Exes and O’s

On figuring out the best name for the father of my children.

What’s in a name? For me, quite a lot, as I’ve struggled to find the right word for the person who was my husband but is not anymore. The man with whom I shared a bed, a home, a life. The man from whom I am now divorced.

We have a name for that person, of course: ex-husband. Frequently shortened to ex. As in, My ex loves to surf. Or, My ex and I watched all five seasons of The Wire on his laptop, the last when I was pregnant with our son. We have names for his family members: ex-mother-in-law, ex-father-in-law, ex-brother-in-law. Long-winded multihyphenate names grown even longer, a sour mouthful.

I do not like the word ex when applied to people, not to those who are still integral to my life. Ex is a Latin word; it means “out from,” “out of,” “removal.” Applied to a person, it means “no longer.” A face covered by the crosshatched strokes of a dark pen until the features are obliterated.

Ex does not capture my relationship with the person I see several times a week, sometimes daily. He is the person I stand beside at our children’s sports games and school events. The first person I told last September, sobbing incoherently, that a family member had been diagnosed with cancer.
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In early December, my ex-husband’s father died unexpectedly. Our children’s beloved grandpa, he was a fixture in their lives and in mine. “I’ll always love you and consider you my family,” he told me after the divorce. At his memorial service, my ex-husband and I sat bookending our children. He delivered the eulogy. I was proud of how strong and poised he was, how he did justice to words that, like him, were spare, direct, and wry. I laughed and cried with the other 300 people in the room even though I already knew the jokes and heartfelt descriptions; he had given me the speech to read beforehand.

Ex-husband might feel like a poor fit, but surely I could do better than “fourth person.”

Recently, my ex-husband moved into his new house. It was not in good shape when he bought it. But when I saw it for the first time months later, dropping by with our children, the hideous carpets had been stripped away, the floors sanded and stained. The dingy walls had new colors—the hallway a brilliant sunshine yellow, the kids’ bedroom a green-blue. It is not a big house, but with no furniture, smelling of new paint, it seemed larger, at once inviting and raw. Tugging at my hands, our son and daughter excitedly led me from room to room. The back windows faced west, with a view of the ocean. I stood looking out, feeling in equal measure happy and deeply sad for all of us.

We took the kids out to dinner that night. We went early, but there was still a wait, so we went to stand outside in the sunny, windless San Francisco early evening. My ex-husband’s phone pinged: a delivery. He had to walk the four blocks back to let in the guy from the mattress store. “Ten minutes,” he told me.

Five minutes later, the hostess called out my name.

“Our dad’s not here,” my daughter said.

The hostess asked me, “Is your husband outside?”

“He’s not,” I trailed off. Not what? Not outside, and not my husband.

I tried again. “The fourth person will be back very soon.” As the hostess led us to our table, I felt a flush of shame. Ex-husband might feel like a poor fit, but surely I could do better than the awkward and bizarre “fourth person.” I remembered a former colleague’s devastating cross-examination of a government official in a criminal case we tried together years ago. “You weren’t important enough to be the primary or even the secondary agent on this case,” he said. “You were tertiary, weren’t you?” I had just made the father of my children quaternary.

Recently, I spent two weeks at a retreat in New Hampshire, working on a book I am writing about wrongful convictions and restorative justice. Restorative justice is a centuries-old practice that brings together victims and offenders, their families and the larger community to make reparations as they work through trauma and loss. At the retreat, by silent agreement, everyone referred to their significant other as “my partner” whether they were gay or straight, 72 or 22, usually without adding a gender or even a name. At first, when asked who was taking care of my 4- and 6-year-olds, I said, “Their dad.” After a few days, I tried again. “My partner,” I said. The words felt strange. Throughout our married life, we had not been partners, only two rigidly separate individuals eking out a grim coexistence. Our inability to create a partnership was why we had gotten a divorce. And yet, after breaking apart, we had stood by and with each other, bound up by tragedy and everyday life events.

The other day, I felt a rising sadness, even despair. In a flat voice, I presented my ex-husband with a list of failures. At the top was our marriage.

He disagreed. “We may no longer be husband and wife,” he texted later, “but we will forever be partners in this life.”

I stared at the word partners for a long time. “That’s true,” I texted back. “And comforting.”

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2016/06/on_what_to_call_your_ex.html

Why Losing A Friend Can Be Harder Than Losing A Husband

Divorce knocks you down and drags you face-first through the mud, leaving a bitter taste in your mouth. In those first few months of shock, the world feels distorted, an underwater kingdom of muffled sounds, blurred shapes and heavy movements. You’ve lost a piece of yourself, and you fear you’ll never be whole again. This can’t be happening—not to you.

Divorce has many dirty secrets, and one of these is that it comes with stigma. You failed at the most important relationship of your life. The very person who swore he would love you in sickness and in health has decided you are not worth loving. There must be something wrong with you.

If you’re lucky, most of your friends and family will see past the stigma. They won’t judge you or blame you. Instead, they’ll open their arms with love and words of kindness. Their support might be the only thing that keeps you from unraveling.

Unfortunately, as many a divorced person could attest, family and friends are not always there with love and support. Some of them seem to view divorce as a contagion, as if contact with you might cause seeds of marital discord to waft into their own relationships and germinate discontent. Or perhaps they think you’re not fun anymore. It’s hard to laugh and play when that part of you feels broken. Maybe they leave because they think you failed, and no one likes a loser. I will say one thing for divorce: It shows you who your true friends are.

The day that I lost my husband to divorce, I lost my best friend too. She stopped calling and visiting. I tried reaching out, but if I was lucky enough to get a few words with her, she waffled between excuses for her absence and promises to be around more. Losing a best friend was like getting hit by a second storm when I hadn’t rebuilt after the first. I could hardly believe it. I’d trusted her more than anyone. I’d believed she would always be there for me. Instead, she left when I needed her most.

Losing a friend is very different from losing a husband. You don’t have to leave your house. You don’t lose half your income. You don’t have to make co-parenting arrangements or split holidays with your kids or stare at the empty space in the closet where her clothes used to be.

But losing a best friend can be harder than losing a husband. Divorce is tragic and terrible, but at least it provides relief from a toxic marriage. When my husband left, I cried for weeks, but amidst the swirling confusion and grief was a sense of freedom, of hope, of second chances. Deep down I knew I was better off without him.

Losing a friend did not make me stronger. I felt no relief once she was gone, no hope that good would come of the tragedy, no pride in my ability to move on. Instead, I stayed up at night wondering what went wrong. I still do.

Why do our friends leave us after divorce? Don’t they know how much damage they can cause? We are already broken, already abandoned by the person we loved the most, already doubting if we are worthy of someone else’s time and attention. We are questioning our judgment, wondering how we never saw it coming. Then the second wave hits and confirms our worst fears. We are unloveable. The people around who we think are our friends are just pretending. We start to become paranoid. Who will abandon us next?

The paranoia affects other relationships. It’s hard to get close to anyone. If you care about someone, they can hurt you, so better to not care, better to keep them all at arm’s length until you can figure out what you are doing wrong that causes everyone to leave. So you hunker down inside yourself and close everyone off. It’s safer to be alone.

The wound from divorce leaves scars. But the wound from losing a friend keeps bleeding.

Source: http://www.scarymommy.com/losing-a-friend-divorce/