Somehow it is the middle of May. Betsy is off to Washington D.C. next week. I swear that it seems like just a couple of years ago that I was in Washington D.C. with my friends.
(I was just getting over a cold when we were in D.C. and so the last stages of a cough always take me back to those three days with my friends in which I felt like such a teenager, an actual teenager with a social life.)
Watching Betsy be fourteen is a delight. She is so very much like me anymore. It’s all a bit strange because for all the years that we were the family of four, Betsy was such a tomboy and such a daddy’s girl. For all that I have changed so much during the past almost 4 years, Betsy has changed too-it all took its toll on her as well, but she and I have come to this new place where, as she says just about every day, “we are so much happier.” Which is very true.
In the beginning all of this change was overwhelming-the experience of Nick leaving for me and the girls was very jarring. Everything happened suddenly, and our world flipped upside down, and there were new people and an entirely new routine and there was just so much to mitigate. Betsy’s personality is to be pleasing and so she tried as hard as she could to act like none of this change bothered her, but the reality is that change bothers Betsy more than any of us.
The other day she and I were talking and she said, “I remember that I always wanted to be with Daddy. But then it’s like that doesn’t make sense.” Listening to her try to make sense of all of this change helps me to understand why it’s so difficult for me to find the right words sometimes-the words to describe what living through such a profound change does to you. Because you come out the other side and you feel like your old life was forever ago and also just yesterday.
It feels like a fraud to forget-to not acknowledge the good parts of the old life, the parts of life that we remember still with joy. Because that’s the bit about all of this that is so profoundly difficult, and I think is particular to divorce-there are all of these memories that exist that contain really wonderful, happy memories, but it’s all wrapped up in memories of the way that Nick left. It slants everything, and I’m sure that there are people for whom getting divorced was not a terrible trauma to live through who think that we seem overly dramatic.
It’s all a dance, and watching Betsy helps me to realize that I’m not the only one who remembers the good while struggling with what to do with the damage of the bad, and that coming to these realizations is difficult.
I am so very lucky to have these girls to go through this journey by my side. Because frankly, there are bits of this life that we live that only make sense to us. I don’t know that I am even able to write it down in terms that explain-the best way to put it would be, we remember, quite happily, bits of life that existed prior to Nick leaving, but we always come to this realization that life now is better. And I can’t explain how that can possibly be true, but it is.
The thing of it is, we had all of these wonderful years that we were a family. And I don’t want to deny that part of my life. But I also want people, particularly the people who have reached out to me about being in a similar situation, to know that life on this side of being divorced is actually really wonderful. I would have given anything, about 4 years ago, to have someone say to me, “It will be okay. It will be glorious. Life will twist and shift until you can remember that it was happy before, but that you know that it’s happier now.”
Change is still not my favorite, and never will be. But I’m not scared of change like I was 4 years ago.
These precious girls that I get to raise, they just keep teaching me all the things. I don’t know how I was so lucky to get to be their mom. But I’m grateful for every single second of it.
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