Watching the finale of Mad Men and seeing Betty once again seething with rage I
couldn't help but hope that she would let go of her anger at Don already. She was trying,
though, to be happy for him. You could tell because of her visible pain at finding out he
was getting married again -- and yet she didn't explode, for once. She had taken that little
step, perhaps the hardest one to take. Betty had a lot of excuses: she was stunted, trapped
in the early sixties. Marriage, in her generation, was the be all and end all for women,
and a divorce the ultimate failure. Not to mention the fact that she had to endure Don's constant
womanizing. Who wouldn't be seething with rage?
We are 50 years ahead of Bets, and yet, there we are, having a hard time letting go
of the anger. But when half of marriages end up in divorce, and we still have quite a bit
of life ahead of us, we need to realize that divorce is not the end -- especially if we have
kids. It's only the beginning ... of the post-divorce relationship with your ex.
What I remember of the first, blurry, post-breakup years was the adrenaline
coursing through my veins, a mix of terror and anger camouflaged under the giddy frenzy
of a Merry Widow. I was suddenly alone with my two daughters, without a man in the
house every day. For nineteen years, it had seemed to be the natural state of affairs.
But now I was constantly raging at having to do it all myself: breakfast and dinner and
driving the girls to school in the morning, and consoling and overseeing the homework
and food shopping, and calling the handyman because, sadly, I had no clue how to fix
anything in the apartment.
I remember a few years after her divorce a friend telling me: "my marriage was
a failure, but my divorce is a success" -- only to break up all communications with her
ex-husband when he got married. So much for success! I, for one, never thought of my
divorce as success or failure. It just was. To be endured. There was no escape: we had to
talk on the phone about the kids and the weekly arrangements, and even see each other on
Friday evenings for the ritual drop-off.
When my younger daughter asked me to buy a present for her half-brother's first
birthday, I felt as though some new, exquisite torture had been inflected on me. But we
went to GapKids together and we picked a cute t-shirt, and as I helped her wrap it later at
home, something melted a little in my heart. It was perhaps one of my first steps towards
accepting that, since I couldn't escape that new, post-divorce relationship, I had to
welcome it. I know there are women (and, no doubt, men as well) who pride themselves
on keeping the flames of anger burning -- like others fan the flames of passion, but I tried
to take a lesson from my daughter, who was about 7 at the time: her life was expanding
with a new brother and soon another one on the way, and it seemed more generous to be
part of that life than to keep my fists clenched.
It is our choice whether to have a good post-divorce relationship or a bad one. It is true
that some exes are truly hopeless to deal with, perhaps because of their own anger issues.
In our case, there were bursts of temper, and icy tones, hang-ups and reconciliations, and
bumps along the road, and sometimes the tension flared just like before, and for a long
time it was stressful to make a phone call, and it took a lot of effort -- I am sure, on both
sides -- to be straightforward and to stay calm and light. But we both keep at it, trying to
hold clear boundaries: carving this little place of communication that encompasses the
girls and everything pertaining to them -- school, behavior, money, schedules -- and not
much else. And over the years it's dawned on me that we genuinely feel good about the
way we've been able so far to navigate the post-divorce waters without too much damage
to anyone.
Sad to say, I may have learned more from my post-divorce relationship than from
the marriage. And one of the things I've learned is that if you remain fueled with anger,
you are never going to be free of the past, it will always eat at you in some form or
another -- not to mention your kids will suffer from it. But if you open yourself to the new
reality of divorce, the bitterness will gradually dissolve, and -- amazingly enough -- some
love with grow back.