The High Social Cost of My Fresh Start
Those who would shun me apparently still do.
Welcome to the new “Adventures in Divorce” section…
I’d nearly forgotten what a transgression it had been for me to leave my first marriage a few months shy of 27, then move to the city to live all by myself and become something of an art monster.
Well, an art monster with a demanding day job. But someone who was now liberated from suffocating suburban marital ennui (and futile fertility treatment) with a person I’d met at 19 and could no longer relate to, nor get along with, who was not supportive of my creative work or my desire to pursue an MFA. Now I was free to write—to allot for my own work whatever extra-curricular time I could eke out to work on Adventures in Divorce, initially fiction, later on a memoir, connecting the dots between the damage from my parents’ divorce and my choices to marry too young, then end my marriage.
Scandalous! I was shunned—particularly by some married friends and acquaintances, who acted as if I had a sickness that might be catching. And that was before my ex got sick, six months later.
I was recently reminded of my status as the Hester Prynne of south shore Long Island when I found myself in a social situation with a group of women I hadn’t seen in many years. They’d grown up with my ex, and revered him. It was unimaginable to them that I’d dare to walk away from him, and more generally, from the straight-and-narrow—the settled married life I’d entered at the clueless, barely-formed age of 23-and-change. The same life path they’d all embarked on around the same time, and currently still adhere to.
On the rare occasions I encounter these women, I notice a series of expressions come across their faces, which I perceive as: Oh, shit. It’s her. I guess I should say hi…? I always save them the trouble and say hi first. It’s pleasant enough, tolerable for a one-minute catch-up. But it reliably leaves me feeling awful—judged, and self-conscious.
It’s occurred to me that maybe they aren’t judging me. Maybe it’s my own projection. This week’s
Questionnaire, featuring Griffin Hansbury, aka Jeremiah Moss, included a response that really resonated for me, even though I am not trans or queer, just someone who was drawn to an alternate path, which sometimes makes me feel like I’ve failed:I find it useful to think of Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of “chrononormativity,” which describes the way that capitalism and patriarchy convince us that there’s a right way to progress through life and that way maximizes productivity and reproductivity. Queer and trans people are often outside of that, but we also measure ourselves against it and that can feel like failure. At the same time, there’s a tremendous liberation to being out-of-sync with what is normal. You have more space to do what you want with your life.
But this time something weird happened that made me think the judgment isn’t all in my head.
While I was off talking to someone else, one of the women approached Brian—perhaps not realizing he was my current husband?—and told him a story about me, how I’d left “Elliott” (as I call my ex in my book), and then he fell ill. She was sharing this scandalous anecdote with the person I am now married to, and she had boiled it down to what sounded like cause-and-effect. Selfish Sari asked for a divorce —> Elliott got sick.
It’s true. Six months after we got separated, my ex developed a serious illness. Over decades I’ve come around to realizing you can’t give someone a congenital disease by breaking up with them—by realizing you’re living the wrong life and making a big, difficult change before you further commit, thankfully before there are children in the picture and it becomes even harder to do, potentially putting more people’s emotional wellbeing at risk. But at the time, I believed it was my fault.
It was enough to make me run back. After being informed by friends, I hated myself. I sobbed uncontrollably, then pulled myself together enough to make a call to Elliott in the hospital.
My father-in-law picked up.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I wish for you whatever you wish for yourself. But don’t you ever call him again.”
Click.
I was shattered. I could barely function for months. I spoke to an older cousin about it. I told her that in my mind, this was all a sign that I was a terrible person, and wrong to leave.
“Or,” she suggested, “maybe you can view it as a sign that you got out just in time. If you’d waited six more months, you’d have never had the courage to go—to be honest about your unhappiness and start your life over. You would have felt stuck forever.”
She made me realize my father-in-law had done me a favor. He’d eliminated whatever ambiguity remained about our possible future together. Ours was no longer a “trial” separation. We were headed for a capital D divorce.
In other news…
One of the most terrifying things about life is that every path we take cuts off many other paths. I suspect the judgement was actually self-recrimination that was too painful and therefore turned in your direction. I’m comfortable with the compromises I’ve made until I see someone who didn’t make the same compromises and thrived. But I’ve learned that my discomfort in those situations belongs with me, not the brave soul who did something different.
Envy can look like scorn.
My father said, "You abandoned a dying man," after my husband divorced me six months before his death. Women aren't supposed to "leave," even if the leaving was initiated by someone else's violence or lack of support for one's writing, for one's "Sariness" or "Kirieness." When I was in rehab for alcoholism, we young women were told that nine out of ten women stay with their husbands through alcohol recovery. Only one out of ten husbands stay.