by Audrey Faye
Because that is truly the learning that landed in my lap. To walk with my new compass and reshape every part of my life while listening, very carefully, to what I already know, but haven’t always given air.
And it was right and good to begin with my walk as a mom. I’d been so terrified for my kids, trying to figure out how to shield them, how to control the world and keep it gentle for them, furious at the man who had made sure I would fail.
The warrior mama in my heart knew to let all of that go.
My job isn’t to get between my children and the world. It’s to walk at their side, be the wind at their back and the soft place to land and the presence that will honor who they are whenever they need to be loved and seen. My job is to be resilient and happy and silly and steady and awesome, to be sad and bounce back, to side-eye change and then embrace it anyhow.
I am the witness to their journey, a mentor, and a fellow traveler on the road.
Yeah. Four-inch heels would have been way easier. And I probably would have failed miserably in this particular shift, because it was scary as hell to walk those two steps from the front of my children to their sides. Except for one thing.
They both bloomed like magic, rainbow flowers as soon as I did it. I won’t go into the details, because even the children of authors deserve a little privacy. But trust me, it would have been impossible to miss the neon flashing signs of rightness.
It was the middle of winter, there was nuclear meltdown in our midst—and my children were blooming.
Even I am not dumb enough or stubborn enough to walk away from the waterfall that brought me that.
There were still plenty of things to trip over. Blooming kids were one thing. A car with a very dead battery just seemed like an unfair karmic kick I shouldn’t have to deal with.
And yet, hiding under the cruel injustice, the same lesson poked out.
Most of this journey, in fact, hasn’t involved the big, red-letter stuff. There have been lots of little things—and oddly, those took longer and tripped me up more often than getting the really big things right.
But these little rocks mattered, too. They were the stumbles that dumped me off balance and left me feeling like an awkward tourist in my new life, instead of a native. I was married for twelve years. So very many parts of how I did everyday things were shaped around that one simple truth.
And then suddenly, a whole bunch of those defaults disappeared. I don’t have a default listener anymore, or a default source of egg-drop soup when I’m sick or hugs when I’m sad. There isn’t a plug-and-play couch buddy on movie night or an obvious person to call when fourteen warning lights bling into life on my car dashboard—and then all go out.
The car thing jarred me particularly hard because this is one of those jobs I defaulted to the man in my life with joy and gladness. I am a car moron, and I was very happy to ditch any responsibility other than knowing where my keys lived. The afternoon of the suddenly very dead battery dropped the rest of car reality back in my life with a big, ugly thunk. I spent an angsty hour cursing at the universe in general and several people specifically and contemplating life with a bus pass instead of a temperamental, middle-aged car.
And then I tottered in my stupid new shoes over to the website of the BC Automobile Association and discovered they rescue damsels in car distress and like doing it.
It wasn’t particularly graceful—but I felt pretty good knowing that the next time my car crapped out on me, my new life had a solution.
Over time, I came up with an inelegant, but effective system to deal with these details—if they made me trip, I gave them some attention. There are probably smarter ways to have gone about deciding my priorities, but sometimes diligent earns you more points than smart. I’ve set up a calendar reminder to take out the garbage, found a car mechanic who doesn’t treat me like an idiot and doesn’t expect me to understand a word he says, enlisted friends who were willing to be the emergency contacts for field trips and a woman at the hardware store who knows everything I need to fix any plumbing problem in the known universe.
I don’t have to do it all myself—I just can’t outsource it all to the same place anymore.
And occasionally, one of those annoying pebbles turns into something quite different. At one point, somewhere in the middle of winter, my toilet developed a wobble. It had always wobbled a little, but suddenly it was like trying to pee on the Titanic. Google had dire warnings about all the disasters that could befall homeowners who left such heinous problems unattended.
I owned none of the tools necessary to properly investigate toilet wobble, and none of the money necessary to page a plumber, especially late on a Saturday night.
So I found a post online by some guy who sounded fairly wobble-experienced. I carefully read his top seven reasons toilets don’t stay put like they’re meant to, and eliminated the three I didn’t understand. And then I raided my kitchen for things that looked sort of like the tools in question and got to work.
I got lucky. It turns out that the doohickies that go on the bolt things were on in the wrong order, and a little bit of jimmying things around with a knife, a fork, and a pair of pliers got things fixed up just fine.
Since then, I’ve tackled a dripping shower, a winky light fixture, and learned the many and varied uses of a stud finder. (If you’re laughing, it’s totally not what you think.)
All part of finding new defaults and new ways to walk. It was uncomfortable as hell sometimes, and it poked a finger into the belly buttons of a lot of my insecurities.
But making choices is power, whether it’s being an awesome parent or attacking a wobbly toilet with a fork. And the more of them I make for myself, the less dusty this road has begun to feel.
Sometimes, a choice is a single word. When my car died, I dealt with it, right there and then, even if there was a wee temper tantrum involved. I wasn’t always that smart. I tripped over one word in particular way too many times before I turned to face it head on.
Husband.
Legally, we’re in marriage limbo. Separated, which I used in public once or twice and then squirmed in embarrassed silence as the person I was talking to expressed hope that we could work things out. I wish all kinds of power to separated people everywhere who are trying to do exactly that, but it’s just not in my cards. My marriage coded out, and we don’t have the ingredients necessary to resurrect it.
It was easier when it came up in reference to my kids. Then he’s just their dad. But even there, I was conscious of the distance those words imply, and I wondered how it sounded to my girl, if she understood the magnitude of the shift that had happened to turn “my husband” into “her dad.”
It might seem strange, this focus on language instead of worrying about misbehaving cars and missed garbage pickups and how the hell to parent in the middle of nuclear fallout.
But for me, words shape my truth. If I called myself the “lazy mom,” something in that choice would seep into my soul—or ooze out of it. And stumbling across the empty sentence space where “husband” used to live totally sucked.
When I was a teenager, I went to school in Italy for two years. I arrived not speaking a word of the language, and I don’t think my head stopped hurting for three months. I stumbled, ran into conversational walls, and generally made a mess of relating to the world. And then one day some magical switch flipped and I was able to function. I wasn’t fluent—heck, I wasn’t even close. But I no longer tripped over my own two feet trying to navigate through my day.
I needed a word for the guy I had once married if I wanted to be functionally fluent in the language of my new world.
I’ve settled on calling him my ex-husband. It resonates for me, even if it isn’t legally true just yet. He was my husband, he’s not anymore. There is no limbo in my heart on that subject, and words have power. Mine needed to speak of finality, and of acceptance.
So much is still in flux, but this isn’t.
Keeping the baby, throwing out the ba
thwater. I have always been slightly envious of my youngest sister. She married her high school sweetheart, a guy she’s known since first grade. They’re good together, but the thing I envy them, even now, isn’t that. It’s their history. So many years of knowing each other. He remembers the dress she wore to her ninth-grade formal dance and the years when his mother packed an extra sandwich so that my sister didn’t have to eat health food for lunch. They went off to college together and figured out the grown-up deal walking at each other’s sides. Four kids, several careers, and houses in two countries later, they have this richly woven fabric of more than thirty years of knowing each other.
I was on my way to that. To someone I could look at and say “hey, remember when?” and it would call us both to a memory. To decades of them.
Instead, I live in a new town, with no family nearby, and my twelve years of marriage just got reset to zero. It’s tempting to kind of let go of all the history and pretend my life started eight months ago, hatched out of an adult egg by a magician with a very warped sense of humor.
But I can’t do that.
Or I can, but it would be a really bad idea.
I see it in my daughter’s eyes, when she asks me to tell her a story about when she was a baby. To remember a time when we were a family, whole and intact. She needs to know we were—and that it was good. That she has more than the current cracked concrete as her history and her foundation.
I need those memories too. Just like the wrinkles that decorate my face more and more these days, these bits of history are my travel record. I didn’t expect my marriage to break, but it did. That doesn’t mean I need to be ashamed of the years that came before. They were strong years, and years that mattered.
I’m not going to throw a third of my life into the void because the ending kind of sucked.
So I’m making an effort lately to reclaim the orphan memories. To let them ramble through my inner landscape, and to feel the bittersweet tugs and the quiet longing and the gratitude for what once was. I’m mostly past the anger now, but if that travels through, I let it come too.
A lot of learning on this road has been about letting go. But sometimes, it’s about dusting off something that’s precious and holding on.
Sweating the big stuff. I’m pretty good buddies with frustration—we’ve hung out a lot together over the years. I’ve sat with my newly potty-trained two-year-old in the twenty-third restroom on our fourteen-hour drive and managed not to strangle anyone when she cheerfully announced that she’d changed her mind. I’ve listened to my son’s building nasal congestion as February arrived, every sneeze and sniffle a nail in the coffin of staying in the pollen-drowned town we loved. I’ve walked a room full of accountants through a snazzy new web design, and a room full of web designers through e-commerce metrics.
I know frustration.
But I don’t think anything has ever made me as utterly crazy as trying to deal with the legal mess of a divorce. It’s a limbo of the worst kind—I really don’t know if most of it will be resolved next week or still be a hot puddle of goo three years from now.
And yeah. There are days that has stood me on the brink of the Ocean of Crazy and blown a hard wind at my back.
But this is another one of these important places where letting go isn’t the right thing. I can’t walk away, and I can’t give everything up—some of what is at stake matters deeply, particularly for my kids. So I need to see this process through to its bitter end, even if it takes a very long time and every last patience nerve I possess.
What the waterfall gifted me is the conviction that the rest of my life doesn’t have to go on hold until that day arrives.
I’ve tried that before, putting lines in the sand that must be crossed before the thing that really matters can happen. I’ll buy some non-trashed-by-pregnancy clothes once I lose twenty pounds. I’ll work on making friends when I’m not so tired. I can have chocolate after I finish this chapter (or a vacation after this book, or a month off after this series.)
I can have a life after I’m properly divorced and my kids’ financial future is stable and I pretty much know what the next phase of being me looks like.
And honestly, I believed that for a while. I worked insanely hard on coming up with possible agreements that seemed fair to me—even generous. I listened carefully and tried to connect and understand, even with my bruised, grieving heart. I spent lots of time on Google trying to wrap my head around every issue, and lots of time in Excel calculating the long-term impact of every possibility.
Willing it to be done so that I could move on. Waiting, mired in frustration, for it to end.
Fortunately, I suck at patience. And I had this restless, bubbling lightness knocking at the door and telling me to come out and play.
It knew what I didn’t, at first—that the quality of the rest of my life won’t be shaped most by what ends up in a legal document.
It will come from what finds room in my heart.
Living with a cauldron of anger and hate. Just in case you think I’m living through one of those neat, tidy, obnoxiously friendly divorces, it’s probably time to do some truth telling around that.
My ex-husband is living in my basement suite. It helps for parenting the kids, but despite my very biggest efforts and fervent hopes, it hasn’t held our family together. I walked out of the initial explosion shell-shocked, but determined to try to keep us a family of four, even if marriage would no longer be the center that held everything together.
It almost looked like it might work for a while. We shared common space and a kitchen, we had overlapping parenting time so the kids would still experience all four of us together, we talked about how we hoped this would work for the future.
And then it all slowly melted to hell.
I was the last one to acknowledge it. The kids were way smarter—by the time I took a good hard look at reality, both of them had already fled for the hills in every way possible while still contained in a two-thousand-square-foot house.
So we shifted to a model where we parented separately.
Yup. In a two-thousand-square-foot house. There are good reasons for trying to make that work—we’re still trying to make it work. But as our separate journeys out of marriage fallout deepened, it got pretty ugly.
I watched the guy I once loved, the guy I slept beside for over twelve years, turn angry and resentful and full of hate. I don’t know all the reasons why, and quite frankly, knowing wouldn’t change a whole lot. His feelings are his work to do, just as I am the owner of mine. But it meant that there was a cauldron of harsh, nasty feelings stewing in the basement of my home, and particularly in the dark of winter, it boiled over with unpredictable, unfortunate frequency.
What to grab hold of, what to let go.
It was brutally hard to listen to my insides on this one. There was nasty stuff in my house, spilling on my children, oozing under the door of my bedroom. And somehow, the wires to all my pushable buttons had survived nuclear meltdown, which wasn’t helping me to be sane or respectful or anything I could be proud of in the middle of all of this.
Dealing with this in the way that I wanted to meant I had to rewire.
It meant I had to let go of some pretty big stuff. Marriage is an agreement to slide into a tandem harness with someone. To pull the same direction, to share the weight, to glory together in the strength and speed and to stand quietly together when a wheel needs repairing or someone gets tired.
The nuclear hit took care of some of those harness lines. And a couple of big, important co-parenting ones need to stay in place, even if the track gets a little or a lot rough. But several important someones in my life helped me to realize that I was letting a bunch of other harness lines continue to hang out. Some were frayed and tattered and hanging limp, but they still gave purchase for angry grappling hooks reaching out of the cauldron.
Once I could truly see this for what it was, I dealt with it in one fell swoop, because I’m that kind of girl. I headed o
ut onto the ocean with pen, paper, my wedding ring, a couple of photographs, and a big-ass pair of scissors. My own private harness-lopping ritual, most of it made up on the fly because the nice neat ceremony I’d planned didn’t seem quite right as I stepped onto the boat.
The specifics didn’t matter—the intention did. I stepped off the boat two hours later a lot lighter, a lot clearer, and exhausted enough that it took thirteen hours of sleep to be functional again.
I woke up a lot more in tune with the wisdom of my insides.
Most battles don’t matter—walk away.
The ones that do aren’t about the words, they’re about the energy. Focus on the energy.
Rain washes many things away, as do oceans and showers and tears.
I can live on the side of an active volcano and choose misery and fear—or I can be happy.
And yes, there are definitely days where that feels like trying to tap dance in my skintight mini skirt and four-inch heels. But slowly and surely, insistently, and occasionally with big swinging swords, my ribs have brought me to a place where the cauldron in the basement isn’t the focus. There’s no denying it’s there, and some days there’s just no ignoring the hot, furious venting. But there’s also an earthquake fault somewhere deep under this island I live on.
Life has fault lines. Ones I can’t fix, fight, or keep away from my children. Some things are just bigger than me, some things aren’t mine to deal with, and some things maybe have a purpose even though I don’t like them very much.
I have a friend who is an artist. She talks about the power of contrast.
I don’t like how I feel when the cauldron boils over, even now. But it feels so very different inside my skin than it did a few months back—a particularly vivid measuring stick of just how far I’ve come.
I walk away differently now. I get angry differently and I fight for different things.
Not always. But often enough that it matters.
