It’s official. The divorce is final.
I am untethered.
No longer a wife. No longer a “Mrs.”
No longer able to afford to stay home with the kids.
No longer able to look forward to being an empty nester who finally gets to put herself first.
No longer picturing sitting on the porch in the morning with coffee and the husband of my youth.
I am adrift.
I float through several days of sobbing and drinking and not getting out of bed and not wanting to go home and forgetting to feed myself and overeating and sleeping too much and not being able to sleep.
I send regretful text messages compulsively, knowing I shouldn’t. Knowing I should practice self care rather than lashing out. But I ignore my wiser, saner voice and send them all anyway.
I am flailing. I am suffering. And I do not go quietly.
I do not apologize for saying out loud what I’ve been keeping secret for years.What do I have to lose now? Not my marriage. That’s been lost.
Exhausted from days or weeks or years or decades of wallowing and grieving and raging and crying, I crumple into the bed that he used to sleep in, I squeeze my eyes shut, and I finally breathe.
Curled up into myself, I place a hand on my belly and the other on my chest, and I finally make myself still.
Stillness is the scariest thing to face when every cell in my body is wailing and mourning for a future that will never be, for the broken home, broken promises, broken trust, broken vows, and the broken hearts of my babies.
But I will myself to be still. To hear the quiet. To keep breathing.
I go into myself and ask, “What do I need?”
“Power,” my inside me answers. “A casting off of what no longer serves me. Purification. For the old to make way for the new. Release. The shedding of layers of who I used to be. Set free. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
“What happens now?”
“Fire. Cut it off. Burn it.”
I get out my phone and make an appointment to get my hair cut the following morning.
“Just a trim?” Hannah asks, playing with my long hair. Hannah has been cutting Great Grandma’s hair for decades and the whole family goes to her. She’s an older Asian woman who always made me egg rolls whenever I was pregnant.
“No. Cut it all off,” I say. Hannah looks at me in the mirror, shocked. “My divorce is final. I need to cut my hair off.”
A wise Knowing replaces Hannah’s unsure expression. She nods and picks up a straight razor.
“I cut my hair when I’m angry,” She says quietly. “I know what you need.” And she proceeds to pull my hair into her left hand and starts attacking it with the blade in her right until my past is in a pile on the floor.
Hannah hands me a plain brown gift bag. I kneel down and pick the hair up off the floor. I expect it to be a messy process, but it all stays together in one tidy handful, as if it were expecting the next part of its journey. I place it in the bag and I say goodbye to Hannah.
That night at a speakeasy-esque house party, I mention to Micaela that the hair is in the car and I plan to burn it. She tells me there’s a fire in the backyard. I retrieve the bag of hair and she gathers my people.
Ka Shawna, Amanda, Kim, Micaela, and I sit by the fire, and I look around at the amazing women who surround me, supporting me, loving me.
I take a breath, take a moment, and place the bag into the flames.
I wish I remembered the beautiful and profound words that were spoken by those women during that ritual, but they must have just been meant for that night, for that ceremony, around a stranger’s fire pit, with jazz music drifting from the house.
I watch the bag burn, and my pain and my past and my hopes are the embers being lifted by the wind.
It is finished.
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| Photo credit: Mary Markham |