Elizabeth sent me this link to a funny essay by divorce memoirist Suzanne Finnamore about how it takes two years to get over your divorce. I’ve got admit that while this sounds like good advice, it just doesn’t jibe for me.

Finnamore writes:  I got through the First Christmas. The First Valentine’s Day. The First Wedding Anniversary. The First Divorce Anniversary. It slowly eased up; the psychic damage was beginning, if not to disappear, then to taper. I stopped wishing him dead, and started wishing him rich so he could send us more money. This did not happen.

As I wrote in a note to a comment a few weeks ago, I think we’re all on our own schedules. Some of us have been consciously mourning our marriages for quite awhile – letting go in stages – accept various “deaths.”  I know Alex and the kids and I will have Christmas together for years to come. I’ve never cared about Valentine’s Day. And our wedding anniversary hasn’t had any resonance for me since the one four years ago when I figured out he’d had an affair. (Yes, on our anniversary, after weeks of asking him to tell me the truth, I discovered a smoking gun email that made it quite clear he’d a) had an affair, and b) lied to me about it. Gosh, Happy Anniversary!)

I remember when my dad died from cancer and I didn’t have the immediate grief response I thought I should have. But then I realized that in so many ways I’d been grieving and letting go for the year of his illness. I’d already done quite a bit of the work. Not that I was “all better” or ready to get on with things as though nothing had happened. Not at all. But I’d already moved beyond a certain point of raw grief. And I think the same is very much true of where I am with the end of my marriage to Alex.

This weekend I watched Away We Go, a very sweet film about a young couple who are trying to figure out where to live and how to be as they prepare to become parents. There’s a part where a song is playing that says, “Promise you’ll always wait for me.” The context of the song within the movie makes it clear that this means:  when I fuck up, when I’m slow to learn — wait for me. Promise.  And this — much more than any holiday — really got to me. Because I feel that Alex and I grew at different paces. We took different paths at some point. And maybe I didn’t wait for him long enough? He didn’t ask me to wait – but maybe part of the deal you make when you get married is that the other person shouldn’t have to ask, might not even know at certain points in his/her life that they need to ask — but you wait anyway. And I didn’t.  This is the question I’ll come back to for years.