Sleeping Solo: One Woman's Journey into Life after Marriage (7 page)

But those moments come—and then they go.
 
They are honest, and they’re mine, and I
do my best to rest easy with them even when they’ve crash-landed into one of my
happy days.
 
Honoring grief matters,
especially when there are two little people watching and they’ve lost something
too.

But there is no dude with a clipboard taking notes and
keeping track of whether I am sufficiently miserable.
 
The quality and importance and value of
my marriage
doesn’t
have to be defined by the scope of
my grief.
 
Moving on doesn’t mean it
didn’t matter.
 
It simply means that
I’m making a choice to visit grief’s house, rather than live there.

I got walloped the other day, watching a sweet old couple
hold hands at the beach.
 
They were
sitting on a bench, watching the waves stirred up by the summer breezes and
sharing a drink of something pink and bubbly.
 
She reached up to adjust his ancient
straw hat and then took his hand in both of hers.

I wanted, desperately, to be him—to know that someday,
when the lines are etched far deeper in my face, that someone will want to hold
my hand, and perhaps to fix my hat, too.

And who knows, maybe that will happen.
 
But I won’t be sitting there with the
father of my children—and that’s worthy of grief.
 
My children will never see us sit there
together, and that stirs up sorrow for me too.

And knowing all those things, I can still choose to be
happy.
 
Not every moment, not every
hour—but enough of them that the painting built from these brush strokes
will be one I like.

Because, let’s face it.
 
It’s got to be a lot more fun to live in the painting called
Woman Caught Dancing
than the one named
Woman Mired in Grief
.

The need to dance.
 
Let me start off by saying something that anyone who knows me will swear
to be truth.
 
I am not a
dancer.
 
Not even close—I’m one
of those kids who hung out on the walls at the school dances and tried
desperately to avoid certain humiliation.

I feel music.
 
I
have
rhythm,
I just have no idea how to translate that
to my awkward hips and limbs.
 
I
have not shimmied anywhere in my life.

But at some point in this journey, I promised myself I was
going to try new things, even ones that seemed like they might be two hours of
non-stop cringing.
 
I was also still
on a quest to find ways to be more present in my body.
 
And, if I’m telling all the truth, as a
girl who grew up with
Flashdance
and
Dirty Dancing
, I have long
harbored the secret hope that I am not destined to be this awkward forever.

I don’t remember how I tripped across the website of one of
the local 5 Rhythms dance teachers.
 
I do remember it was when the muddy,
uncomfortable, seed-cracking days of early spring were giving way to early
summer glory, and my body was very, very restless.

5 Rhythms isn’t a typical dance class, and I’m not going to
do it any justice by trying to describe it.
 
So I’ll just tell you what it felt like
to be there.
 

The first time I went, I sat gingerly on the floor in the
middle of about twenty other people in a big, dim hall, all doing various
things—stretching, mostly—that had no pattern I could discern.
 
Music played in the background, but it
didn’t seem to demand that we do anything with it, although some people in the
room were clearly already catching a ride on the beat.
 
I waited patiently for someone to show
up and tell us what to do.

After about ten minutes, I was the only one left sitting on
the floor.
 
The rest were moving
around, doing their own thing—but it was mostly beginning to look like
dancing, and the music was getting harder to ignore.
 
So I stood up and began to quietly
shuffle around in the shadows.

The woman standing by the music system in the corner would
occasionally say things like “follow your hand for a while,” or “play with some
clockwise spirals if you like.”
 
And
this interesting thing started to happen for me.
 
As I felt out what my hand wanted to do,
or had fun spinning around in right-hand circles, I started feeling the dance
from the inside.

The whole awkward thing is a non-issue if it’s the way your
body wants to move.

I have no idea if I looked like a dancer that night, but I
felt
like one.
 
The music got to speak straight to my
body as it moved from gentle flowing rhythms through more demanding, wild
ones.
 
And oh, the magic of the wild
beats!
 
Then back
to flowing, and finally to stillness.
 
(There’s a lot of actual thought and
experience behind these rhythms, as you might guess from the name, but I didn’t
know any of that on my first night.
 
I just rode the dance wave.)

So, two things happened.
 
I fell into wholly unexpected love, and
I had a new tool for hanging out in my body and for opening the gates to some
of what I was feeling that didn’t have an easy outlet.

Dear world.
 
Make
room for one more dancer.

I also found a place to be in community—and to be
alone.
 
The dance sometimes moves
into partners or trios or squares, and some people choose to remain solo at
those moments.
 
The other night was
the first time I tried that—there had been more partner dance than usual
and my body was resisting.
 
So I
flowed on my own, following a meandering stream only I could see, in and around
the duos.
 
It wasn’t lonely at
all—more like the magic of being the blood traveling between the
cells.
 

I can be in a room full of pairs, be alone, and not be
lonely.
 
I can be connected in
exactly the way I choose, and find welcome.
 

I knew that before the other night—but this time, my
DNA got it.

The
awesomesauce
of friends.
 
I am so freaking fortunate—and I
know it.
 
I have good friends who
offer me cuddles and intimate conversation and the joyous pleasure of being
seen and appreciated for who I am in this moment or this day or this decade.

And before you think I’m one of those lucky people who has
spent the last decade surrounded by a luscious tribe of people who care about
me and who came together to create a soft landing when my marriage exploded…
not so much.

We’d just moved.
 
Away from all my peeps, those of us who had survived the early years of
childrearing and sleepless nights together and who stood brave and teary-eyed
as the kindergarten teacher waved good-bye and closed the classroom door.
 
It was a big loss when we moved, even if
I’m honest and
say
that I felt more like a satellite
in that solar system than a major planet.
 
People liked me, and I liked them—but our shared lives held us
together more than anything.
 
Some
of my closest friends were online, one of the many quiet consequences of being
an exhausted introvert.

When we moved, I’d resolved to find community on the
ground.
 
Real-life
friends, not virtual ones.
 
People I bonded with because we liked each other, rather than because we
shared
kids
of approximately the same age.

I’d made some good beginnings.
 
And then, four months after the big
move, my marriage detonated.

It’s hard to look at a brand-new, maybe-could-be-a-friend
person over tea and say that your life has exploded.
 
Especially when you’re a socially
awkward introvert who hasn’t done the best job of connecting with real, live
people in the last five years.

But this awesome, juicy thing happened when I did.

I made friends.
 
Like in an hour, deal done and sealed over tea.
 
Terrific, honest,
interesting friends.
 
I
didn’t let it all be
about me and my mess of a life
(mostly!),
but I didn’t hide it, either.
 
And the universe gifted me with a tribe.

Of all the things that have happened in the last eight
months, this is the jazziest miracle.
 
And the biggest surprise, because I’m just not all that smooth and savvy
at the friend thing.
 

I’m an introvert, so I’m still moving slowly.
 
Some of my friendships have hit that
comfortable place where we know a fair bit of each other’s stories, and some
are three days old and counting.

But every single one of these people is heart treasure, and
I’m ridiculously grateful.
 

The message in the cards.
 
My aromatherapy-massage person had a fun
afternoon gathering a few weeks back.
 
A bunch of cool people attended, and we got to make custom scent blends
and eat ridiculously good chocolate—and have our tarot cards read.

By now, I don’t even blink at
the woo
.
 
I just laugh.
 

My turn for a reading came late in the afternoon, and the
woman reading the cards was moving fast and furious.
 
I cut the deck and she began flipping
the cards and flying through what they meant.
 
It was a waterfall of words, and I
didn’t catch all of them.
 
Stuff
about change and energy and grief and resurrection—things that made sense
and aligned with my view of where my world
was at.

And the cards held one more very strong, very consistent
message.
 
Sometime in the next three
months, my life would run headlong into tall, dark, handsome, and male.
 
Of the romantic kind.
 

My reaction was clear and instantaneous and full of
laughter.

Nope.

Not now.
 
Not any
time soon.
 
And
maybe not ever.

I don’t know
who
those cards were
really for.
 
It had been a marathon
of quick readings for the woman holding the deck, and my introverted self could
recognize another inward soul approaching exhaustion.
 
Perhaps someone else in the room was on
a path toward romance, I don’t know.

I just knew it wasn’t me.

And I loved, so very much, that six months after my marriage
exploded, the reasons for my certainty were good ones.
 
Not because I’d been hurt, and not
because I was still working my way through the debris of my last tall, dark,
and handsome, although both those things are very true.
 
Not because I’d sworn off men and not
because I was born in the unlucky line when the universe was handing out
partners.

None of those things are why I laughed, although all of them
seem like sensible responses to nuclear meltdown.
 
Six months ago, I might well have
decided any or all of them were pretty good places to land.

Before my ribs started knowing things.
 
Before I started really breathing.
 
Before my soul found
its drumbeat and its dance.

There won’t be any tall, dark, and handsome walking through
my door any day soon.

Because I’m ready to live with me.

I
want
to live
with me.

The land of no name.
 
The tarot cards and my dancing were a
turning point—one that had me realizing that in a very real way, I’ve
arrived somewhere tangible and good and worth celebrating.
 
There was only one problem.
 
I didn’t have any idea what this place
was called.

I needed a word.
 
I’m a writer.
 
Words
matter—and not having one wakes me up at night.

“Married” was a word I took for granted, right up until it
wasn’t true
anymore.
 
It was one of the easy adjectives that described
who
I was, made it simple for people to slot me into
the right country on their mental map of humanity.
 
It was a word I was proud of, shorthand
for something in my life that mattered deeply and named an important piece of
who I was.

“Divorced” is just not that kind of word.
 
It’s all about who I’m not, a singular
declaration that I no longer live in the country of people who are
contractually hooked up with a mate.
 
It’s a word that conjures breakage and separation and
disconnection.
 
A
lack of something, or the ending of it.
 

Seriously?
 
That’s like describing my gender as “not a boy”, or my favorite desert
as “not cake.”

At this point in my life, I get to choose my own darned
adjectives.
 
I wanted one that’s a
kindred spirit—something that offers people a one-word taste of who I
might be and an invitation to lean in and find out more.
 
“Divorced” is just not that kind of
word.