Divorse !!

Playing it Cool

When my marriage was in its final throes, my then-husband accused me of having a “thing” for divorce. “You think those divorced ladies are pretty cool, don’t you?” he sneered.

 
I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. I’d just barely begun to peek at divorce through my fingers, like a horror movie or a roadside wreck. And as for  “those divorced ladies,” I was less concerned with their coolness than with the practical question of how they paid the mortgage.
But looking back today, I realize my ex might have been onto something. I think divorce does leave a common mark on many women who’ve been through it.  
And yes, I believe the experience often makes us “cooler” than we might have been before; stronger, smarter and above all, happier.
The giant step of leaving my marriage required lots of mini-steps, all of them pretty cool in hindsight.
I rattled myself free of superficial social expectations; I learned to put my own sense of the real and the right ahead of other peoples’ rules about relationships and family; 
I figured out that it’s ok to make mistakes. Most importantly, as I veered off the path paved for me by generations of culture and convention, I discovered my own capacity to build a new path, all by myself.
I know I’m heaping an awful lot of glory on one generally unfortunate event, so let me be clear: I’m not advocating divorce for its own sake, and I’m certainly not disrespecting marriage. 
I’m just pointing out that divorce – like any dramatic, life-changing experience – has a magnificent power to awaken us to our own possibilities. 
It topples our assumptions and serves up a crisp, clean canvas on which to redraw our lives. 
Pretty cool.
Of course you don’t necessarily need a divorce to break free of convention and realize your own potential.
Lots of people manage to learn these life lessons with far less hoopla, and some real smarties even learn them as a team, in the context of a committed lifelong partnership. 
My hat is off to all of them. But for me – and I’m convinced I’m not alone – the Big D churned up vital resources of inner strength I never even realized I needed, let alone possessed.
As my marriage crumbled, I couldn’t eat or sleep and wept daily. Yet I also felt fantastic, charged with an electric clarity of purpose I’d never known before. I was becoming one of “those divorced ladies” before my own eyes. 
And although I hardly recognized that lady, I liked what I saw.
To my amazement, I found myself cherishing what might have been the bleakest weeks of my life. 

Raw and buzzing with potential energy, I wanted to hang onto that fevered, fervent state of mind forever.
Of course (and thank God) I couldn’t. Over time, the chaos of change gives way to the rhythm of new normalcy. And as it turns out, the path I’ve built myself has the same bumps and boring stretches as anyone else’s. 
But the transformation was real, and permanent. Even today, something hums inside of me that wasn’t there before; a low, electric echo of a moment years ago, when I discovered just how cool I am.
" Soulmate "