Sleeping Solo: One Woman's Journey into Life after Marriage (3 page)

It was also, however, sending me these teasing hints of
other possibilities.

I’m a scientist and a data analyst, and I grew up in a
lawyer’s house.
 
I don’t embrace
the woo
all that easily.
 
Until it started
showing off.
 
Big things,
like pulling a house and a team of fairy godmothers out of its hat.

But there were little things, too.
 
One afternoon, shortly after the rush
and bustle of getting us all over to the new house, I lay on one of the beds in
my daughter’s room, cocooned under a duvet (one of my son’s favorite games that
month was to hide people like this.)
 
It was warm and cozy, and I drifted, a little sleepy, and listened to
the sounds of two mellow, happy kids.

It took a while for the message seeping out from my ribs to
register.

My
marriage
had
exploded—not my entire world.
 

And if I could unfreeze just a little, there was more than
survival ahead of me.
 
More than a
fight to hold together the ragged pieces of what had once been good.

In my soft, warm, safe cocoon, I could finally feel
it—somewhere under all the ice and cold, embers were slowly fanning.
 
I wasn’t a wimp.
 
I might not have heeded all the warning
signs in my marriage, but I didn’t deserve this.

And I had two kids who were still capable of making happy
sounds on an ordinary afternoon.

I don’t think it was any accident that this clarity hit
after I moved into my new house.
 
That was the first big step away from ground zero, and I will always be
immensely grateful that I was able to take it.
 
It gave me my first and best beachhead
against the cold—and the beginning hints of a sense that the most
important part of what came next wouldn’t be what was ending.

It would be what was beginning.

I remember how astonished I was as that thought took form,
the wild idea that my job right now wasn’t to cry and weep and mourn my
marriage.
 
That needed to happen,
but it wasn’t the compass point that needed to drive the next few months.

To find that, I needed to figure out what was fluttering to
life inside my ribs.

A breadcrumb trail to clarity.
 
I didn’t come out of my afternoon in the
duvet cocoon as a butterfly.
 
I was
still dealing with long stretches of devastated and bleak and flattened, afraid
to look forward and terrified not to.

But in the days that followed, sneaking in around the edges
came some small ripples that kept nudging me back to that sense that there was
something more here than endings.
 
The evenings where I breathed a sigh of anticipation as I closed
the doors on my children’s bedrooms and contemplated an entire couple of hours
to myself.
 
The laundry that
got done in two loads a week instead of five.
 
The creeping pleasure
of
sitting on the beach alone and letting sand meander through my fingers.
 

The slow exhale as dozens of small weights slid off my
shoulders.

My marriage was a good one—I still believe that.
 
But we had accumulated a heaviness that
I didn’t really understand until it wasn’t mine to hold anymore.
 
I wish there had been a chance to
lighten it together, but one of the gifts of nuclear meltdown is the clear,
certain knowledge that things are truly over.

I didn’t choose to blow things up.
 
And it felt almost wrong at first to
acknowledge the lighter places—until I realized they had found me a tiny,
chinked-open door to the rest of my life.
 
The explosion of my marriage had created a lot of holes.
 
Big, jagged, bleeding
ones.
 
But holes are also
doors and opportunities and escape valves and bringers of the light.

It was time to start finding the good in where I’d landed.

Collecting traveling
companions.
 
I’d figured
out that I didn’t need a therapist, and I didn’t want to talk.
 
But I was pretty sure that I still
wanted help.
 
Guides, people with a
little more experience in this country where my ribs knew things first and
decisions got made based on how easy it was to breathe.

I’ve always been deeply intuitive—I’ve always
known
things, always gotten to the
answers differently than most people I know.
 
But I didn’t come at the outside world
that way.
 
I was a rational,
articulate, creative thinker who always had words and smart explanations and
solid common sense.

I met the world through my head—not my ribs.
 

But I wasn’t trying to meet the world this time.
 
I was trying to meet
me
.
 
So I let my ribs loose, looking for people, for resources, for tools,
for mentors.
 
Followed my intuition
without trying to layer a whole lot of words over it.

Some of what I needed was already there.
 
The choir that sings
in a big circle and wrapped me in sound and light, every single week.
 
The words of the wise old Irish witch in
my own books—and the fierce mamas.
 
The yarn, spun by my own
hands, that
gave me
tangible metaphors for wisdom and hope and strength.
 
The two children who know what it
is
to be deeply in this moment and not worry too much about
the next.

Sometimes you just have to shift the way you look at things
that are already there.

But sometimes, especially if you’re stubborn and smart and
full of words like me, it helps to have a guide.
 
When you’re about to dump over a bunch
of waterfalls on a
hellbent
ride down a winter river,
it’s very good to have someone holding space for the landing.

I found the first of mine very quickly.
 
She’s part writing coach, part woman of
the wild and witchy and
woo
, part therapist, part
ass-kicker.
 
She asks the
uncomfortable questions, holds up a mirror so I can see what just happened or
who I am or what I’m squirming away from, and sends me boxes that smell like
sexy ancient forests.

But mostly, she took what was already sneaking in the
door—the light, the beginnings,
the
sense that
my ribs really had this—and helped me to put them at the center.

It was time to
walk
on
this road of mine, instead of curling up on the shoulder.

A waterfall into myself.
 
I wish I could lay the journey of the
next few months out for you in some kind of nice, comforting, linear path (I
actually, at one point in writing this, did try).
 
It would make this all sound a little
saner, and it would comfort my inner story-structure chick.
 
But I can’t.
 
It was a waterfall—a beautiful,
overwhelming, wild and scary and enchanting ride, and I spent a lot of it
tumbling around, not at all clear which way was up, learning to worry less
about gravity, less about where I was headed, and more about how it felt
to be
.

How it felt to be present.

How it felt to be wide open.

How it felt to be in my body and listening to my own wisdom.

How it felt to make the words come last, or never, instead
of first.

A beautiful jumble I can’t lay out in any nice, neat way,
but what I can tell you about are some of the things that happened along the
way.

I fell in love with the elements.
 
I had moved to a very
walkable
neighborhood close to a beach—two beaches,
actually.
 
A
lovely, windy, stormy temperamental one, full of pebbles and strong opinions.
 
It is happy to remind me that I’m wildly
alive—or I can sit very quietly and let the wind push at my cheeks and
know that something much bigger and older and more tenacious than me
exists.
 
Or I can I trek to my
lovely quiet cove beach and soak in the gentle heart of the ocean and the
grains of sand that know everything there is to know about grief and let the
waves lap my toes.

Yes—I’ve suddenly discovered that, in the right
environments, I’m a forty-four-year-old mystic.

My kick-ass guide person helped me to get outside.
 
Out of my cozy retreat of a house where
sometimes I can fall into my own head and never come out.
 
Out into the world that blusters one day
and teases me with
hints
of sunshine the next, or
offers up the first bright, daring daffodils of spring on a morning that feels
like winter may never end.

These days, it’s the sultry summer evenings calling, the
ones that lure me into being a hedonist.
 
But back then, I was simply falling in love with the rhythm and the
power and the deep, vast comfort of earth and wind and water and sky and
moon.
 
Centering and balance, in an
utterly tangible way that I adored, and found wasn’t so foreign after all.

And I was, in the same tumbling journey, falling in love
with my ribs and all they connected to.
 
Learning to turn inward, past my words and past my head and really tune
in to what my body knew.
 
What it
needed.
 
What it could give.

Learning to get out of the way of my own strength.

I watched in awe as my heart reached out and anchored my
children in its fierce, fiery, soft, watery depths.
 
As my lungs and throat sang deep,
wordless misery out into the ocean and let peace rise up in its wake.
 
As my DNA reached out
to the rocks and water of this island and found unshakeable home.

Well, I didn’t watch, exactly.
 
That’s not how this whole
being-in-your-body thing works.
  

All I know is that it was fast and furious and full of wild
joy as I realized that I already knew how to do these things.

I already know.

That was such a profound and giddy revelation for me.
 
This wasn’t going to be a journey of
endurance and survival and scrambling to teach my forty-four-year-old self new
things that I would probably suck at and need to practice for a decade until I
got any good.

I remember the first time I lit a fire in the woods.
 
I was twenty-two, and I’d somehow landed
a job taking troubled teens on weeks-long canoe trips in the Canadian
wilderness, even though I’d never been camping in my life.
 
I had a week to learn all the important
stuff, like how to paddle and how to avoid getting lost even though the maps
were thirty years out of date and how to build a fire that might actually turn
a bunch of unidentifiable dehydrated stuff into a meal.

The guy teaching the fire-building lesson had lots of tips
on keeping your pockets full of
birchbark
and how to
make this neat little teepee of tinder and tiny sticks in the middle of your
much larger teepee of dutifully dry wood so that you could tease a few sparks
of fire into life.

I built my teepees, shredded my
birchbark
,
carefully
positioned myself on my knees to blow gently
on the small flames that had lit agreeably when I’d dropped my match.
 

And nearly lost my eyebrows as a bonfire raced to life.
 
I might have used a little too much
birchbark
.

This knowing inside me was like that.
 
And for the second time in my life, I
nearly lost my eyebrows.

I had somehow expected to be a babe, barely learning to
crawl, as I tried to learn new ways of being and doing in the still-scarred earth
I was traveling through.
 
Instead, I
discovered a grown woman—one who has been waiting forty-four years for me
to give her just a little more oxygen.
 
(Well, she kind of slid out through the crack of my books and danced
around in glitter and dared me not to notice her, but I hadn’t quite realized
that yet.)

So I breathed, because when you’re tumbling in a waterfall,
that’s not exactly optional.
 
And
watched this amazing
me
come blazing
out to greet the world.

She’s not shy.
 
(Dear introvert, hang on for the ride.)

She’s got the whole how-to-be-in-community thing pretty
figured.

She’s got really low tolerance for choices that lead to
exhaustion.

She’s a
rockin
’ mom.

She has some
crazypants
stories
she wants to write, and she’s not all that interested in whether they will make
me rich or not, although she seems to think the fame thing would be pretty
okay.

She’s silly and she likes to laugh and she has amazing
patience with moments that might head to either of those.

She’s a warrior—and she knows which fights matter.

She’s got this.

New skin takes some
getting used to.
 
So, I’d
gone over the wild waterfall of this life-changing winter.
 
I’d hit the bottom full of this awesome,
tumbling well of wisdom and energy, resident right inside my own ribs.
 
Now I just had to figure out what to do
with it.