On Anniversaries

Yesterday was, in a bizarre example of life’s occasional symmetry, the anniversary both of my marriage and of my divorce.

On May 12, 2001, I meringued up in a traditional fluffy white dress and walked down the aisle to meet the man on whom, it turns out, I had settled. Four years later at 2:30 in the morning on May 12, 2005, I realized that I was finished and that my marriage was over. Normally, I would call it May 11th due to my usual insistence that the next day doesn’t begin until one has slept and wakened, but that’s not important to this story. Whatever. Close enough, non? What does matter is that I can still remember the noise I made when I realized my marriage was over, indeed I don’t think I can forget it, but I don’t think I could ever reproduce it.

Let me pause here and say that I have never, for even one instant, regretted the fact that I’m no longer married to my ex-husband. Hell, I can still almost give myself a facial tic just by thinking about him.

Because unlike many of my fellow humans I do have a tendency to use my forebrain, I have made peace with the mistake that was my marriage and the . . . extraction . . . that was my divorce. The Ex was, at the time of our marriage, a drunk. I sort of knew it, but my wedding and marriage was all about denial, so I went right ahead. In retrospect, I met The Ex far too soon after what was, in essence,a bit of a nervous breakdown and a short but dreadful series of heart bruising and breaking. I didn’t need to get married; I needed an intensive round of the therapy.

That said, The Ex doesn’t get a free pass. He wanted to get married, and I was just the next woman who happened along. I think he knew less about who he was and what he wanted than even I did. Eventually, The Ex got sober. Once he cleared the whiskey cobwebs from his brain and soberly appraised the situation, he realized that he didn’t particularly like me. Which made me not particularly like me, either, but made me like him even less.

Like all things that are ultimately doomed a breaking point was eventually reached, and suddenly the Kate that I had somewhat lost reasserted herself. Realizing that my situation was fucked, my marriage was fucked, and the fool to whom I was married was completely fucked—I decided that it was time to leave. And to take most of the furniture with me.

There is some friendly back and forth among my friends and I as to whether or not he ever really loved me. Since I don’t think he ever really knew me, I say not really. In all fairness, I don’t know if I loved him enough for our marriage to have worked even had the halcyon period immediately following his sobriety continued.

In the moments when I do not feel like tarting up the truth in pretty ribbons and bows, I knew the person I was marrying pretty well. He had all the depth of your standard casserole dish. I failed to predict how out of control his drinking would get, sure, but I knew it was a problem because it was a familiar one (shout out to the family!). The problems we encountered after he stopped being a drunk were unanticipated, but predictable. Oops. His behavior changed, but only because he quit filling the echoing hollow of his empty inner-life with booze and began plotting to fill it with work and children for whom he expected me to care.

I married Mike because I didn’t think I was going to do any better. I divorced him because I realized that it didn’t matter if I could do better because I sure as hell couldn’t feel any worse. After Mike’s surprise at my announced decision wore off his relief was, as I recall, palpable. He wanted out as well, he just wasn’t strong enough to do it.

What took the longest time for me to come to terms with, indeed what still troubles me from time to time, was the fact that I was, after all, the kind of woman who would make these mistakes. I got married for foolish, selfish reasons. This led, inexorably, to divorcing. I failed not because my marriage ended, but because a stupid, weak choice necessitated my marriage ending.

That sound I made on that late, late night when I finally realized that my marriage was finished, that terrible, pained yip, was not the sound of me mourning the end of that relationship. No. It was the sound of realizing that I was not the person I thought I was.

Oh well.

Two years later I am okay with the person I am and okay with the mistakes I made. Not proud of them, or indifferent, but okay. I needed, I think, to fucking burn myself in all that. It seared off an awful lot of fluff. I hope that it didn’t temper me, that it didn’t make me hard; that’s not what I want. I would never want a stupid mistake made when I was young and raw to forever harden that part of my life. I don’t think it has.

I will not, however, be making that fucking mistake again.