Today is the official release date of The Big Activity Book for Divorced People (order here!), woo! To celebrate, I tried A New Thing (divorce! evolution!). Caveat: I have zero technical skills and essentially just tried to teach myself how to use GarageBand while sitting under a sheet, so suggestions and feedback are welcome. I have a few more of these planned, so I'd also love to hear whether you...you know...like this.
Listen away below!
I'd never heard the term "love-bombing" before. And then it happened to me.
Read all my posts about divorce here.
On Valentine's Day afternoon, I took a nap with my kitten (pictured above having mixed feelings about this choice). I sat on a patio in the valley with my friend Margo, and ate some good sushi. I Facetimed with the kids, who were spending the weekend with their dad. I asked him to handle their Valentine's Day presents, and didn't beat myself up about opting out of this particular task. I fell asleep again only a few hours after I'd awoken from my nap, then woke up at 11PM, watched some bad TV, and went back to bed. Everything I did all day long - from the breakfast I ate to the midnight show that I watched - was my choice.
At some point during the day I posted this picture to Instagram, and thought about how happy I was when it was taken. I thought about what a difference a decade makes. I thought about how happy I am now...except I'm not even sure I'd call this feeling "happiness" - it's easier to define it as the absence of sadness. I think it's the kind of feeling I've spent my entire life both searching for and running away from.
I am exhausted.
I most definitely should not be: I'm sleeping literally more than I ever have, and doing oh my god, so much less - on the work side, at least; the parenting side is obviously, ah...intense. But even on the days when Kendrick has the kids, it's like I can barely keep my eyes open. I sleep for 10 hours, at least. Nap for two hours, at least. A walk around the block feels like the equivalent of running a marathon: I cannot do it, which is fine, because I also do not want to do it.
Lest all this sound like perhaps somebody has come down with a case of The Depressions, though: I really don't think so. I'm anxious about money and the health of my family and, you know, THE STATE OF THE WORLD, for sure. But I'm also smiling more easily, and more often.
Today's reader question comes from S, who is in the process of divorcing her husband. S, like so many divorcing women, is conflicted about what to do with her engagement ring: Part of her wants to hold on to it for her children, but...it's complicated. I get it, and you probably do, too.
So S wanted to know if I had any ideas for what to do with her engagement ring. I'm going to give my 100% honest answer, with the understanding that this is a touchy subject, and also that symbols of marriage (and the institution itself) are topics I have ever-evolving views on. Let's back it up for a moment.
For the years that I was married, if you had asked me what my most prized possession was, I would have said "my engagement ring" - the $350 pawn-shop band with which Kendrick proposed to me in a Las Vegas parking lot - without a moment's hesitation. Cut to nine years later, when a trio of events related to that ring took place:
If we're being honest, I don't think it was my marriage that broke me. It was all the marriages.
I just finished reading this book, Fleishman Is In Trouble. It's about divorce - and specifically about a woman who, one day, simply disappears - abandons her marriage and her job and her children while her husband holds up the fort, so to speak. It involves major twists that I won't spoil for you because you really should read it - but I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you what I took away from it. Which is that this book explained my own story to me in a way I hadn't fully comprehended before.
At the crux of the issue is the plight of the working mother. I shy away from this topic because in our present culture there is such (completely valid) sensitivity to the different ways women approach parenting. There is a danger, when you identify yourself as a "working mother," of creating distance between yourself and the other kind of mother - the one who "doesn't work." But who does! Of course she does! She does the hardest job!
I recorded this interview with Leo Flowers for his mental health podcast on the same day that I published the post about my breakup...and to say it got interesting would be an understatement.
He - meaning the host of the podcast - did this. To a woman he was dating. Like, RECENTLY. So I think it's safe to say that I had a few questions to ask him.
Go ahead and give it a listen.
I’ve been writing and talking a lot these past few weeks about vulnerability. Authenticity. And the realizations I’ve had about myself as a result of all this writing and talking have been pretty fucking humbling.
So. Because I cannot write or talk about anything else, I'm going to tell you what happened.
Listen to the podcast interview in which I discuss what I learned from this here.
Me, in a beautifully produced video, being open. Or something.
A few weeks ago, my therapist said to me something that left me reeling. Jordan, she said, I have known you for years. And you are one of the least authentic people I have ever met.
How's that for a compliment?
At my son's open house last night, we were given a checklist with the different projects on display, so we could make sure to see them all. There was a wall where the kids had written about their favorite part of first grade (my son wrote "getting to eat breakfast in school," because he has his priorities straight), and a wall displaying illustrated book reports of their favorite Dr. Seuss story. The last project on the checklist was "My Home." There were little spaces where the kids filled in various facts about their home - how many pets they have, that kind of thing.
In my home, there are 3 pets, my son wrote. There is 1 adult and 2 kids.
I scanned the other kids' projects, doing the now-familiar hunt for Another Divorced Person (I look for them everywhere - at drop-offs and playgrounds and amusement parks; they're not usually hard to spot). Two of his classmates had 6 people living in their home (4 adults and 2 kids). The majority of them had 4 (2 adults and 2 kids). But - national statistics be damned - nobody else had "1 adult."
