Celebrating Divorce With a Sledgehammer Has a Ring of Freedom : Ceremony: One entrepreneur is turning wedding bands into a cathartic fashion statement.
Do you take this divorce?
I do.
With this ring I-- SMASH! -- celebrate my freedom.
With a whack of a four-pound sledgehammer and Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” twanging in the background, Linda Howell reduced her wedding ring to an unrecognizable mess of gold, silver and cubic zirconia.
Howell swigged champagne and thought about her plans. Make the mess into a pendant? Earrings? Yes, a pendant.
So much for tradition.
For Howell, a 38-year-old nurse, the ceremony was a cathartic way to start over after her divorce. And it brought jeweler Lynn Peters some business.
Peters is the founder of Freedom Rings: Jewelry for the Divorced, which makes custom jewelry out of wedding rings. Women often select earrings, pendants and bracelets. Men like golf ball markers.
Peters calls the venture her “artistic contribution to the recycling effort.”
Others call it a refreshing way to handle a painful situation.
In addition to the re-formed jewelry, smashers get a signed divorce certificate and a mini-reception with champagne and music.
Peters’ friends serve as ring and hammer bearers. The hammer is placed in a music box of sorts. When opened, the faint twinkling of “The Wedding March” cascades out of the silk-lined container, which is quickly shut so the smashing can begin.
“It’s like a release,” said Howell, who split with her husband after a 14-year marriage.
She said receiving the divorce papers in the mail didn’t feel like the real thing. “You have a ceremony when you get married, but when you get divorced it’s nothing.”
Peters felt the same way after she and her husband divorced in 1988.
“I never felt like there was closure,” Peters said. “So I threw a party, sort of like a wedding celebration in reverse.”
But what to do with the ring? Peters said she thought about going to a pawn shop or giving it away, but her experience as a jeweler gave her a better idea.
“I thought, I’ve never really made a custom piece of jewelry for myself,” she said. “So I took the diamond out, took a sledgehammer to the band and transformed it.”
Peters’ old band is now a pendant emblazoned with her company’s logo--a wedding ring with a slash through it. She wears that on her collar, along with a button that reads, “I miss my ex-husband, but my aim is improving.”
The Divorce Ceremony
Excerpts from divorce ceremony developed by Lynn Peters:
You are to be charged with the following duties:
1. To have and to hold anyone you damn well please.
2. To enjoy life to its fullest.
3. To experience the pleasures you’ve heretofore only dreamed of.
4. To recover emotionally, financially and sexually.
5. To regain your rightful place among the serene and satisfied.
And
6. To remember that being naked does not mean being alone.
To symbolize this transition we will release any remaining ties to your past by transforming your ring--which represents that past--into a token of your new beginning.
Now, take the hammer.
Stop for a moment to consider the transformation that is about to begin your new life.
Ready?
With this swing let freedom ring!
Source: Associated Press
