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A memoir of divorce, but kind of a really annoying one.

Definitely yes, divorce is traumatizing and I completely relate to the part about feeling as if your whole life somehow became about his happiness, and also how can he just waltz out and leave you devastated, and how is it that he can break everything and make such a mess but then he seems unaffected and you’re just left weeping in a pile of ashes? So, yes, that part: relatable. But the rest? She’s having a very different experience of life and thus a very different experience of divorce, even if some, a lot, of the underlying pain and trauma and heartbreak is very much the same. Also not relatable: the ongoing hanging out with and sleeping with the ex, the friendliness, and the final chapters bringing it all to a bittersweet but heartfelt conclusion with her and her ex having some nostalgic moments and no thanks ugh. Good writing. Good details. Good humor, mostly. Just a gulf, a chasm, between the “challenges” of going through divorce that made the telling sound more like self-pity than self-awareness. Or maybe that’s just me being bitter. 🤷‍♀️

Yet I was lulled by his predictability—once again, without preamble or rational discussion, he was stating his inalienable human right to have happiness in his life. By now this was a popular theme in our home, N’s Happiness, a kind of precious yet difficult pet. It had become repertoire and had lost some of its original force. Although I’d never said so, it all sounded as whimsical as a lost pinwheel. He (we) have everything… gainful employment, a home, health, a sound child. Food, warmth. It ought to enough; he shouldn’t force us all to go delving on some quixotic hunt.

It’s his happiness, I thought, slightly hysterical by now. Therefore he should find it on his own. Has he looked everywhere?

An absence opened up from N’s side of the marriage, a different tone of silence. …It became a void; a place I could add to and see no difference, and I had seen that and I had blinked. I had blinked and that, I see now, was the beginning of my own undoing. Because I decided that what a good wife and a new mother would do would be to correct her own faults, and simply expand to fill the space.

I am human, a detriment to the smooth, successful completion of divorce.

The flip side of love is disregard. When entering the country of a certain kind of love, be aware that desolation is a distinct possibility.

I intend truth, but some of what I believe to be true is doubtless untrue. Due to necessity, I will aim for the broad strokes. The loss of significant chunks of highly salient information, the blurring of whole months is a wily, elastic aspect of betrayal.

There is nothing I wouldn’t do for him. Nothing. Therein lies the difference between N and me, the difference that can never be overcome: putting himself over his son, not to mention his wife, whom he knew was true and had loved him despite all the myriad maladies of his soul. Now A is Guest Son and not Whole Son status, a marginalization, rife with so many subtle mind-fuckings to the both of them. …he climbed up on the manic dolphin and swept away from us, toward his own private Atlantis.

Too many memories, and him out there with no memories at all. What a lucky brain N has, to not remember anything, to just be able to Empty Trash. Empty Family.

That is his right. I have mine. The right to burn, to raze the earth, and perhaps to start again. This is a call to action. I need the energy that is locked in these mementos. I need it all back.

There is satisfaction in simply making life work; a roundness to everyday living that I was looking for all along, and found at the end of this debacle. N has somehow missed our boat… but it’s all right for A and me. It is enough.