Milestone

This week in dubious milestones: Tomorrow, 1/13/21, marks five years to the day since Jen moved out.

Back when the post-marriage chapter of my life was only just beginning, when it seemed utterly alien and unreal, when I could scarcely grasp the concept of me a divorced/single person, I remember trying to imagine what my life would be like in the future, beyond the immediacy of the hurt and grief and bewilderment that was then my present. What would things be like once all of this was no longer fresh, once I was no longer in “crisis” mode? When in the midst of big life changes, I sometimes have a sense of being “stuck in the present”—wishing that I could know or experience what their long-term impact will be like, knowing that it will not always feel like it feels “now,” but of course unable to do anything but wait. I had been married my entire adult life; now, suddenly, I wasn’t, and that was new and weird. But what would it be like when my marriage was, say, five years in the past?

(And, okay…as of now, it’s only been five years since our at-the-time-possibly-temporary separation, not since our actual divorce, or even since the point when “hopefully temporary” gave way to “definitely permanent.” And the thoughts and questions and general mindset that I’m recalling here presumably belong to that later time. So, technically, I’m not yet quite at the “five years out” milestone that I was then trying to imagine. But, whatever. Close enough.)

Closely related to this question was a sense that I had, especially in the first year or two after the divorce, of waiting for some kind of “new normal” to take shape in my life. To the most wishful of my inner voices, this equated either to whatever remnants of hope I initially clung to that the whole catastrophe could still be reversed, or (mostly, and increasingly over time) to the hope of finding someone new. Otherwise, it meant something along the lines of “making peace with” my new reality (whatever that might mean)—or maybe, more concretely, it meant things like getting to a place of financial stability, and feeling secure in my ability to keep my house (preferably without needing to share it with a renter). Not forgetting that I was in the middle of a big attempted career change simultaneous with the divorce, there was plenty that felt unstable and impermanent and of uncertain resolution in my life at the time. Of course, less than year after the divorce, my job and financial situations did stabilize, and I was able to get rid of the renter. Also, my efforts at dating actually led to some new experiences around the same time. When the latter proved short-lived, I told myself that what had happened once (however briefly) could happen again, so there was no telling what life might have in store for me. So, for the next year or so, I contented myself as best I could with the dramatic improvements in my life that had come from my job promotion, tried to move on from the failed dream of becoming a teacher, and struggled to keep hope alive that I might yet have a romantic future as well. But even so, I realized sometime in the following year that I had never really stopped unconsciously waiting for some kind of ill-defined “new normal” to materialize. This was silly, I told myself. Regardless of what the future did or didn’t have in store for me, my life in the present was the new normal—not merely some waiting period that somehow didn’t fully count. But would this understanding ever really sink in on an emotional level?

Surprisingly, the answer to that question has since turned out to be “yes.” Sometime fairly recently (though I’m pretty sure it was at least a month ago now), as I was going about my routine one day, the thought suddenly popped into my head that despite my deeply ambivalent feelings about it, living alone felt very “normal” to me now. I had grown accustomed to it, I realized, and it actually seemed a little strange to really think back to all the years when I shared my life with someone else. Not “bad strange,” to be clear. I still miss it, and I still long to have something like it again in the future. But still, the “old normal” had, sneakily, at some point begun to feel rather distant, I realized—and the post-divorce life that once had been so hard for me to even imagine, now did actually seem “normal.” Huh.

Then, of course, the Christmas season arrived. I haven’t had even a single really good holiday season since the divorce. This is partly because it’s a time when I tend to feel the loss especially acutely, with so many of the rituals and traditions that I cherished for years being irrevocably changed, and me being so much more alone. It’s also, though, partly the result of a flukish streak of bad luck; I was sick during two of the last five Christmases, for instance, and then recovering from surgery (among other issues) last Christmas. This year, on top of the now-standard isolation due to living alone and no longer getting to visit Jen’s family for the holidays, the pandemic meant that I couldn’t even see my own family—and this on top of having been isolated from friends and coworkers for the better part of a year now, being deprived of community band (and our annual holiday concert), and everything else. I tried to make the best of it, but the truth is that much of my holiday break ended up being kind of depressing. It wasn’t all bad, but it definitely wasn’t what I wanted it to be, and (to return to my main theme here) nothing about it felt remotely “normal.” But this, too, is part of the reality of my life, five years after Jen’s departure from it: on one hand, I’ve grown quite accustomed to being alone most of the time—and on the other hand, certain times (like holidays) continue to be especially hard, and rarely match the expectations for them that I still carry in my head.

Anyway, here’s to having my first five years of newly single life behind me. I wonder: What will my life look and feel like when ten years have passed since the divorce?