It Doesn't Have to Be This Way

I was never going to get divorced. I mean, I waited a long time to get married. 35 years to be exact. If I had let societal pressure get to me, I would have first married a man at 23, but Spirit intervened, threw me into a deep depression and woke up my insides the minute I entered Sister’s. Never mind that the lesbian club was full of White women who I swore I would never date. Clearly, I have to get the word never out of my vocabulary and mouth.

It’s been almost two months since my wife has moved out. Look, I've avoided writing because I don’t want to talk about this either, but it’s my life so here we go. We are separated and figuring out what that means every day. Today I’m less angry than I’ve been in the last two months. Blame it on accepting reality on its terms or the grace of time, but I am starting to see myself less as a victim. I love my wife. I am very loyal, and even if divorce crossed my mind a lot in the last year, I would not have done it until it was forced on me. 

I am not particularly brave. I am actually scared AF. I said to a friend this week – “I am afraid to be alone. My spouse was my everything. They were my best friend, my partner, my lover, my editor, my support system, my world.” And until those words came out of my mouth, I didn’t know my own deep dark secrets. I had become my 12 year old self’s worst nightmare.

Did I just really say that? Do I really believe that?

I’ve been a stay-at-home mom for 10 years. Since I was three months pregnant, I effectively stopped working outside the home for pay. Well there was a 9-month stint that my spouse had to scale back working because they were in graduate school and I was bitter about it, because we agreed I would be the at home parent, which frankly, after dealing with work-identity issues, I loved doing. I know how to run a household and take care of my family. I am good at it. Plus, I am able to volunteer at my kid’s school, help with the PTO, be on boards of interest, and basically do all the unpaid labor our society needs but doesn't value. 

And then it was over, and I get why my feminist girlfriends never stop working and would never depend on their husbands financially. I get why they always have separate bank accounts and even why my MIL was upset that I wasn’t working for pay, because even she knew that I was financially vulnerable. But that’s not all that matters to me, and frankly I am privileged enough with three master’s degrees to not worry about money. It is not what motivates me.

What I gave up in my marriage was the village, the communal culture I grew up with. This may have something to do with marrying a White middle class person. This might have something to do with White American culture. This might have something to do with how we organize marriage and what we believe marriage should do. In our society marriage is legally something between two people and our belief is that this unit should ideally be self-sustaining and self-sufficient. And guess what? I bought a queer version of that sh*t ten years ago.

I blamed our need to be self-sufficient on the fact that we moved a lot for my spouse’s career and education. We never spent enough time anywhere to build a village. But I also blame it on the fact that I don’t have an accepting family and the family of acceptance buys into this nuclear family as the ideal capitalist unit– as is the belief in mainstream culture. Whatever may be the case, I thought all I needed was my spouse and a few close friends who happen to not live near me at all. 

I was wrong.

In the short two months I’ve been single parenting, I realized how much I have missed out. I am not going to glamorize single parenting. It’s hard as sh*t. It’s a lot of work. It’s tiring. It’s hard to run a household on my own and I haven’t even started working outside of the home. BUT I have been forced to rely on people I wouldn’t otherwise count on, because I have a spouse. I have to make myself vulnerable enough to ask for help now because I need it, my kid needs it, my dog needs it. We all need it. 

I’ve always wanted to re-create the environment I grew up in. I was surrounded by my grandparents and my aunts and uncles and cousins when I was a kid, but as I queer person and  a person who has moved a lot in the last 20 years, I thought and believed it wasn’t in the cards for me. That’s why polyamory was appealing, because I wanted to find people who were committed to being kin with me and my family. (I will save that topic for another post.) But polyamory done well requires a lot of work and maturity. That’s all I will say about that for now.

What I have learned in the last two months is I’ve missed out on connections that I didn’t have or didn’t think I needed when I had a partner who I completely relied on for almost everything. As much as I grieved not having the relationships I have wanted from friends – a kinship that seemed impossible to create – I hadn’t done my part to make that happen. I hadn’t made myself vulnerable enough, open enough, willing enough to say in my words and deeds that I want us to be each other’s people, to give other people in my life the opportunity to support me as I support them – like family does for each other. I haven’t lived out my beliefs that our lives are always connected no matter what and we must commit to being there for each other as best as we can and stop pretending we are meant to do this all on our own.

I know this is hard to do. Our social norms and institutions set us up into these perfect little capitalist units. I am learning that it doesn’t have to be this way.