Girls Gone Single

I wore sunglasses fished from a public toilet. In fact, I fished them out myself, with my bare hands, dried them on the hem of my shirt and stuck them back on my head. You might be thinking $1200 Gucci shades, but you’d be wrong. Like almost all of my accessories, these were from Target, probably purchased on sale.

It happened when I was meeting my mother at the airport, and I’d just left my husband. I don’t mean I left him in the parking lot – I mean left him, in italics. My mother, God bless her, was flying in to survey the damage.

The truth is I’d been holding up pretty well, considering, but I suspected that in the age-old tradition of daughters in crisis, I’d fly to smithereens as soon as I laid eyes on my mom. And with my two kids gawking from the sidelines, smithereens weren’t really an option. I was determined to keep it together.

For the first time in days, I showered and put on makeup. Head high and shoulders back, I navigated Denver International with a kid gripped firmly in each hand. I would greet my mother as I planned to greet my new life; dignified and unafraid.

Then, of course, Naomi had to pee. And so I found myself crammed in a stall, supervising her novice tinkling while simultaneously trying to keep an eye on her sister’s feet, visible under the partition. There was some crouching involved, and that must be when the sunglasses took the dive.

At a different moment in life, I might have hesitated. I might have cringed and winced, and probably left that mess of toddler pee and plastic as someone else’s problem to clean up. But I’d just left my husband, left him in italics, with two kids under five and only a part-time writing career to fill my purse. And in the shadow of that crisis, this one barely registered as an inconvenience. I didn’t think twice. Just plunged in, grabbed the shades and kept moving.

That day at the airport, I didn’t meet my mother with dignity as I’d planned. I met her with toilet water in my hair. And I didn’t meet her unafraid; I was petrified of every single thing about the life that lay before me. But none of that really mattered. What mattered was that I was in motion; navigating on instinct through a mess that only weeks before had held me paralyzed.

I forgot all about the sunglasses until the next day when I realized they were awfully streaky. And as I washed them, it occurred to me that through those grungy lenses, I was seeing life more clearly than I ever had before.

When my marriage was in its final throes, my then-husband accused me of having a “thing” for divorce. “You think those divorced ladies are pretty cool, don’t you?” he sneered.

I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. I’d just barely begun to peek at divorce through my fingers, like a horror movie or a roadside wreck. And as for  “those divorced ladies,” I was less concerned with their coolness than with the practical question of how they paid the mortgage.

But looking back today, I realize my ex might have been onto something. I think divorce does leave a common mark on many women who’ve been through it.  And yes, I believe the experience often makes us “cooler” than we might have been before; stronger, smarter and above all, happier.

The giant step of leaving my marriage required lots of mini-steps, all of them pretty cool in hindsight. I rattled myself free of superficial social expectations; I learned to put my own sense of the real and the right ahead of other peoples’ rules about relationships and family; I figured out that it’s ok to make mistakes. Most importantly, as I veered off the path paved for me by generations of culture and convention, I discovered my own capacity to build a new path, all by myself.

I know I’m heaping an awful lot of glory on one generally unfortunate event, so let me be clear: I’m not advocating divorce for its own sake, and I’m certainly not disrespecting marriage. I’m just pointing out that divorce – like any dramatic, life-changing experience – has a magnificent power to awaken us to our own possibilities. It topples our assumptions and serves up a crisp, clean canvas on which to redraw our lives. Pretty cool.

Of course you don’t necessarily need a divorce to break free of convention and realize your own potential. Lots of people manage to learn these life lessons with far less hoopla, and some real smarties even learn them as a team, in the context of a committed lifelong partnership. My hat is off to all of them. But for me – and I’m convinced I’m not alone – the Big D churned up vital resources of inner strength I never even realized I needed, let alone possessed.

As my marriage crumbled, I couldn’t eat or sleep and wept daily. Yet I also felt fantastic, charged with an electric clarity of purpose I’d never known before. I was becoming one of “those divorced ladies” before my own eyes. And although I hardly recognized that lady, I liked what I saw.

To my amazement, I found myself cherishing what might have been the bleakest weeks of my life. Raw and buzzing with potential energy, I wanted to hang onto that fevered, fervent state of mind forever.

Of course (and thank God) I couldn’t. Over time, the chaos of change gives way to the rhythm of new normalcy. And as it turns out, the path I’ve built myself has the same bumps and boring stretches as anyone else’s. But the transformation was real, and permanent. Even today, something hums inside of me that wasn’t there before; a low, electric echo of a moment years ago, when I discovered just how cool I am.