The Path to Separation is Paved with Separations - PART 1

So here's what happened, the whole sordid history, the posts where I dump everything I'm tired of carrying and tell you how my parents wound up separating in 2005. I'll have to save the story of the 3.5 years between the separation and the divorce for another time, because this will be mammoth enough as it is, and I can only handle so much catharsis honestly.

When my parents met and subsequently married 4 months later, it was 1967. My mom had been a "stewardess" in the parlance of the day, my dad was her passenger. He asked for a pillow and she threw it at him. That's the story anyway. It was against company policy for flight attendants to be married,  so my mom gave up the job and globe-trotting she'd dreamt of and followed my dad to the other coast. Within weeks, if not days, of the wedding none of his family or friends attended, my dad told her their marriage was a mistake. My mom recently told me he was engaged to someone else when he proposed to her. Incredibly, somehow that ring was still around, and somehow, my mother got it in the divorce settlement. She's selling it and that's how that tidbit came to light.

At any rate, I believe my dad was seeing another woman while he was a newlywed in his marriage to my mother. I don't know that it was the same woman he was engaged to. I suspect not. But my parents soon divorced, and my dad remarried shortly thereafter.

Then that marriage ended. And then my parents started seeing each other again.

A longtime favorite

The first time I read this I was 19. I knew it was prophetic but I couldn't look away.
Do we become the things we love?

SWEET RUIN

Tony Hoaglund

Maybe that is what he was after, 

my father, when he arranged, ten years ago, 

to be discovered in a mobile home

with a woman named Roxanne, an attractive, 

recently divorced masseuse. 

He sat there, he said later, in the middle 

of a red, imitation-leather sofa, 

with his shoes off and a whiskey in his hand, 

filling up with a joyful kind of dread--

like a swamp, filling up with night, 

--while my mother hammered on the trailer door

with a muddy, pried-up stone, 

then smashed the headlights of his car, 

drove home, 

and locked herself inside. 

He paid the piper, was how he put it, 

because he wanted to live, 

and at the time knew no other way 

than to behave like some blind and willful beast, 

--to make a huge mistake, like a giant leap

into space, as if following

a music that required dissonance

and a plunge into the dark. 

That is what he tried to tell me, 

the afternoon we talked, 

as he reclined in his black chair, 

divorced from the people in his story

by ten years and a heavy cloud of smoke. 

Trying to explain how a man could come 

to a place where he has nothing else to gain

unless he loses everything. So he 

louses up his work, his love, his own heart. 

He hails disaster like a cab. And years later, 

when the storm has descended 

and rubbed his face in the mud of himself, 

he stands again and looks around, 

strangely thankful just to be alive, 

oddly jubilant--as if he had been granted

the answer to his riddle, 

or as if the question 

had been taken back. Perhaps 

a wind is freshening the grass, 

and he can see now, as for the first time, 

the softness of the air between the blades. The pleasure 

built into a single bending leaf. 

Maybe then he calls it, in a low voice 

and only to himself, Sweet Ruin.

And maybe only because I am his son, 

I can hear just what he means. How 

even at this moment, even when the world

seems so perfectly arranged, I feel 

a force prepared to take it back. 

Like a smudge on the horizon. Like a black spot

on the heart. How one day soon, 

I might take this nervous paradise, 

bone and muscle of this extraordinary life, 

and with one deliberate gesture, 

like a man stepping on a stick, 

break it into halves. But less gracefully 

than that. I think there must be something wrong

with me, or wrong with strength, that I would 

break my happiness apart

simply for the pleasure of the sound. 

The sound the pieces make. What is wrong

with peace? I couldn't say. 

But, sweet ruin, I can hear you. 

There is always the desire. 

Always the cloud, suddenly present

and willing to oblige.

Sometimes you choose the art

and sometimes the art chooses you.

Susan Rothenberg
Blue U-Turn, 1989
oil on canvas
91 x 112 inches

Small Blue Flowers

I've had a revelation.

My mom got my childhood home in the divorce settlement, and my dad got our Lake Cabin. For the better part of 15 years (so 10 years prior to the separation), he's bandied around the idea of getting rid of it. I've always known that my dad likes to play "What If?" quite a bit, and rather than get upset every time he complained about not using it enough, or every time the mood struck him to start talking about selling, I just wrote it off as him venting. I don't think I've ever actually believed it might be lost.

At this point my younger sister is almost done with her undergraduate degree, and my dad's wife's youngest son is graduating from high school. ("Step brother" is not a word I'm comfortable using. That's for another post I guess.)

Here's what just clicked: my dad has told me over and over how growing up, his own father would say (to him directly? within earshot?) that as soon as my dad was 18, he'd leave my grandmother. And guess what? After all those years of saying that, my dad turned 18 and my grandfather divorced my grandmother. My dad is going to sell the cabin.

And now what?

It's been five and a half years since my dad moved out of my childhood home, two since my parents' divorce was final, and a year and a half since my dad married the woman he left my mother for. My parents   were first married (more on that later) in 1967. And now what?

Here is what I can say at this point in the process of grieving:

Almost no one understands how my parents' divorce continues to rip me apart, or how it has made me see myself differently; how I used to feel like a strong, confident person, but now I feel like I came out of the factory defective because I can't seem to stop grieving; how the hurt has lessened in frequency, but not intensity; how at this point I believe I won't ever escape from this.

A number of years back I joined a Yahoo group for Adult Kids of Divorce (AKODs, or alternately "adult children of divorce" - ACODs), but there's not much activity over there. Additionally, I've seen both of those terms used to reference adults whose experience of parental divorce occurred during their childhoods - and trust me, there are common elements, but it is not the same sort of experience.

There's exactly ONE scholarly book written on the subject. And it's out of print.

Searches for therapists well-versed in this situation have come up fruitless.

And over the years I have felt more and more alone. I have a sister who is 10 years my junior - she was still living at home when our dad left, and the extent to which both my parents protected her while simultaneously laying pretty heavy weights on me is remarkable. The hurt and implications of that discrepancy shattered my connection with the one person in the world who I thought was most likely to understand.

I lost my family, I've lost my dad completely, and to some extent I lost my sister.

So now I am reaching out.