“‘Til Death do us Part, Heartache”
Divorce and abandonment- the gifts that keep on giving
I just found out that my Ex husband is getting remarried to the woman he online dated while we were married. I am dealing with complicated feelings that make me have more complicated feelings towards, myself. I am enraged with myself for feeling anything but the simplest of emotions towards him: hate. The divorce lasted five years and now, one year after the divorce was finalized, I am just starting to build an after life.
I thought I had come so far from the feelings of sharp pain, abandonment, confusion and searing jealousy. I thought that through five years of adrenaline pumping fear and fierce maternal rage, I had reached the far off shore of complete disconnection from the man I fell in love with at 17 years old. The man to whom, at 26, I swore with my entire being to be with him until death did us part. At 29, I brought his baby into the world and dedicated myself to our home, this child and our family’s every need. When we were 42, he had a massive heart attack and I got published with nine books deals which I pushed aside to take care of him for months. At 45, He declared he had been online dating and I was thrown away like trash. Both his child and I, kicked to the curb for his freedom from all responsibility, his desire to have sex with anything and everything and his public declarations that although it had been a life together for 27 years…he never wanted “that kid” or “this life”.
— Yet here I am, imagining him stomping on the glass with another shiksa.
A year after he left me and our only child, I had a realization while lying in the final bath I would ever take in the home we lived in (that I was being forced out of). I was listening to Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache”. I had listened to this song over and over, singing along, since I was a child when my mother would play her Lady Day album on our 60’s console record player. Here I was now, at 48, crying in a tub, alone after a 27 year relationship and I finally understood her song.
“Good Morning Heartache, you ol’ gloomy sight…” — Drake / Fisher /Padellan
In that tub, in that moment, I finally understood the Blues sung by women. I don’t mean understand the words. I mean FEEL the blues. In my soul, in my bones, in what was left of my heart.. in my being.
Songs like this one…of being “done wrong”, I now, shook my head in agreement with. THIS song, with it’s addressing heartache as if it is sitting in the room with us, here I was talking back to in the candle lit bathroom. In the dim light, over on the toilet, sitting on the closed lid.. was perched… like the husband used to when he would talk to me when I was in this tub.. there was heartache.
“Good Morning Heartache, Here we go again…”- Drake /Fisher /Padellan
Heartache was in the damn bathroom with me. Heartache was walking down the aisle at the supermarket next to my cart filled with ben and Jerry’s peanut butter cup and high fibre english muffins. Heartache was making dinner for the kid beside me. Heartache was not letting me get any work done. Heartache was my new partner — ’til death do us part.
Women have been singing through heartache since the dawn of time because, men leave. Men do this. They leave and they do not look back. Women are left. Women are left with no money. Women are left holding the children. Women are left to endure — being left. Women are forced to prove their value in courts of law that have no idea we are currently NOT in the 19th century. Women are left begging the sky, “WHY?”
So we sing or we make or we draw or we sew or we cook and we care and we love our children and we clean up the mess he left and we hunt for food and for work and for a life that we can live, with our heartache.
We carry the pain with us. We carry it on strong and tired shoulders.
“Good Morning heartache, what’s new?”- Drake /Fisher /Padellan
We can see each other. I see the other women accompanied by their heartache. The halfway-hopeful plans for rebuilding a life are etched on our faces by the fear and the worry. We see all of the broken things around us and in us and we use those pieces to construct something that may turn into a new life.
We put ourselves back together, self-Kintsugi’d with the gold of courage in the cracks. So much more beautiful after the break.
We live with what has been. We do not get to leave it behind. But we, the women who were left or cheated on or abused or all of the above, like me, are so much more than we were before.
I will endure this knowledge that he is marrying my replacement that he shopped for online, like a sweater. I know, they deserve each other and I know, he knows, as he vows until death he does part (again), what a vile thing he has done. I will endure as I worry about money and worry about the child he abandoned, now in college. I hold my aching back and rub my tired shoulders where the cracks are as I pour two cups of tea and tell heartache, as Billie did.. because I am used to it, hanging around, “Good Morning Heartache, sit down.”
