Hell of a Coincidence

On January 4, 2015, I chose to divorce my husband. 

Each time I think back on this pivotal decision,  more and more I believe that the date was pretty significant. It happened to be the birthday of my mother, who had passed away a little more than a year previously, so I am sure I was feeling rather introspective and reflective. Perhaps I was more open to making a crucial decision that I had been, until that point, only theoretically pondering. On that particular day, a Sunday, I happened to come across some data that ultimately became the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm done with this, I decided, no more. I'm divorcing Jason. I'm very unhappy and homesick, I know he's unhappy, and I have no business staying in this marriage. 

(Also, here's a good lesson for all of us to remember: if you are suspicious enough about your partner to go snooping about on your partner's electronic devices, you absolutely should NOT be shocked when you find the shit that confirms your suspicions.)

"It's best to step into the future while it's still waiting for you," says Alice Hoffman in a book that was published  a good few years after all this transpired, but there is truth in this statement even prior to the statement's existence. Not only was I going to divorce Jason, but I was going to do it soon, and then I was going to move home and pursue the life I hadn't yet had a chance to live, back in Indiana.  

Making the decision was pretty easy. Acting on it...well, that took longer. It took me two weeks to confront my husband; 10 months to move out of our home, 11 months for me to file for divorce. But I wasted no time in letting my sisters know about this shift in their baby sister's life. And my Eldest Sister decided that, if her youngest sister was moving back to the frozen wastelands of the Midwest, she would be needing a blanket. And so she got to knitting. 

While she was knitting away, I was going through a rather arduous and painful time in California. Divorce ain't easy, even when it's more or less amicable. It was an excruciating time of loneliness and anxiety and depression and the not-unspoken fear of what if I can never find work back in Indiana and move home? It was a kind of hell. I was terrified that things would never change. 

Of course, things did change: A little more than a year after I decided to leave my California life, I was able to actually do so, and moved home to Indiana. 

And still my sister kept knitting. 

Years passed. Generations passed. 

Okay, not really. But six years did pass. Many things happened, as they are wont to do: The divorce came to pass, my grandmother passed away, I earned a promotion, I learned what it was like to live with a mentally unstable (and mean) individual, I lived through a Trump presidency and a pandemic...and all the while, down in the wilds of Florida, my Eldest was click-click-clicking away with her knitting needles, working at the Divorce Blanket here and there. 

And then today, 4 January, 2021--six years to the day that I made my choice--I opened up my front door to see a lumpy, bulky package on my doormat. And mere minutes later,  I was wrapped up in a colourful blanket, a physical manifestation of my sister's loves and hopes for me and a brighter future. 

It's a beautiful creation, knitted together with the yarn scraps of a dozen different strangers--folks who answered the call my sister sent out for some of their favorite textiles, along with hopes and well-wishes. It's soft and wraps perfectly around my shoulders, and on these chilly Southern Indiana nights, it's just the thing. And it's a reminder of my sister's belief in me, which never flagged, even when my own hope and faith did.  

she
has

been through 

hell. 

so believe me when

i say, 

fear her when she looks

into the fire and smiles. 

-e. corona

*Disclaimer: there are many kinds of hell. My hell is not your hell; there are many, many worse hells. The particular hell to which I refer above is probably neither the only hell, nor the worst hell, I will go through in my life, but it's the hell I am choosing to share at this moment. 

How to Live (and Wear) a Feme Sole Thanksgiving

Now that our grandparents and mother are dead, Thanksgiving is a lot different. A lot quieter, and so, a little weirder. For literally decades, we would gather at my grandparents' overheated, tiny house, which was filled to bursting with family, partners, friends, and orphans. Our increasingly deaf grandparents would blare Judge Judy and sportsball and the Macy's Day Parade; my grandmother and mother would holler at Eldest to add more broth to the stuffing, soupiness be damned. But as the years marched on, and people divorced and moved away and died, our numbers dwindled. And now, for the first time in 31 years, we aren't having dinner at the grandparents' house. That house stands silent and mostly empty and thoroughly abandoned, patiently waiting for a realtor to march people through and choose to buy it so they can have their own decades of family dinners there. And those few who remain--my sisters and partners, all childless, and myself--now gather in my sister's kitchen to break bread, give thanks, and all the rest.

This is also my first Thanksgiving as an officially divorced woman--a feme sole. This is what my beloved Oxford English Dictionary has to say about this:

feme sole, n.
Origin: A borrowing from French. Etymon: French feme sole. Law French feme sole, femme sole unmarried woman (1302 or earlier in Anglo-Norman) < feme , femme feme n. + sole soleadj. Compare post-classical Latin femina sola (1396 in a British source, in legal context). 

An unmarried woman; (sometimes) spec. one who is divorced or widowed. Also in the English and other common law legal systems: a married woman whose legal status, esp. with regard to her right to own property or to carry on a business, is that of an unmarried woman.

In other words? Fuck yes. It's funny, I was so uncomfortable in my 20s about being single, unpartnered, unclaimed, yet I had to become all those things to become comfortable with not being those things. And so now I wear this title with pride and joy and relief; it was a hell of a long road to get here, both legally and emotionally, and now that I am here, I am pretty ready to dig in, put down roots, and look down at all you other chumps with some smugness. Just kidding. Kind of.

I'm having a damned good Thanksgiving, despite the lack of family, and because of my feme sole state. Here's how I do it:

I decide I'm going to look good--look damned good. Wash my hair dammit, and choose an outfit that gets me a lot of compliments even if I think secretly it makes me look pregnant. (I'm not, and thankfully never will be.) I wear it with my best smile.

 Tunic from Rue 21; leggings from Meijer's because omg I wear leggings now!

I put on as much makeup as I want. Here's my view on makeup--it conceals what doesn't need to be seen and enhances what should be seen. It helps make me be the most radiant me that I want to be.

Couples at family holiday dinners are happily inevitable. When I was younger and the single odd duck, I felt self-conscious, unpaired, unloved. I'm older now, and now it doesn't bother me one jot, and if you're single, I hope it won't bother you either. The (let's hope) happiness of the couples at family gatherings are not a reflection on us single folk; not an indication of some sort of fatal flaw, and we can make our own happiness and freedom without a partner by our sides. And as I learned through my own bitter experiences, having a partner at your side at a family dinner is no indication of a satisfied, secure existence. I smile and laugh and talk and joke with the couples, admire the camaraderie that they share, and then I carry on being me.

I adhere to family traditions. With my people, this consists of

• Eldest Sister slaves away in the kitchen, as she has done since Time Immemorial (she is now both the Matriarch and the Martyr of the Family) 

• Middle Sister sits on the couch and peruses the Black Friday ads (although we aren't dummies, we don't go out into that brouhaha) 

• The Little Odd Duck stays as much out of the way as possible and watches X-Files. This is a tradition that stems back to my teens, when I worked at a toy store and had to be to work at 3 AM the day after Thanksgiving, literally ducking toys flying overhead, so during Turkey Day I would hunker down, rest up, eat food, and drool over Scully. 

 Me, Pre-Drool

• Occasionally I holler at Eldest Sister to add more broth to the stuffing. I don't care about stuffing, but it's what our mom and grandmother did. And what was good enough for them is good enough for us, dammit. 

So there we go--how I lived my  2017 Thanksgiving. It was chill but not chilly, lovely and cozy and filled with laughter and memories of people and days gone by. I lived it genuinely, as I have tried to do every day since taking the leap into Life After Marriage--as a sister, a friend, the Indy Grrl, the Odd Duck, Crazy Aunt Mel, and feme sole. It's a good life, and it's one I am grateful I had the courage to grab on to.

On the Edge, and At the Bottom

The adventure through the Yucatan wilderness had been fun. Under the blazing sun, in the humid, cloying heat, we explored temples, drove through the jungle, fondled boa constrictors. Now we stood at the edge of a 30-foot cliff and gazed down at the beautiful, deep waters of the cenote and thought of plunging into them. We were hot and sweaty and exhausted and there was no way we weren’t going in, because the other option was simply to, well, melt to death. The staircase leading down to them would take a few minutes to clamber down, or…

“Okay!” joked the tour guide. “Who’s brave enough to be the first sacrifice to the Mayan gods?”

“Where’s Mel?” asked my recently-wedded husband.

Splash.

Later, my husband and I gazed in equal parts awe and dismay at the bruise that was forming on my backside. Perhaps a cannonball wasn’t the best diving position for an impulsive, bottom-heavy woman to take when jumping off a cliff. Of course, it was perfectly emblematic of the type of thing I do: something absolutely zany, and sudden, with little fanfare, but lots of commitment once I’m in. And afterwards, there are usually a few scars and bruises to show for it.

My divorce happened the same way. I had been pondering it for a while. Inching up towards the edge of the cliff, gazing down into the murky darkness below, I knew I was scared because I didn’t know what lay in the darkness, but I did know the unhappiness that had chased me up to the precipice. The same unhappiness that lurked there when I finally took a breath, closed my eyes, and jumped off the cliff. With little fuss, on an otherwise uneventful night in January a couple of years ago, I stood in my kitchen in California and told my husband that I was done with the infidelities and lies and unhappiness, and that I would be divorcing him.

It took a while before I hit the ground after that leap. There were a lot of dark and lonely nights, a lot of false starts, a lot of sacrifices and some high prices to pay. But it finally ended, perhaps fittingly, on February 14 of this year. While I was drinking margaritas and watching Deadpool with my friends in Indiana, a judge was signing off on my divorce decree in California, freeing me from a life that I had once felt was the only thing left for me. Now, I know that's not true; I've had a year and change of really genuine happiness to know that the only unhappiness that is permanent is the one that we force on ourselves. 

There will be bruises, but they will fade. There will be wounds that bleed, but they will scab over and scar. The fall may be long and terrifying, and the landing may be rough, but sometimes...you just have to jump.