Official Ex-Wife
welcoming myself to the club
Yes, my dears, the day has come. My marriage is officially over. 644 days it took, from February 1, 2023 when we filed to when the court stamped our court documents on November 6, 2024. (Yes, of course I was hoping for a different kind of good news on that day, but either way, I will celebrate that day from here on out as the day that I officially claimed my freedom).
Now, lest you think the paperwork is over, it isn’t! I still have to hire a QDRO to split our retirement accounts, a title company to change the deed to our house, an estate lawyer to establish a will, a life insurance company to protect his support payments. But the end is in sight and it is official. I will take it as a win.
I’m still not quite in the mood to be celebrating (as I mentioned in my post, Endings). The world is in too much of a precarious state to feel much joy. I also feel like a snow globe that has been shaken for 21 months straight and it is taking a while to let the snow settle. But I am finding that I can look back on my marriage through different eyes now that the battle is over. I couldn’t even really THINK about my marriage while going through my divorce. The tenacity it takes to leave, the sheer force of will required to upend everything and stick with it, to not buckle under the weight of the lawyer’s fees and the financial disclosures process and all that change, requires hardness, steeliness, armor. There is no softness. So once you do accomplish an actual divorce, and can let yourself collapse, yet again a heap of skin and bones, a human, it all comes back to you. The good and the bad and the pain and the joy, the millions of moments that encompassed your life. You don’t want that life anymore, in fact, it was killing you. But it was yours. It was all you had. And it is gone. Never to return.
I am trying to hold it all, the multiplicity of emotions on the eve of a new era. It has been a doozy of a few years. Probably the most difficult five years of my life. But I am here and this space is growing and my voice is getting stronger and I am loved and and I’m not stopping.
I have lots of other posts percolating (more on chores and why are women always called privileged no matter what life choices they make, and about sex as a chore in marriage and more Divorce Diaries). Yet this week I am the chair of my elementary school’s Scholastic Book Fair for the very last time (because my youngest child graduates the school… Lord knows I do not know how to say no unless my retirement from the school forces my hand). Thus I thought I would share this lovely news as well as some favorite posts from the archives that many of you new subscribers likely missed.
I’ll be back in your inboxes with more musings next week!
I think it is hilarious that my very first post on The Mother Lode was about saying No to the PTA and yet here I find myself the book fair chair for the third year in a row.
The seeds of my most popular post to date, Our Fair Play Discussion Signaled the End of My Marriage, can be seen in this post written the year before. I also see signs of my pending divorce in lines like this:
“I guess what I’m asking is, is the reason I want a wife due to the fact that I no longer want to be one?”
Ha ha. Yes. The answer is yes.
One of my favorite series on The Mother Lode is The Math of Motherhood, where I examine the financial repercussions of motherhood. The first one I published was on the unpaid labor of pregnancy.
This is the newsletter I posted on the day we filed for divorce. I hadn’t announced the news, and yet you can see it all over these musings. I was just done with marriage.
Many of my favorite posts came directly from my response to reading thought-provoking books. The one below was particularly juicy as was my post on Sarah Manguso’s Liars.
Do you have a favorite post from The Mother Lode? If so, share below!
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