Divorce: Cutting ALL the Ties that Bind

I noticed something pretty incredible this morning.

I woke up smiling.

I started thinking back. I might also have woken up yesterday with a smile. Didn’t I wake up pretty happy a few days ago, too? The realization slowly sunk in. This has been going on for a while. It may have even been weeks.

 

 

After 16 years of a mostly unpleasant marriage and four very difficult post-divorce years, I have been unhappy. I watched others around me recover so much faster after the end of their marriages. I had one friend who was remarried three months after her divorce was finalized. Even the ones that hadn’t paired off were enjoying being single; island vacations, Broadway shows, cruises, day trips – they were out there living life.

I couldn’t do that right after my divorce. I had two kids to finish raising and college payments looming on the horizon. The divorce kicked the **it out of me and my new life consisted of 60-hour work weeks and weekends filled with laundry, cleaning and meal planning and preparation for the following week. The exotic vacations would have to wait.

But there was an even bigger reason of why I couldn’t move on; our housing arrangement. My ex and I had decided to wait to sell the house until after the divorce when the market would hopefully have improved. He moved into his new girlfriend’s house, the kids and I stayed in our home and the date was set to sell four years into the future after my youngest would leave for college. This was a fantastic arrangement for my ex, but I definitely had not thought this through.

The potential stress of co-owning a house with my ex-husband should have been obvious. A volatile marriage, followed by an even more volatile divorce process should have taught me that every tie between us should have been completely severed when we signed the divorce papers.

Problems arose almost immediately. We were supposed to split the costs of maintaining the home 50/50. Instead, I somehow became 100% responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the property and that meant many things. Acres of lawn to mow twice a week each summer, long driveways to plow in the winter, leaky windows, leaky roofs, ceilings falling in, replacing broken down 25-year old appliances and furnaces…, it seemed that every week there was a new adventure and a new bill. With each check that I wrote, I resented my ex even more.

Even worse, none of the financial or physical burdens of owning this home with him compared to the emotional ones. I owned property with a man who so deeply and genuinely hated me that any time I had to call him to fill him in on property developments, the conversation left me spent. The name-calling, the belittling, the digs, the threats…, it’s all the stuff that should have ended with the marriage.

Then something happened. Something fantastic and so emotionally, physically and financially freeing that it changed my life immediately. Four years had come and gone and we finally sold our home.

What I hadn’t realized until I was in my new place (a very small apartment where I have zero responsibility outside of the four walls of my living space) was that there was no way for me to truly heal from the divorce until that house was sold. That last piece of connective tissue needed to be severed.

The day that I was able to cut the last connection was the day that my new life began. I was free. Free not just from the daily stress of what the house represented, but more importantly, free from him. With the kids in college and the house gone, I no longer had to report to him or to ask permission or consult him about anything. Everything in my life now belonged to me.

Thinking back now, I remember waking up that first morning in my new place. I was on the cold floor. I had fallen off the blow-up mattress that I was using until my furniture arrived. There were boxes everywhere – my barking dog accidentally wedged stuck between two of them while trying to retrieve her stuffed bear. No place to sit, no television, no Internet. I could hear my neighbors upstairs stomping across their living room. It was chaotic and crazy but it was my chaos and my craziness. I did the only thing that I could…I smiled.