Hate No Cure for Agony of Divorce

We are careening through divorces, my friend and I. Wait. That’s not entirely true. I’ve already had my divorce. It’s my friend who is in the thick of it. She has filed and is awaiting a court date, and I am giving her all kinds of great advice that, if I were her, I wouldn’t follow either. I mean well.

Without too much involvement from their attorneys, they have decided she will take their 4-year-old son, they’ll split the profits from the sale of the house, and both will be free. She may move west.

I tell her that if she’s standing near someone who says, “My divorce was the biggest growth experience of my life,” to run screaming in the other direction. That kind of maturity is unattractive.

She calls to tell me a weird dream where she’s running, splashing through a jungle stream--so no one can track her, she says--and she is suddenly confronted by a snarling lion that turns into a tiger and then back into a lion again, and she looks up at a highway overpass (in a dream world, a highway overpass through a jungle is entirely plausible), and there’s an old man standing there watching her. She doesn’t recognize the old man. It’s not like a dead father come back to rescue her. It’s just some old man. She wakes up shaking in anticipation of being eaten alive. She thinks the big cats are her fears about life with her husband, and life without him too.

I long ago hid my fear beneath a blanket of bravado, but I lift that blanket just for her and tell her about my divorce summer. I did everything stupid twice and came home each time swearing never to do that again.

She’s started drinking tea--not because she likes the taste of it but because the heating of the water and the dropping of the tea bag give her comfort in a way popping the top off a soda can doesn’t.

She is combing the self-help section and coming home with armloads of books that she piles in her bed as barriers to keep this from ever happening again.

Good women. Bad choices. Good women. Low bridges. Good women. Old age.

She calls to say she has a family album in her lap, and a pair of scissors in her hand, and she is going to snip her soon-to-be-ex-husband out of all the pictures, as if that will take away the lies and the drugs and the counseling sessions where she sat waiting for him, and he didn’t show.

I tell her not to. They have a 4-year-old son who one day will need to see his history--his entire history, not one edited by his angry mother. She has already altered her wedding pictures. I ask her how she’s going to explain a lonely picture of her in a long fancy white dress standing in front of a church. She says she’ll pretend it’s her first communion.

I tell her the world is divided firmly down the middle on this, that some people rewrite entire family histories to pretend a spouse--and a divorce--never happened, but some are militantly open about the whole thing. Of course, she must hate him for a while. She just must be careful to do so judiciously, there being a child.

Maybe hate is the emotion she needs to launch herself out of there, and then later she’ll remember that picnic she took where she laughed and laughed, or the music he liked, and instead of wincing she’ll smile. Cauterize the wound now, I tell her, but don’t think you can survive hating him forever.

She, who normally blushes if someone takes the name of the Lord in vain, runs through an impressive list of foul names for him. I can’t argue with her. I tell her to look for an article of clothing he might have left behind and slash that instead.

She calls to say that a man has asked her out at work, and she’s thinking of going just for the sex, and I tell her that the world doesn’t work that way anymore. I do not come from high moral ground here, but it’s been 12 years since she was on the dating market, and she may not have been keeping up.

She wonders how hard this is. She wonders why it took her so long to leave such a painful union. And as weird as it sounds, she wonders, too, about that old man on the overpass.