shouting in decibels to be heard above the thumping techno.
“Nath!”
She shook me firmly.
“He doesn’t love you anymore, but I do. So, I’m gonna give you one piece of advice.”
I waited.
“Get angry and stay angry.”
With that, she turned and disappeared into the heaving throng of sweaty, shirtless bodies, leaving me to dance with my own demons. I stood open-mouthed for a minute, choking on the bitter pill of brutal honesty she’d just shoved down my throat. She was right, of course. He just didn’t love me anymore.
Our marriage was over, and it had ended badly. He had strayed. I was hurt, I was sad, and yes, I was angry. I was also giving him all the power. As soon as I had seen him, I’d handed him the reins to my emotions (not that he’d asked for them), leaving myself flailing in his wake.
What a waste. Of time, of energy, and of my last weekend with my friends.
But Kieran showed me the way out: to harness those emotions for my own good. At the time, her counsel to “get angry and stay angry” gave me the impetus to move forward. And I was angry… very angry! (Not any more though. Time has healed old wounds and we are great mates!)
Back then however, whether or not the motivator for moving forward was to move forward to something off in the distance or ‘away’ from him is immaterial. It was more about the anger building a fire in my belly, and momentum to propel me out of the pain. It enabled me to think about a future, my future. And what I was going to do with it when I got home. I strapped on a big pair of ‘fuck you and the horse you rode in on’ boots and stomped off towards my future.
But that was a long time ago…
And now, 27 years later, Kieran’s advice came flooding back to me.
Here I was, devastated after another broken marriage. Should I get angry?
20-something Nathy thrived on anger. It was a powerful motivator. That ‘fuck you, I’ll show you!’ attitude.
Certainly, I needed some sort of internal driver to propel me through what would be a challenging time, but this time anger didn’t seem to fit the bill. Despair put its hand up, but I quickly shut that shit down.
I came up with this one instead: hope. This time, it would be hope.
At 47, I found myself with a young son, no (regular) job, and no money, but rather than despair and anger, I was filled with something else – an absolute determination to make the rest of my life a joyful, authentic, loveand laughter-filled, meaningful existence, whatever the hell that was going to look like.
Looking at this through another lens, it might have read:
“My life is shit as it is. I’m miserable, my kid is miserable, and the man I’ve tried to make a life with is miserable. How much worse can being on my own possibly be?”
My Grandma Eileen had a saying… “You’re a long time looking at the lid.”
This was her go-to when she wanted to convey the potential cost of putting off making the tough decisions in life – like following your heart, or your dreams or your gut. Google Translate might interpret this as: “Life is short, so don’t bloody waste it!”
Sure, I knew there would be some tough times ahead, but right then, with the taste of possibility whetting my appetite, life was looking up. If there were fuck-ups, they would be my fuck-ups, and if there were victories, they would be my victories.
I was back in the driver’s seat.
Detachment – Stage 1 Houston, we have a problem.
Let’s say you need to launch something big. And you need it to travel far. And you need this big thing to not run out of fuel before it’s reached its destination and successfully completed its mission.
You’re thinking of a rocket launch, aren’t you?
Well, if you aren’t, think about it now. It’s a useful image to have in your mind when you think of the energy required to end a marriage and not have the whole thing explode in your face before it gets off the launch pad.
I reckon one of the reasons people put off/delay/avoid ending marriages, even when they’re ship-wreckingly on the rocks, is that it’s so time consuming (and expensive). It requires superhuman efforts to deal with the decision itself, the fallout (yes, it will be nuclear – complete with destruction, carnage, and the winter that follows), and then survival and rebuilding your life. Even if you have had the foresight to build yourself a bunker, the catastrophic changes that have befallen your world will ripple onward and outward for years to come. It’s exhausting and terrifying, and you have no clue as to how it will really all play out.
But hang on a minute… Hollywood will show us the way.
When Hollywood A-Lister Gwyneth Paltrow and her then husband Coldplay’s Chris Martin announced that they were ending their eleven-year marriage through ‘conscious uncoupling’, they gave ‘separating with dignity’ a sexy new name.
But as evolved as Gwynny and Chris may be, they did not invent this approach. The idea of ‘uncoupling’ as an alternative to an acrimonious divorce has been around since the 70s. Out of the 60s decade of peace and love came a ‘peace and love’ approach to dissolving a legal institution in which the ‘love’ was gone, but ‘peace’ was still desired.
In short, the concept revolves around both parties reaching a point where they agree (together) that their marriage is kaput. They then set about crafting and executing a separation of lives, homes, cars, kids, pets, friends, and finances that avoids the nuclear codes being activated and a domestic playing out of World War 3 happening, that being where everyone gets dragged through the courts, misery and mayhem ensues, and lots of lawyers get very rich.
Andy and I separated (the second time and for good) in 2011, and to the best of our intentions and abilities, we tried to ‘uncouple consciously’ in Gwynnyand Chrisstyle (but without the millions, the entourage, the nannies, and the publicity). How that was to look – for us going into it – was with the goal of mak ing as little negative impact on Leo as was possible under the circumstances.
While we decided in April of 2011 to end our marriage – quietly informing family and friends of our intentions – it was June before we told Leo. By that time, we had a plan for how it would unfold. (Thank God we did, because nothing could have prepared either of us for the look of sheer terror that grabbed his little face from the inside-out on the day we told him.)
We were sitting in our sunroom. Leo was on the day bed, me sitting next to him and Andy on a chair close by. He was sitting in between the two of us. In a second, I saw his safe and unified (albeit rocky and unhappy much of the time) world unravel in his mind and cast adrift. He swivelled his head wildly between the two of us, like someone watching the nail-biting end of a Wimbledon Final. No sooner did he shift his eyes to one of us than he had to swing back to the other – it was as if, if he took his eyes off either of us for a second, we would evaporate.
“What will happen to me?” was all he got out before the tears came.
In hindsight, the time invested in formulating a ‘separation plan’ was one of the best moves we made (in a veritable ocean of bad ones). The capacity to be able to answer all the questions that inevitably came gave us the small comfort that we could, at the very least, remove some of the anxiety that comes with the sheer tsunami of uncertainty for children when they realize that their worlds are about to change forever, and that they have absolutely no control over what is happening.
It is only the degree to which parents can successfully navigate and chart a course through the shit storm of separation that can, in some measure, redress the balance of trauma children face (no matter what the circumstances).
Of course, for many people (who may be victims of abuse and are in danger), circumstances