The Long Goodbye

 

The Long Goodbye

 

 

We tried.  We really did.  We went to marriage counseling for four long years and we have lived apart for nearly two.  We finally came to the hardest decision and are going to get divorced.

Neither one of us really wanted this, but we both know it was the right thing to do.  Do we still love each other?  Absolutely.  You don’t create three gorgeous human beings together and stop loving each other.  But the love we have for one another is so very different that it used to be.  We have known each other for 27 years, have been together for 20 and married for 14, but it just isn’t the same anymore and I think we both want to be happy and don’t want to be the cause of any more pain for each other.  I want happiness for us both and I think we recognize that that may not be possible being married – we are simply better at being friends.

I think you could argue that we have seen an awful lot in our marriage.  We have dealt with my traumatic past, infertility, Frank’s cancer, Liam’s heart and lung disease and ultimate death, more infertility and my addiction and perhaps it was all just too much.  I know every family has a lot to deal with but it proved for us to be just too much.

Frank will always be a part of my life.  We will always be friends, perhaps best friends.  He knows me better than anyone else.  We have Dermot and Wren to raise together and I know we are going to be a team and do the best job possible.  We will be parents together and if we are lucky, we will be grand-parents together.

After Thanksgiving we went away for the weekend and talked until we couldn’t talk anymore.  We cried and we mourned the end of our story as we thought it would be written.  We came home and started the process of moving forward.  We even sat on the fence for a while, but ultimately I started looking for a house to buy.  I have found one and if all goes well I will move in at the end of January.  It is a house big enough for the kids to each have their own space, but small enough for me to afford and maintain on my salary.

I didn’t want for Frank to have to sell the house he and the kids have been living in to divide assets exactly down the middle.  Moving the kids away from the house they have come to know as home and where they feel safe and secure with their grandparents right across the street is just not something I can stomach.  It is a hard sacrifice, but one I was more than willing to make.  The house they are in will remain their home base during the week.  They will not have to move back and forth while they are in school.  I will be there some of the nights of the week to help with homework and have family dinners just like I have been and we will switch back and forth on weekends. There will be Mommy days and Daddy days and days we spend altogether. Frank in turn has made sure that I am financially set with an IRA that I can build upon.

As soon as I began to accept in my heart and my head that we were ending our marriage, I made a decision that we could have the best divorce ever.  There is no reason we have to make this harder for one another or for the kids.  There has been no fighting.  No raised voices and no intentionally harsh words. We are setting an example for the kids that you can navigate a difficult time with grace and dignity.  We are simply loving each other through it.

This single most difficult part of this was sitting down to tell Dermot and Wren about the decision we had made.  We wanted to wait until after Christmas to tell them, and we wanted to tell all the adults in their life first so they could be a support to the kids once they were told.  We talked to the child psychologist they had seen when I went back to rehab in 2014 and asked his advice on how to go about the task and I dreaded talking to them but I have to say it went as well as we could have wished.

I would need to be the one to break the news because from the start we had told them that Mommy wouldn’t be coming home until she was better and we didn’t want them to think that I was still sick.  I also didn’t want them to perceive that this was something that their dad was doing to me.  In point of fact I was the one to verbalize what we both knew needed to happen and ask for a divorce.  So I opened by telling them that I had bought a house but that daddy and I were no longer going to come together and live in the same house.  I told them that in fact we were getting divorced.  Dermot got off my lap and went across the room and faced us.  He said, “I am a little sad and a little confused, but mostly I am excited to see Mommy’s new house!”  I told them a bit about it and mentioned my ace-in-the-hole – the fact that my new house comes with a hot tub on the back patio!  I had arranged for the realtor to open the house for us that afternoon so we could show the kids.  They asked us questions about the house and seemed excited to be going over.

Wren was processing all this quietly from Frank’s lap when Dermot said, “But I don’t like the word divorce.”  We asked him why and he told us that when people are getting divorced it usually it means your parents are mad at each other.  I said, “Dermot does it look like Daddy and I are mad at each other?”  He admitted that it didn’t and I told him that divorce was just a word and that I thought we could have the best divorce ever.  He then excitedly exclaimed, “Maybe we could have a divorce party!  Like in Mommy’s hot tub!”  Well… why not?  God, I love that kid.

We took them over to see the house and they ran through the whole place in delight to the amazement of all the adults and I have never been so relieved in my life.  I am not so naïve as to think that there won’t be scars, there will be.  This will become a part of the story of their lives and it is a chapter they didn’t ask for, nor did they want.  But we can love them through it just as we are loving each other through it.

So where does that leave me?  It leaves me in a curious place. I am standing in the gloaming, watching this dusk come on in sadness and grief for a life I thought I would be living and letting it go.  I am resting before the dawn of a new day with tears in my eyes, crying not from sadness but from the knowledge that I am going to be okay and indeed knowing that I am going to be happy.

And you know what?  In the end, it wasn’t about the booze.