When two lives come undone
How do you keep a family together after divorce, asks Samantha Shanley
FOR years, I was under the impression that my husband and I had cultivated the near-perfect marriage, the two of us like His and Her Majesty, presiding over an enviable life. I wasn’t the only one who saw it so plainly. “You two are in your prime!” my uncle remarked last winter, echoing what many who knew us must have been thinking too. I grinned back at him, but inside I quavered.
It was true, we were mostly happily wed and brewed, but not entirely infused. After 17 years, I felt our strengths had settled into dregs, thin deposits lying in the basin of a teacup.
We trudged through therapy sessions, unpacking anecdotes from our life together like worn travel clothes from a tattered suitcase. I stood with those rumpled articles at my feet, and it seemed to me that the entire structure of our lives had come undone.
Near the end, although my husband said he would do anything to save us, I knew it was too late. Together, we chose his new apartment, one with enough space for our three children.
As he was preparing to move out, old fears and anxieties showed up on my doorstep to replace him, reminding me of all the pieces of myself I thought I had left behind in my 20s.
I didn’t have time to attend to myself, though. Our children had been stewing amid the tension for months. It was time to bring them up to speed, so we held a family meeting. We explained that we never thought this would happen to us, but that we needed to separate so that, someday, we could be happy again.
We didn’t know yet that our separation would lead to a divorce. But what mattered was that we would still be a family, just configured differently. At the time, I could only imagine this to be true.
As we put our children to bed that night, my daughter turned her tearstained face toward me. “Mama, everything is going to be okay, right?”
I wasn’t sure, but I nodded anyway, kissing her wet cheeks before closing the door.
Then I followed the hallway to my own room, fell face-down onto my quilt and sobbed. Perhaps I could still take it all back, patch it up and start over. As if months of anguish and emotional processing could simply be rewound in an instant, the invisible line cast and then reeled back in regret.
The only choice, I knew, was to keep moving forward, together, as our newly fashioned family unit.
On a Saturday, we took a trip to Ikea, all five of us together. My husband needed kitchen items for his apartment. Each of us carried a colourful tarpaulin bag in which we placed new dishes, silverware and a set of melamine mixing bowls – like set doubles from our current life. I chose a throw pillow for my husband’s new couch – black and white, the way I had seen many of our differences over the years.
When moving day came, we stacked my husband’s things – new and old – carefully into his car and mine. The children piled into his back seat and I tapped his new address into my phone in case I got lost. I trailed behind my family on the interstate highway, our two cars linked together in a private funeral procession of sorts.
Once we arrived at the apartment, the children dragged boxes and bags down the hallway, relocating picture frames and books. With a box-cutter and a pair of scissors, we unpacked. It was, I knew, both a dismantling and a reconstruction, though it felt surreal, like neither one nor the other exactly. I began by unrolling the children’s new mattresses and making up their beds – I wanted them to tuck in and find space for themselves right away.
As they did so, the cleft in my heart grew wider. Everyone looked to me, the Mom, for what to do. I knew we had come to the right place, but I didn’t know what happened next. I had driven a garden hoe through my family, as though dividing a beloved hosta variety: I stood in my husband’s new living room, theoretically with one part of our family in each hand, the gaps between my fingers yielding their severed roots.
Divorce brings about the loneliest kind of grief, with the death of a marriage hovering somewhere between a thing lost and one broken but not entirely gone. Many of our friends and family scattered, fearful, perhaps, of our emotional bardo, which had been triggered by factors they could not possibly understand.
Still, support arrived anyway, creeping under the backyard fence, around the tulip poplars, and from least-expected places. People offered help mulching the garden, taking my kids after school. Neighbours brought dinner. Friends promised to show up on random Tuesday nights with salted caramels and jam jars filled with wine.
I began to learn that, when you cast a net into unknown waters, the people who love you will swim out to you, offering everything you need but time.
Eventually, after the first excruciating months of our separation had passed, my husband and I were able to withstand being together around the children again. As each holiday, birthday and transition day passed, they became easier to manage. If the pain of separating our lives lingers for us, so does the joy our children still feel when all of us are together.
At first, I feared that when my marriage was over, life as I knew it would also end.
Now, as we turn the corner toward the one-year mark, I can see the horizon more clearly.