Flannel shirts should be outlawed for ex husbands; I realize this now. Flannel shirts are to women what crotchless panties are to men.
Suzanne Finnamore
Daily I walk around my small, picturesque town with a thought bubble over my head: Person Going Through A Divorce. When I look at other people, I automatically form thought bubbles over their heads. Happy Couple With Stroller. Innocent Teenage Girl With Her Whole Life Ahead Of Her. Content Grandmother And Grandfather Visiting Town Where Their Grandchildren Live With Intact Parents. Secure Housewife With Big Diamond. Undamaged Group Of Young Men On Skateboards. Good Man With Baby In BabyBjörn Who Loves His Wife. Dogs Who Never Have To Worry. Young Kids Kissing Publicly. Then every so often I see one like me, one of the shambling gaunt women without makeup, looking older than she is:
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It´s like watching someone do a triple backflip dismount and land on two feet, solid, arms splayed in the air. I know I could never do it, don´t even know where I would begin to learn, but some people are built for it. He was handcrafted to leave, had practiced on other women since adolescence. I was one of an unnumbered series.
Soon he was online every night until one or two a.m. Often he would wake up at three of four a.m. And go back online. He would shut down the computer screen when I walked in. In the past, he used to take the laptop to bed with him and we would both be on our laptops, hips touching. He stopped doing that, slipping off to his office instead and closing the door even when A was asleep. He started closing doors behind him. I was steeped in denial, but my body knew.
I travel back in time, falling back into what I know for certain, the historical data I cling to in order to not go mad, not assume I made a suicidal and well-informed error in marrying this man.
I am not ready to think of him as either insane or evil, to consider in full how I could love and have a child with such a person. I am not ready to think about anything, except ways in which this may still be averted.
I feel angry but not homocidal; this may be unlooked-for progress.
I should have known then it wasn´t, as he called it. But I was eight months pregnant. No sense closing the barn door now, or so I thought. I swallowed the, straightaway after the usual tears and denial.
I played possum. I did this, as the possum does, out of fear.
They ought to do away with divorce settlements. Instead, both parties should flip a coin. The winner gets to stay where he or she is and keep everything. The loser goes to Paraguay. That´s it.
The whole world seems tilted, my inner ear displaced by a hole where my spouse used to be.
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I want to own this transition, not to simply swallow the shame of it entire. I will push for every little irony.
The abandonment came, and now this shabby bacchanal.
This is much easier than when N left. Our son is unable to grasp and simultaneously turn doorknobs yet. If only this trick could be unlearned by men over thirty, many more families would celebrate Christmas together.
People told me not to get married; I didn´t listen. No one ever listens, it seems to me now. Perhaps people should stop trying to communicate. N was not a communicator; early on, I´d insisted on communication. Now I see his point acutely. I would love to have him back to not communicate with me. I would never ask for communication again, I would simply go elsewhere for the deep fish. Also, I´m not at all sure I want to hear what he has to say in this new vista. This works out well.
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