A Broken Celebration: the day my divorce was final
This was it. The day I had been waiting for. Sounds a lot like what people would say when they’re about to graduate, or get married, or get that big promotion, or have a baby. Today wasn’t that kind of celebration, but it was a celebration, nonetheless. A decade long relationship, eight of those years including marriage, including abuse, was coming to an end today. I was finally going to be free. Oh happy day indeed.
I drove to my apartment, the one I would soon be moving into. My soon-to-be-ex-husband and I decided to try to keep living together during the divorce proceedings, for the kids. My lawyer had tried to convince me to fight for the house in court because I would have almost definitely have won that battle. But I didn’t want the house. It was his house. He was the one that moved us to this new city, the one who found that house and fell in love with it. My only connection to that house was being abused by him in it. Every room was tainted with the echoes of my pain and tears. Who wants to live in a house that haunts them with their own nightmarish memories? No, he can have the house. And I don’t want to sell it either because at least it could be some place of stability and familiarity for the boys when they are with their dad. Why uproot them twice if I don’t have to? And maybe my soon-to-be ex-husband will appreciate that I’m not coming after him for everything’s he’s got, that I’m trying to keep as much civility as possible. Because no matter what I’ve been through with this man, he is forever the father of our two boys, and that counts for something. The better we all get along after this, the better it is for the sake of those two boys who didn’t ask for any of this.
I pull into the parking lot of my new apartment complex and walk up to the third floor. Apartment 1334... my home. Nobody has a key to this place but me. Nobody else is coming in here. I walk inside to the living room, find a spot on the floor in between the two windows to my left, and just sit. I soak it all in. This place is safe. I am safe. I will never wait for my soon-to-be-ex-husband to get off work in this space and wonder and worry about what kind of mood he might be in when he gets home, or what kind of effect that mood will have on me. Because this is not his home; it is my home. There’s no danger here. Only freedom. And relief. The relief is overwhelming in the best possible way. It’s like I have been riding the currents of a rushing river, always waiting for the next set of rocks to crash into, but now all the rocks are gone, and I’m finally headed straight to the open ocean. There’s so much space and so much air in the open ocean. I can breathe again. I forgot I knew how.
I take in one last breathe in my new safe haven and gather myself up for one last formality before I begin my new life. I must go down to the courthouse to have the judge sign off on the divorce decree, making it final. I get back in my car, make it to the courthouse and find my lawyer in the lobby. We walk into another room where the judge is sitting at a table, smiling. He greets my lawyer with a friendly hello and they briefly talk about their upcoming plans for the weekend. Just another day. He smiles at me and says, “You’re about to be a free woman. Congratulations!” I think there was some other formality too, but I can’t remember. All I can remember is him saying, “Congratulations!” and then signing the decree and shaking my hand, all with a smile on his face. Congratulations. Congratulations. It keeps ringing in my ear. It won’t go away. This is not something I should be congratulated on. You congratulate people when they get married, not when their marriage ends. But wasn’t I supposed to be smiling too? This is what I had been looking forward to, wasn’t it? And now it was done. Just like I wanted. My celebration day. But it didn’t feel right. A marriage, a union between two people that was supposed to be until death do us part, was over. My family was broken. I mean, it was broken even while the marriage was intact, but now it was officially broken. Legally broken. Just like that, with one little signature. I was not happy after all. But I forced a return smile and thanked the judge and my lawyer for all they had done, I took the papers that declared I was no longer married, and I headed back down to my car. I sat in the driver seat and I started to weep uncontrollably. So much for celebrating; more like a broken celebration.
The tears wouldn’t stop. I had stopped crying when my now-ex-husband lost his temper on me while we were still married. I cried at first. Who wouldn’t? But crying never made him stop and I felt like every time I did cry it just gave him more power over me. So I learned to stop the tears. He would not see me in pain. He didn’t deserve the luxury of seeing me hurt. But now, in this moment, I had no control over the salty water that flowed out of my eyes. It wasn’t because I regretted the divorce; I didn’t. I had been 99% sure it was what I needed to do for a long time, but I needed to wait until I was 100% sure before I followed through with it. And I did wait until I was absolutely sure. I had even lost a long-term friendship over it. She had been asking me, begging me, to leave for a long time. A lot of people did. At least the people who knew the truth about what was going on did. And I understood where they were coming from; nobody wants to see someone they love go through that kind of pain unnecessarily. But in return, I needed them to understand that this wasn’t like just breaking up with a boyfriend. We were talking about divorce. That is a big deal, especially when kids are involved. I needed to hold on to hope for as long as I could that something would finally click inside of him and he would see and grasp and understand the damage he had done... and change. It would have been so much better, so much easier, if he would just finally see me, the me on the inside, not just the body that I provided, and love me. I wanted him to love me so badly. Most of my friends did understand, or at least pretended to. But she didn’t. And in the end, she decided that if I wasn’t going to get divorced on her timeline, then she just wasn’t going to be my friend at all anymore.
I don’t know how much time had passed after she left that I finally decided it was time to file for a divorce. I had been talking to a counselor who asked me what it would take on my then-husband’s end in order for me to be happy again. She asked me to describe my perfect scene to her. And in that scene, my perfect scene, my husband wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t a scene where he and I and the kids were living it up happily on some beach or something; where he finally did love me. He just wasn’t there at all. That was when I realized that even if he did change by then, it was too late because too much damage had been done and I could never be a wife to him again. I was at a point of cringing and literally feeling nauseous in his presence; like he might touch me and I couldn't stand the idea of him even accidently brushing against me. That's not how wives are supposed to feel about their husbands. But I did feel that way and there was no getting away from that now. And I thought about the kind of marriage that I was modeling for my boys. If they ended up in marriages just like mine because it was all they knew, I could never live with myself. It was time to leave. None of that changed there in my car on divorce day, with so many years worth of un-cried tears flowing down my cheeks. It was what I needed to do. There was no regret. But that didn’t change the sadness of it all. This was not the way it was supposed to be. I felt like a failure. I had let down my family, everyone who was there on my wedding day, my parents who invested financially into that wedding, my kids, and God. I had let every single one of them down. This was a day for mourning, not celebrating. So I let myself cry all the tears. It was like my tears had also felt trapped all those years, just like I had, and were welcoming their newfound freedom. They finally had the freedom to fall.
I don’t remember much else from that day. Nothing else mattered that day. Except I do remember all the love I received from my loved ones that I felt I had let down; even from God, who I felt I had let down the most. It’s hard to describe if you’ve never experienced it yourself, but it’s like I physically felt Him there in my car with me that day, telling me that no, it wasn’t supposed to be like this, but that I am still loved, and nothing will ever change that. It was the first time that I had truly felt loved in a long time. Funny how true love, not the fake stuff my ex-husband threw at me, cradles you in your weakest moments like that.
So why choose this sad, depressing story as the one I tell and write about? Because it defines so much of who I am today. And because I don't want my story to have happened in vain. If there is anyone else out there going through something similar, I want you to know that you are not alone.
It’s been five years since my divorce and life is easier and harder and better and worse all at the same time. Abuse and divorce are forever a part of my story, and forever a part of my kids’ story, which is always going to be hard and sad. I hate that this broken family is the one that my kids are forced to be a part of. And knowing the full ugly truth of divorce, I am not an advocate for it unless it truly is the only last resort. But in the middle of so much hard, ugly stuff, there can still be beauty and redemption and growth. My ex-husband broke me and then buried me as deep as he possibly could. But instead dying there in that deep hole he shoved me in, I began to grow. Once I was free from his abuse, I was able to start growing into the person I was always meant to be; and because of my deep burial during those abusive years, the roots to the person I’m growing into now are that much deeper and that much stronger. I'm still in the middle of the strenuous pruning process and am still waiting on the day that I will fully blossom, but the sun is bright and growing conditions are optimal.
