Nine

It has been nine years since I signed the papers that officially ended my marriage. Eleven years since the whole process began. If you had shown the woman I was eleven years ago a picture of my life today and told her, This is where you’re going to end up, I would not have believed you. Actually, I probably would have laughed at you. And depending on what particular day of those eleven years you caught me on, I might have had a few other choice words for you too. But here we are.
Every year when this date rolls around, I think about what I have learned since signing those papers. You would think after nine years I would have this whole post-divorce, rebuilding-a-life thing figured out. Apparently, life did not get that memo. The list of things I continue to learn just keeps getting longer, and this year I think one of the biggest lessons has been that loss comes in so many more forms than I ever understood.
We tend to think about loss as death, and unfortunately I now understand that kind of loss far better than I ever wanted to. But there are so many other losses we don’t really talk about. There is the loss of a marriage and the family you thought you would always have. The loss of the dreams you had for yourself and others. The loss of relationships with people who are still very much alive. The loss of friendships, traditions, jobs, homes, plans, expectations and versions of ourselves we thought would be around forever. Sometimes there isn’t a funeral or a sympathy card or even an acknowledgment that something important has ended. You just wake up one day and realize that something you thought would always be there isn’t anymore.
And grief, as it turns out, is just as creative. Sometimes it arrives exactly when you expect it. Other times it sneaks up on you in the grocery store, on a walk, while driving, or because some song you have heard 847 times suddenly decides that today it is going to destroy you. Grief has absolutely no respect for schedules, plans or the fact that you just put mascara on. Rude.
Recently, I wrote about finally giving my grief a name. I call her Edith. Naming her has helped me understand that grief isn’t something I am going to conquer or eventually leave behind. Edith and I are apparently in this for the long haul, so we are learning how to live together. Some days she sits quietly in the corner and lets me get on with things. Other days she makes herself entirely too comfortable and acts like she owns the place. We didn’t choose each other, but if we’re going to be together, we’re learning to make the best of the arrangement. And maybe that’s another thing these nine years have taught me: not everything we carry has to disappear for us to keep moving forward.
Because loss comes in many forms, grief comes in many forms, but so does joy. So does happiness. And so does peace.
I think for a long time I expected happiness to look big. I thought rebuilding a life meant creating some shiny, fabulous new one that would prove everything had worked out. But some of the happiest parts of my life now are ridiculously ordinary. The sun on my face during a morning walk. Music in my ears. A really good book. Laughing with my kids. A conversation with a stranger I almost didn’t stop to have. Sitting in my own home and realizing how peaceful it feels. Going somewhere by myself and not thinking twice about it. Making plans because I want to make them and changing them because I want to change them.
There is a freedom in that which the woman from eleven years ago couldn’t possibly have understood. And I don’t just mean the freedom that came with signing those papers. That was one kind of freedom, certainly. But there is another kind that has taken me much longer to recognize.
There is a certain freedom that comes with the release of all the expectations attached to the people and relationships you lose along the way.
For much of my life, I carried a lot of ideas about who I was supposed to be. A wife should do this. A mother should do that. A daughter should be this. A friend should be that. This person expects this from me, that person needs that from me, and somewhere in all of those expectations was the person I thought everyone needed me to be. Some of those expectations were spoken. Plenty of them weren’t. And, if we’re being fair, more than a few of them were probably expectations I put on myself and then conveniently blamed on everyone else.
But when relationships change or end, something unexpected can happen. The expectations connected to them begin to fall away too. Sometimes painfully. Sometimes slowly. And sometimes with the surprising realization of, Wait. I don’t have to do that anymore.
There is grief in that. Absolutely. But there can also be freedom.
Freedom to decide what actually matters to me now. Freedom to change my mind. Freedom to stop explaining choices that don’t require an explanation. Freedom to discover who I am when I am no longer trying to fulfill a role someone else assigned me… or one I assigned myself thirty years ago and somehow forgot I was allowed to resign from if I had the wherewithal.
Turns out, there was no exit interview required.
Peace has surprised me even more. I used to think peace came when everything was resolved. When all the questions had answers, all the relationships were repaired, everyone understood one another, apologies were given and received, and all the loose ends were tied into a pretty little bow. Ya know….that big kumbaya moment. Bless my heart. That is not how any of this works.
Sometimes peace is accepting that something will never be resolved. Sometimes it is realizing you don’t need someone else to understand your side of the story. Sometimes it is loving someone from a distance. Sometimes it is finally understanding that closure isn’t something another person hands you. And sometimes peace is simply realizing that you don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to. That one? Well, it took me far too long to figure that out.
For years I also thought healing was a destination. Surely at some point I would arrive at this magical place called Healed, plant a little flag and be finished. Nine years later, I know better. Healing is messy and incredibly non-linear. It is learning and unlearning, losing and finding, grieving and laughing, moving forward and occasionally discovering that something you thought you dealt with five years ago has apparently been sitting quietly in the corner waiting for another turn. Again, rude.
That is probably why #forwardisapace means even more to me now than it did when I first started saying it. Forward hasn’t always looked impressive. Sometimes I ran. Sometimes I walked. Sometimes I crawled. There were plenty of times I was curled up on the bathroom floor because…well… it seemed safe. And there have been times when I had to go back and pick up a piece of myself I left somewhere along the way. I used to think that meant I was moving backward. Now I know better.
Nine years later, I have a lot more compassion for the woman who signed those papers. I don’t look back at her and wonder why she didn’t know more, do more or figure things out sooner. She knew what she knew at the time. She was doing the best she could with the information, strength and courage she had. She couldn’t have known what the next nine years would bring. Frankly, if someone had handed her the complete itinerary, she might have politely declined the trip.
Because she couldn’t have known about the losses that were coming. But she also couldn’t have known about the joy.
She didn’t know how much she would laugh again. She didn’t know how comfortable she would become in her own company or how fiercely she would learn to protect her peace. She didn’t know how many wonderful people she hadn’t met yet, how many places she hadn’t been, how many things she hadn’t tried, or how many times she would discover that she was capable of something she once thought she couldn’t do. Most of all, she didn’t know that someday she wouldn’t just survive a life she never planned. She would actually LIVE it and LIKE it!
Maybe that is the lesson of nine.
A beautiful life does not have to look anything like the life you originally planned. Joy and grief can exist in the same day, sometimes in the same damn hour. Happiness doesn’t mean you have stopped missing what you lost. Peace doesn’t require every story to have the ending you wanted. Freedom can come from things you chose to leave and, strangely enough, from things you never wanted to lose. And being okay doesn’t mean everything is okay. It just means you have learned that you can carry more than one truth at a time.
Eleven years ago, I couldn’t imagine this life. Nine years ago, I signed my name and walked away from one chapter without having the slightest idea what the next one would look like. Today, I still don’t know exactly what comes next. The difference is that I no longer need to.
There will be more loss because that is the price of loving people and having a life full enough to love things worth losing. There will be more grief. Edith will make sure of that. But there will also be more joy, more laughter, more love, more ridiculous stories, more mornings with the sun on my face, more people I haven’t met yet, more places I haven’t been and more pieces of myself I haven’t discovered.
So today I celebrate nine. Not because everything turned out the way I wanted it to. Good Lord, no. I celebrate because I am here. I am upright and above ground. Because I kept going. Because somewhere along the way I stopped trying to rebuild the life I thought I was supposed to have and started living the one that was actually mine.
If you had told me eleven years ago that this is what my life would look like today, I wouldn’t have believed you.
But here we are.
And I think I’ll stay awhile.

Peace,
#tutulady
#forwardisapace