Sleeping Solo: One Woman's Journey into Life after Marriage Read Free Page B

different, and it was a pretty abrupt wake-up
call.   I have two kids to be present
and accounted for, and they need a mom who isn’t sick.   My body was sending me a very clear
message—that dangerous edge had just gotten a lot less stable.
    It was also, however, sending me these teasing hints of
other possibilities.
    I’m a scientist and a data analyst, and I grew up in a
lawyer’s house.   I don’t embrace the woo all that easily.   Until it started
showing off.   Big things,
like pulling a house and a team of fairy godmothers out of its hat.
    But there were little things, too.   One afternoon, shortly after the rush
and bustle of getting us all over to the new house, I lay on one of the beds in
my daughter’s room, cocooned under a duvet (one of my son’s favorite games that
month was to hide people like this.)   It was warm and cozy, and I drifted, a little sleepy, and listened to
the sounds of two mellow, happy kids.
    It took a while for the message seeping out from my ribs to
register.
    My marriage had
exploded—not my entire world.  
    And if I could unfreeze just a little, there was more than
survival ahead of me.   More than a
fight to hold together the ragged pieces of what had once been good.
    In my soft, warm, safe cocoon, I could finally feel
it—somewhere under all the ice and cold, embers were slowly fanning.   I wasn’t a wimp.   I might not have heeded all the warning
signs in my marriage, but I didn’t deserve this.
    And I had two kids who were still capable of making happy
sounds on an ordinary afternoon.
    I don’t think it was any accident that this clarity hit
after I moved into my new house.   That was the first big step away from ground zero, and I will always be
immensely grateful that I was able to take it.   It gave me my first and best beachhead
against the cold—and the beginning hints of a sense that the most
important part of what came next wouldn’t be what was ending.
    It would be what was beginning.
    I remember how astonished I was as that thought took form,
the wild idea that my job right now wasn’t to cry and weep and mourn my
marriage.   That needed to happen,
but it wasn’t the compass point that needed to drive the next few months.
    To find that, I needed to figure out what was fluttering to
life inside my ribs.
    A breadcrumb trail to clarity.   I didn’t come out of my afternoon in the
duvet cocoon as a butterfly.   I was
still dealing with long stretches of devastated and bleak and flattened, afraid
to look forward and terrified not to.
    But in the days that followed, sneaking in around the edges
came some small ripples that kept nudging me back to that sense that there was
something more here than endings.   The evenings where I breathed a sigh of anticipation as I closed
the doors on my children’s bedrooms and contemplated an entire couple of hours
to myself.   The laundry that
got done in two loads a week instead of five.   The creeping pleasure of sitting on the beach alone and letting sand meander through my fingers.  
    The slow exhale as dozens of small weights slid off my
shoulders.
    My marriage was a good one—I still believe that.   But we had accumulated a heaviness that
I didn’t really understand until it wasn’t mine to hold anymore.   I wish there had been a chance to
lighten it together, but one of the gifts of nuclear meltdown is the clear,
certain knowledge that things are truly over.
    I didn’t choose to blow things up.   And it felt almost wrong at first to
acknowledge the lighter places—until I realized they had found me a tiny,
chinked-open door to the rest of my life.   The explosion of my marriage had created a lot of holes.   Big, jagged, bleeding
ones.   But holes are also
doors and opportunities and escape valves and bringers of the light.
    It was time to start finding the good in where I’d landed.
    Collecting traveling
companions.   I’d figured
out that I didn’t need a therapist, and I didn’t want to