I have a large family, and most of them I don't see more than once a decade or so. (Except on Facebook.) This is not by design, it's simply a matter of distance: I moved West, they stayed East. I travel, they don't. When I travel, I don't always visit where they are. And so on.
For this grand event that I was attending in upstate New York - my aunt and uncle's 50th wedding anniversary, at a restaurant right on the Hudson River - I would be seeing nearly everyone who I'd ever really counted as family on my mother's side. That would be, oh, about 80-100 people in one place. About half of them had been at my wedding. And none of them - save two cousins, my mother's first cousins - had ever been divorced.
That put me in the 2% error band. Excellent.
There was one person missing, and that was my grandmother. For years, she'd been my biggest fan. And she'd died about a year before I'd filed for divorce. To be brutally honest, I was so keen to please her, I never really entertained the possibility of divorce until several months after her death.
I was nervous. We got there fairly early, so I'd be greeting everyone as they came in. My cousins were throwing the party, and I LOVE my cousins. They are a big part of my childhood, and I just adore them. So I was just going to have to have fun, no matter what. Then I realized what an asshole I was being, thinking only about me and how people would react to me.
Ultimately, what it came down to was, I had to get the hell over my big bad self. This was a party for my aunt and uncle, and I just needed to get a grip. So I did. But I still felt like I was poised for battle, ever vigilant, in case someone felt the need to judge.
I focused conversations on Little One. When people would ask me how I was doing, I'd say, "Great! And Little One is just fantastic." Pointing to her would invariably keep the conversation away from what I really didn't want to talk about: I had failed to keep my marriage together. They would judge me, I knew they would. Hell, judging is like a spectator sport in the Northeast. If you're not judgmental, you're just plain wrong.
And yet - there was something extremely liberating about just going balls-out in the face of it all. Part of me - this previously quiet, strong, let-it-all-hang-out side which I had narrowed down to the tiniest speck of my married existence - really wanted to just yell, "I'M FINE!!". I wanted them to know that I was just peachy, thankyouverymuch, and Little One and I were much better off without D.
Can you smell the defensiveness? It oozed out of me. So much so, that when one of the two divorcee cousins above said something she thought was supportive ("I know it can be really tough, I feel like I failed at my marriage") - what I said was, "Well, unfortunately, I couldn't change the fact that D is an alcoholic, and so I try not to feel like I failed." I cringe even now, knowing that it was all kinds of the wrong thing to say to her. I had worried myself into this constant state of rawness, and it was doing me absolutely no good.
Through the course of the day, though, I started to remember that I was among friends here. I got down off my defensive post, and started to breathe a little. No one treated me any differently. No one pointed at me and whispered at the pariah in the room. Other than simply asking me, "How're you doing?", they didn't treat me any differently than I remembered. My daughter was charming the crap out of everyone, dancing like a maniac on the dance floor with her older second cousins. And when I finally realized that I was actually having fun - for real, not just because I was intent on doing it to show everyone I was just peachy - I could feel my shoulders drop, and I could relax. My family are good people, and I was reminded of this fact again and again throughout the day.
I went outside for a few minutes, to enjoy the view from this particular restaurant. It sat perched on the Hudson, overlooking the cliffs and perilous roads across the river. Brown water swirled around the based of the rocky coast, and suddenly from the north came a huge military transport plane, a C-5, flying low down the river. It was enormous, and grand, and for a moment, I thought, I had to go get D and show him, he'll love this - and then I remembered.
This would continue to be a theme that would play out over time - allowing the black and white parts of the marriage and divorce to merge into varying shades of gray. But in this moment, realizing D wasn't with me, the moment became one of complete liberation. I stood there alone, and I watched that plane fly down the whole damn river till I couldn't see it anymore.
Because I could.
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