Junk Mail

The reminders have started to arrive.

Anyone who ever registered for wedding gifts will know what I mean - as the first anniversary approaches, the same stores that sold your family and friends wedding gifts want to keep riding that wave. The typical come-on goes something like this:

"Your wedding was unforgettable...make your first anniversary just as memorable."

Yeah, my wedding was unforgettable, all right. I can't stop thinking about what a waste of time, money, and hope that was. The thing is, our wedding was pretty amazing. Beautiful, low-key, everyone said they had a lot of fun. My childhood friend S gave me what I thought was the nicest compliment ever about a wedding - she said it was easy to be there. That may not sound like much, but it made me feel good, because that was exactly the kind of wedding I wanted.

Easy is near the top of the list of qualities I admire. I told a friend recently that one of my main reasons for marrying Dear Husband was that he was easy to be with. It makes me sound like a person who settles for the lowest common denominator, but that's not who I am. I just feel that people and events and situations that require constant energy and stress to negotiate are bad for my heart and peace of mind.

But look where easy took me this time. DH is easy to be around because he represses and subdues nearly every emotion that is unpleasant or difficult to deal with. I can identify with that - who among us hasn't had the urge to go to a movie or have sex with a stranger to get a two-hour vacation from life? I have a nearly lifelong history of self-medicating to avoid pain.

But I also know the pitfalls of that behavior - avoiding pain doesn't make it go away, it just pushes it in front of you like a snowplow until you have a mountain of ice to navigate in order to get to where you need to be. The only way to negotiate painful feelings is to feel them.

That's what I'm trying to do now. It's one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do, and I still have the urge to escape. But little reminders keep snapping me back to the surface. The junk in my mailbox that urges me to buy a silver picture frame to commemorate my special day is one of them. Luckily, these reminders can go right where they belong - in the trash.

As If One Kind of Suffering Wasn't Enough

I have some advice for anyone going through the sudden painful implosion of a marriage - don't visit my father.

Everyone who knows my father warned me not to go, but unfortunately the plans were made before I discovered Dear Husband's Secret Life, and there was no way out.

I'm being unfair - my father was extraordinarily kind when he heard the news of my impending divorce. Despite being an inveterate philanderer who adored DH almost as much as he loves scotch and chocolate, my father took the news pretty well. He announced that DH had become a "non-person" to him.

However, despite his surprising support, my father remains my father, and spending five days with him at his summer house in Idaho is the family visit version of having dental work done without anesthetic. Here's a one-minute slice of our time together - a conversation that took place in a nice (for Idaho) restaurant on dad's 72nd birthday. Believe it or not, this is an actual conversation.

D- 'Aren't you going to have a drink with dinner?'

A- 'Dad, I was hoping it would have sunk in sometime during the past 11 years that I don't drink.'

D- 'Your life is empty.'

Not every minute of this trip was that excruciating. I had some fun at my father's expense - when he picked me up at the airport, he complained that some irresponsible bastard had hit his brand-new Jaguar and left without leaving a note. I examined the green-and-white paint transfer on his bumper and pointed out that I hadn't seen that color scheme on any vehicle other than a 1955 Nash Metro. I hypothesized that he may have in fact struck a building in a drunken stupor.

He roared back that he hadn't seen many buildings with that color scheme either. He made this statement just moments before we pulled up at his new summer home - a green-and-white house with traces of ice-blue Jaguar paint imbedded in one corner.

It may seem to an observer that the unbearable sharp pain of spending five days with my father might eclipse the dull throb of my collapsed marriage. But the two seemed to compound one another - an agonizing cocktail of misery that felt as if it would never end.

But now that I'm safely home in Los Angeles, the visit seems to have served its purpose - now that I no longer feel like I'm pounding my hand with the hammer of my father's personality, the slow pain of my split with DH is almost bearable.

We're Never As Alone As We Think We Are

I just stumbled upon a magazine article about women who discovered their husbands' secret lives. One woman learned her husband was a pedophile and a child pornographer. One discovered her husband had a bad habit of robbing banks when he was away from home. The article told one sad story after another, but all of the women had cut their ties and moved on and seemed to be living reasonably happy lives.

The story made me realize something my friend B always tells me - somewhere there are at least three people going through something similar to what you're experiencing. It made me feel better momentarily, but in the end I felt just as lost and dejected as before. No one else's sad story is ever quite as devastating as your own. I could empathize with these women, but I couldn't feel the weight of their betrayal crushing their souls.

I know that I too will move on and put Dear Husband's betrayal behind me, but I don't know when that will happen. I endure suffering so much better when I know the approximate duration - a seven-minute MRI, a 90-minute 'creative team' meeting, a five-day visit to my father. The prospect of interminable grief is making me feel blue. My efforts to stave it off for a day or even an hour at a time have been unsuccessful. I know the only way through this is to sit in my feelings. I'm trying to do that, but it feels like waiting for a bus that's never going to come.

Invasion of the Cooking Supplies

It's hard to believe that something as innocuous as pest control could set off the kind of emotional outburst I had today.

Of course, 'pest control' is a euphemism for cockroach killing - after making only 15 calls to Cheap Landlord, I was going to get rid of the livestock that recently invaded my kitchen.

But to do so, I had to empty out all of my kitchen cupboards. That's when I encountered Dear Husband's enormous cache of cooking supplies.

I haven't paid much attention to the contents of my cupboards over the past month, because I've been subsisting on a healthy diet of coffee, cereal, and candy. So it came as a shock to learn that I have enough supplies to become somewhat of a gourmand, should I ever want to cook anything again.

It's comforting to know that I own two gallons of olive oil, five types of vinegar, eight pounds of breadcrumbs, six different kinds of sugar, seven open packages of various kinds of exotic rice, and four giant cans of chicken stock - and those are just the highlights. Of course, if I decide to make anything, it will be a little bland - DH packed up his 50 containers of spices on the day he departed. All I have left is some salt and a sad little can of cream of tartar.

Of course DH's culinary supplies brought back some memories too - quite a few intimate dinners and a handful of fabulous parties that brought wonderful friends together around DH's fantastic cooking.

Other items I found while cleaning out the cupboards brought tears to my eyes. A section of my hometown newspaper folded back to show our wedding announcement. The dessicated, ribbon-wrapped bouquet that my single bridesmaid carried down the aisle. A hideously ugly cake plate given as a wedding gift that I don't quite know what to do with right now.

I cried all afternoon. Tears have been a haphazard, irregular occurrence over the past month - sometimes they won't stop, and sometimes they refuse to come no matter how much I need to release them. Nothing in my past gives me any idea how to navigate this time in my life. But I have plenty of breadcrumbs.

Nostalgia

I have a confession to make: I miss Dear Husband something fierce.

I'm still incredibly angry with him, even though the Treasure Chest of Betrayal has begun to lose its power merely through the familiarity brought by repetitive viewing. I've had a couple of terrible dreams about him where he was hateful and abusive, something he's never been in real life. I wake from these dreams shaken and confused.

But still, I miss the comfort level I used to feel around him. It was so immediate that on our second date, in a movie theater, he put his arm around me and I briefly dozed off on his chest. I miss lazily spooning in bed and talking about everything and nothing. I miss the way I felt when I still believed he thought I was beautiful.

This doesn't change anything in terms of our divorce. That yawning abyss that opened between us on that Sunday morning when I discovered DH's Secret Life still exists, and it is as impassable as ever. But the bright hot pulsing anger in my head has subsided enough to make room for other thoughts. I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever feel that comfortable around another person again. I wonder if I'll ever feel beautiful again. I wonder if and when this terrible feeling of loneliness will subside.

By the time I met DH, I no longer needed another person to feel complete. Now I feel like a jagged fraction of a human being. No longer feeling complete, even temporarily, is such a crippling loss. I know in my head that the missing part of me will grow back stronger than ever before. But my heart, that battered fragile organ that controls so much of what I do, my heart is not so sure.

Limbo

It's hard to find my place in the world right now.

It took months for the realization that I was married to sink in - every morning I woke up a little startled that I was legally bound to another person. In retrospect, I guess I should have expected this - after 37 years of thinking of myself in a certain way, I was making a big adjustment.

My sense of being married was fleeting - it took months to take hold, and was gone in the blink of an eye. I stopped feeling married the moment I discovered Dear Husband's Secret Life.

Now, in just as short a time, I'm struggling just as mightily with the idea that I'm getting divorced. The word divorcee summons up certain connotations for me - sort of a 1970s Me Generation association. It's not pleasant.

I ran into an acquaintance today that I hadn't seen for about a month. It seems like just yesterday that we were talking about my wedding. When she asked me about DH, I told her he was doing just fine. I didn't mention the separation or divorce. I didn't want to see the look of horror and curiousity on her face. I didn't want to see the reaction I imagined her having - that she, recently married herself, would think that I was contagious.

I don't want to be a divorcee. I want to reclaim my magical former title - single. It never bothered me the way it does some women. For now, as I wait for my divorce to come through, I'm none of these things - not single, not married, not even a loathsome divorcee. I feel like I'm in limbo.

History Repeats Itself

Divorce runs in my family.

My parents divorced in 1980, after nearly two decades of rocky and tumultuous marriage. Their relationship was the stuff of afternoon talk shows - numerous affairs on both sides, drinking bouts that sometimes came to blows, and a very laissez faire attitude about raising children. Their marriage ended explosively in an early morning act of violence so horrific that it shaped all of our lives for years to come. I learned a lot from my parents about how not to be married.

My mother's mother divorced her husband in the 1950s because he was 'boring.' My grandfather remarried and spent the rest of his days in the Texas Panhandle town where he was born. My grandmother shlepped her two daughters on a trailerpark tour of Oklahoma and Arkansas, eventually drifting out west and settling in Los Angeles. She never lost her taste for marriage - she wed and divorced again, and had a long string of unsatisfying affairs with married men.

My father's mother divorced her husband in the 1940s after more than a decade of drunken violence. Finding no support from her family or his, she enlisted a man named Slick to drive herself and her two young sons from the Pacific Northwest to Los Angeles to start a new life. I pestered her constantly as a child with questions about Slick and his intriguing nickname. All I ever got for my trouble was a withering stare.

My great-grandmother divorced her husband in 1915. She was no Manhattan socialite, either - she was a Welsh immigrant living a hardscrabble life in a small town in Eastern Idaho. The details of that cursed marriage died with my grandmother in 1992 - she of the withering stare. All I know is that my grandmother's mother abandoned her as a small child after the divorce, leaving her with an uncle.

My mother assures me that divorce isn't genetic. Huh.

Considering my family's history, I was understandably reluctant to marry. I compiled a list of personality traits shared by the divorcees in my family - drunkenness, cruelty, a prediliction for violence - and finally entrusted my heart to Dear Husband, who has one drink every six months and has never deliberately hurt anyone. Too bad I overlooked his other 'qualities' - infidelity, dishonesty, secrecy, an inability to trust.

What are the lessons to be learned here? My first instinct is to shut down my heart and never, ever trust anyone again. But as tempting as this seems, it's not how I want to live my life. I want to embrace all the good things that come my way with an open mind and open heart. I thought my heart was shattered into a thousand pieces, but I see now that it is only bruised and battered. It just needs time to heal.