It’s Time

I never wanted a divorce. Long before I was old enough to get married, I disapproved of divorce on a theoretical level. I told myself (with considerable arrogance) that once I had given my word on something, by God I was going to see it through! Self-righteous little snot, wasn’t I?

At the same time, I started fantasizing about a divorce from Wife less than a year after we were married. I even suggested to her right around the time of our first anniversary that maybe a divorce would be the simplest solution for both of us. In the years that followed, many was the time I found myself staring off dreamily into the distance, fondly imagining what life would be like without her. That dream has encircled my mind almost as long as the gold band has encircled my finger.

Now, throughout all this I never changed my opinion of divorce as such. I still classified it as running away. I still thought about my father – who has made plenty of mistakes in his life, and who regrets every single one of them – saying that at least he had been fortunate enough to avoid what he considered the Big Three: bankruptcy, divorce, and suicide. So I silently scolded those who got a divorce for lacking the courage to soldier on in the face of adversity, while all the time I clung to fantasies of flight and then castigated myself for my own cowardice. I guess there is nobody so self-righteous about avoiding this or that sin as the man who secretly craves it with all his heart.

This double-opinion had some interesting consequences. On the one hand, I thought nothing of moving a couple hundred miles and starting over in a new job when Wife got accepted into a graduate program near the city where we now live: I was committed to her, and supporting her aspirations was far more important to me than whatever dopey job I might be holding at the time. On the other hand, I felt profoundly ambivalent about buying a house (just about the time of our tenth anniversary) and having children (Son 1 was born a little over two years after we bought our house). With each of those steps – signing forms in the realtor’s office, hearing Wife’s doctors confirm that yes indeed she was pregnant – I heard a distant hammer nailing a door closed. I saw my escape cut off. And I knew that I had to make the best of what was left to me.

Of course, there were consolations. It’s a small house (maybe “tiny” is a more accurate word) and it needs a lot of fixing up, but at this point it has long since become Home. Also, we don’t have to negotiate with landlords all the time, which is a big plus. And I have loved my boys beyond all reason or measure since the minute each one first sucked breath: indeed, I have often thought that I am far more naturally suited to play the role of Father than to play the role of Husband. (Truthfully, it is only my affair with D that has given me any confidence at all in the role of Romantic Lover.) So it’s not like I wish today that we had never bought the house, or that we had never had the kids. But while those things were in process, I was at best profoundly ambivalent. And always I dreamed of escape.

Points of principle can never be answered by practical considerations; but so long as we live in the real world, practicalities have to be taken into account. When the principles are confused or conflicted, this is all the more true. So I can’t help noticing that, for a variety of practical reasons, if I am ever going to leave Wife then now is the time.

First, there is the simple fact that I have finally concluded it’s not going to get any better. For a long time I lived in hope that it would, but I no longer think that’s possible.

The boys are no longer babies, nor very small children. When they are young enough, all children need a mother – not that older children don’t, but the bond is of a different sort. Each of our boys nursed until about 14 months; obviously they couldn’t have left her then. If I had left then, the boys would have stayed with her. Even when they were two, three, four ... Motherhood would be a formidable concept to try to fight.

Do they need her today? In the abstract, yes of course – in the sense that all kids need a mother. But in fact she doesn’t understand what they need from her terribly well, and so she is not at all good at providing it. The younger one is already eleven years old; his needs are morphing, even as we watch, from the needs of a little kid to the needs of a teenage boy. Wife is pretty good at meeting the needs of little kids. She understands them. But she does not understand teenage boys. Indeed, she often has trouble understanding boys in general. Whenever we have had a discipline problem with Son 1, I hjave pulled him aside and worked it out with him without Wife’s input ... because I knew her input would be counterproductive and would cause him to dig in his heels. (Wife has resented this for years.) The situation with Son 2 has generally been a mite more ambiguous: he is younger, and traditionally he has identified more closely with Wife than Son 1 ever did. But at this point I feel reasonably confident in saying that the things Son 2 gets from Wife pull him backwards into little-kid-hood and not forward into adolescence. So on that front, yes it is time.

Wife’s health isn’t good, and hasn’t been good for longer than I can remember. But she is more stable than she has been in years, and her rheumatologist is starting to talk about the possibility of remission for her lupus. So if I were looking for her to be able to stand on her own, today is as good as it has been in the last decade, at least.

Then there is the house. As long as that was our single biggest asset, we would have had to sell it in a divorce in order to split the assets equally. But today, the economy has slumped far enough that the house – if you count in all that we owe on it – is a liability, not an asset. Since I should be able to make the mortgage payment but she probably cannot, this means that I should be able to keep it without having to buy her out at an inflated rate. Everything depends on the will of the Court, naturally, but these days at least the possibility exists.

In a way, it is kind of like we’re facing a Perfect Storm. If we are ever going to divorce – if I am ever to take more concrete steps than just gazing fondly into space and dreaming, or than waiting passively for her diseases finally to kill her – then now is the time.