My parents didn’t make me feel ashamed when I ended my marriage
The word “divorce” feels so weighted. It was whispered shamefully around the cul-de-sac I grew up in whenever a couple was in the throes of a break-up. Its Latin roots are innocuous, related to words like “diversion” – a fairly limited idea when compared to the reality of co-parenting two children and legally untangling house and home.
I never saw divorce on my horizon – especially with parents who have just celebrated their golden wedding anniversary. Parents with their own eclectic love language that bizarrely involves leaving vegetables in strange places around the house. Only yesterday, Mum found a heritage carrot in the kettle spout, which resulted in a loud squawk and a cheeky cuddle from my dad.
And yet, despite that slightly off-the-wall but extremely loving blueprint, I am now a divorcee. Another word that ignites patronising head tilts and upper-arm squeezes. And on some level, I felt that shame as soon as I decided to move on and move out of my 17-year marriage.
I had some initial qualms about telling my parents I was exiting a marriage into which my dad had “given me away”. (Problematic phrasing: one guy hands a female chattel over to another.) But my parents didn’t make me feel any shame over my decision; they just wanted me to be happy, even if happiness wasn’t going to look like a fairy tale after all.
Neither of us was happy in our marriage, and I certainly wouldn’t say we are happily divorced. There’s no joy in having to dismantle nearly two decades of family life with someone. But it’s become a vaguely neutral place, where peace has been made and a routine for the kids established. Every night I’m with my girls, I brush their hair and ask them if they have any knots to untangle. There’s something about looking in the same direction that helps a steady flow of feelings. We’ve covered everything from new partners to Harry Potter rugs for their new rooms, to the benefits of period pants over tampons, following a sex education class.
For all the milestones and moments in their lives, while their parents were married, I think this little pocket of space post-divorce is maybe my biggest achievement. A time for us to navigate anything and everything together. To show them that life isn’t a linear journey with clear signposting but that it helps to hold hands along the way.
Last night, my daughter asked me a question for the first time. Which is extraordinary considering that children are inherently self-absorbed across the board. But she simply asked, “Are you happy, Mama?” And I was able to say, hand on exhausted heart, that I am. Incredibly happy. I’m not living in a hinterland of “making it work for the kids” and neither is my ex. We made brave decisions for the ultimate happiness of our family, and we have both found happiness on the other side.
Despite the shame laid upon irretrievable breakdown, I would say it isn’t a failed marriage. It is, in many ways, a successful divorce. There’s relief along with the grief of what any couple sets out to achieve after saying “I do”. Instead of The End, it’s just the end of a chapter, perhaps. One that has two little girls as the leading protagonists and continues to bring happiness – just in a different form.
In the book that my ex and I have co-authored, ironically titled Where’s My Happy Ending?, the standout interview is with a whelk fisherman called Derrick West, who had been married to his wife Jean for 71 years until his recent death. He simply said that we have lost our sense of community, so we end up putting everything on that one person. Think of Clintons Cards around Valentine’s Day. Phrases like “my one and only” and “together forever” are peppered about. It’s just too much. The love of any life will crack under the pressure of being it all within the confines of four walls. Add a layer of pandemic PTSD and unrelenting childcare, and it’s no surprise so many divorces are landing in 2024. It’s not a village with just two people in it.
When Derrick fell overboard, it wasn’t Jean who saved him; it was one of the lads on a nearby boat who hauled him on board. When he got locked out of his house, it was his neighbour Norman who had a spare key. And when he forgot change for a pint of milk at the local cornershop, it was his friend Carol who told him he could pay her back the following day. A troupe of people who had his back until “death do us part”. Leaving him free to love Jean and vice versa. Without quite as many administrative wranglings.
That’s the lesson I’m taking into my new relationship – a Brave New World of blending four kids and uniting under one roof. To have and to hold, for sure. In sickness and health, absolutely. But to retain friendships outside of our happiness as a couple. To reach out and lean in to the women who propped me up when I knew I had to get out of my marriage.
When you leave, you never really know what’s on the other side. Unless, of course, an affair lingers under the surface. I didn’t know what was on the other side of divorce, and that is a scary prospect indeed. But it is being able to say with conviction to my girls that I am happy when they ask. That their dad is happy. And that they, in turn, are the happiest I’ve seen them. Breaking up wasn’t the bit to worry about; it was simply maintaining a dogged determination to communicate at every wild turn.
Derrick’s other nugget of advice landed firmly. He said a marriage will only really last if you repeat one thing daily. And that is simply to be together every day with him or her and to not take the rest for granted I might not be replicating the story arc of the Disney princesses I pedestalled in the Eighties. But happiness and hope is there. I’ve found a very different happy ending. And I don’t take that for granted. Not for a minute.
