition without trying to layer a whole lot of words over it.

  Some of what I needed was already there. The choir that sings in a big circle and wrapped me in sound and light, every single week. The words of the wise old Irish witch in my own books—and the fierce mamas. The yarn, spun by my own hands, that gave me tangible metaphors for wisdom and hope and strength. The two children who know what it is to be deeply in this moment and not worry too much about the next.

  Sometimes you just have to shift the way you look at things that are already there.

  But sometimes, especially if you’re stubborn and smart and full of words like me, it helps to have a guide. When you’re about to dump over a bunch of waterfalls on a hellbent ride down a winter river, it’s very good to have someone holding space for the landing.

  I found the first of mine very quickly. She’s part writing coach, part woman of the wild and witchy and woo, part therapist, part ass-kicker. She asks the uncomfortable questions, holds up a mirror so I can see what just happened or who I am or what I’m squirming away from, and sends me boxes that smell like sexy ancient forests.

  But mostly, she took what was already sneaking in the door—the light, the beginnings, the sense that my ribs really had this—and helped me to put them at the center.

  It was time to walk on this road of mine, instead of curling up on the shoulder.

  A waterfall into myself. I wish I could lay the journey of the next few months out for you in some kind of nice, comforting, linear path (I actually, at one point in writing this, did try). It would make this all sound a little saner, and it would comfort my inner story-structure chick. But I can’t. It was a waterfall—a beautiful, overwhelming, wild and scary and enchanting ride, and I spent a lot of it tumbling around, not at all clear which way was up, learning to worry less about gravity, less about where I was headed, and more about how it felt to be.

  How it felt to be present.

  How it felt to be wide open.

  How it felt to be in my body and listening to my own wisdom.

  How it felt to make the words come last, or never, instead of first.

  A beautiful jumble I can’t lay out in any nice, neat way, but what I can tell you about are some of the things that happened along the way.

  I fell in love with the elements. I had moved to a very walkable neighborhood close to a beach—two beaches, actually. A lovely, windy, stormy temperamental one, full of pebbles and strong opinions. It is happy to remind me that I’m wildly alive—or I can sit very quietly and let the wind push at my cheeks and know that something much bigger and older and more tenacious than me exists. Or I can I trek to my lovely quiet cove beach and soak in the gentle heart of the ocean and the grains of sand that know everything there is to know about grief and let the waves lap my toes.

  Yes—I’ve suddenly discovered that, in the right environments, I’m a forty-four-year-old mystic.

  My kick-ass guide person helped me to get outside. Out of my cozy retreat of a house where sometimes I can fall into my own head and never come out. Out into the world that blusters one day and teases me with hints of sunshine the next, or offers up the first bright, daring daffodils of spring on a morning that feels like winter may never end.

  These days, it’s the sultry summer evenings calling, the ones that lure me into being a hedonist. But back then, I was simply falling in love with the rhythm and the power and the deep, vast comfort of earth and wind and water and sky and moon. Centering and balance, in an utterly tangible way that I adored, and found wasn’t so foreign after all.

  And I was, in the same tumbling journey, falling in love with my ribs and all they connected to. Learning to turn inward, past my words and past my head and really tune in to what my body knew. What it needed. What it could give.

  Learning to get out of the way of my own strength.

  I watched in awe as my heart reached out and anchored my children in its fierce, fiery, soft, watery depths. As my lungs and throat sang deep, wordless misery out into the ocean and let peace rise up in its wake. As my DNA reached out to the rocks and water of this island and found unshakeable home.

  Well, I didn’t watch, exactly. That’s not how this whole being-in-your-body thing works.

  All I know is that it was fast and furious and full of wild joy as I realized that I already knew how to do these things.

  I already know.

  That was such a profound and giddy revelation for me. This wasn’t going to be a journey of endurance and survival and scrambling to teach my forty-four-year-old self new things that I would probably suck at and need to practice for a decade until I got any good.

  I remember the first time I lit a fire in the woods. I was twenty-two, and I’d somehow landed a job taking troubled teens on weeks-long canoe trips in the Canadian wilderness, even though I’d never been camping in my life. I had a week to learn all the important stuff, like how to paddle and how to avoid getting lost even though the maps were thirty years out of date and how to build a fire that might actually turn a bunch of unidentifiable dehydrated stuff into a meal.

  The guy teaching the fire-building lesson had lots of tips on keeping your pockets full of birchbark and how to make this neat little teepee of tinder and tiny sticks in the middle of your much larger teepee of dutifully dry wood so that you could tease a few sparks of fire into life.

  I built my teepees, shredded my birchbark, carefully positioned myself on my knees to blow gently on the small flames that had lit agreeably when I’d dropped my match.

  And nearly lost my eyebrows as a bonfire raced to life. I might have used a little too much birchbark.

  This knowing inside me was like that. And for the second time in my life, I nearly lost my eyebrows.

  I had somehow expected to be a babe, barely learning to crawl, as I tried to learn new ways of being and doing in the still-scarred earth I was traveling through. Instead, I discovered a grown woman—one who has been waiting forty-four years for me to give her just a little more oxygen. (Well, she kind of slid out through the crack of my books and danced around i
n glitter and dared me not to notice her, but I hadn’t quite realized that yet.)

  So I breathed, because when you’re tumbling in a waterfall, that’s not exactly optional. And watched this amazing me come blazing out to greet the world.

  She’s not shy. (Dear introvert, hang on for the ride.)

  She’s got the whole how-to-be-in-community thing pretty figured.

  She’s got really low tolerance for choices that lead to exhaustion.

  She’s a rockin’ mom.

  She has some crazypants stories she wants to write, and she’s not all that interested in whether they will make me rich or not, although she seems to think the fame thing would be pretty okay.

  She’s silly and she likes to laugh and she has amazing patience with moments that might head to either of those.

  She’s a warrior—and she knows which fights matter.

  She’s got this.

  New skin takes some getting used to. So, I’d gone over the wild waterfall of this life-changing winter. I’d hit the bottom full of this awesome, tumbling well of wisdom and energy, resident right inside my own ribs. Now I just had to figure out what to do with it.

  It felt an awful lot like someone had handed me a leather miniskirt and four-inch heels and told me to go for a little stroll. Kind of giddy, way unbalanced, miles outside my usual comfort zone, and pretty sure to attract notice.

  Fortunately for me, the ones who noticed first were my kids. A mom with more patience, more silliness, and a sudden affection for midwinter full-moon walks and talking to rocks? Both my kids gravitated to that like moths to flame.

  It was a good place to begin to learn where to walk with all this jazzy new power.

  I love my kids so very much. I would die for them, crawl through burning coals for them. As it turns out, neither of those things came up. My newly loud insides made that clear. As I listened with my ears and my energy and my heart, I could see what resonated best for these two little people I cherish, and it changed my job description so fast that I am still catching up.