My Un-Anniversary

Wedding photo with my ugly dress and my parents, now deceased



I don’t think much about my wedding anniversary anymore. It used to be fun to get gifts and go out to eat or even in 2001, go to Tahiti. No one gets me gifts anymore, at least not romantic ones. Some people have a hard time with anniversaries when they get divorced. I have a more difficulty with other events like Christmas, but I don’t long to remember being married to F. I didn’t want to get divorced, but the marriage was dead.

The twenty seventh of November used to be my wedding anniversary. I was married in 1976. I thought that my husband loved me. It was a long time to be married and I was comfortable with it. I was unmarried June 5, 2009. F decided in 2007 that he didn’t want to be married to me anymore. He had an affair with another woman. He didn’t get around to dumping me until August 2008. Communication wasn’t his strong suit.

I was young and deluded when I got married. Marrying F was supposed to make me happy and anything was better than being alone. The thought of trying to make myself happy didn’t occur to me. I thought the marriage was good and I was content. I didn’t deal much with any problems I had because it was easier for me to be complacent. I lacked confidence, but I was afraid to do things on my own. Life events didn’t force me out of my comfort zone.

Getting divorced burst my bubble of safety or what I thought was safety. My assumptions about my place in the world liquified and nothing seemed certain anymore. I didn’t know who I was or what my purpose was. I had to learn to do everything myself, and I didn’t feel up to the task. F wasn’t around anymore to take care of the pool or the car. It was difficult dealing with stuff that I had have no interest in, because I was in a cloud of pain. I resented being left with this crap. No one else was around to do the stupid chores.

I was left with myself and I had to learn to live with this person. My spouse didn’t like me anymore, so I had to unlearn the assumption that what he thought of me was what I was. If I had no value to him, then I had no value as a person. That assumption is unbearable to live with. F*** came into my thoughts and said that I am stupid. I eventually told him to shut up. This worked.

Un-Anniversary means unromantic. True love seems like bullshit. Real love takes work. I feel kind of jaded about the whole fairy tale wedding concept and maybe a little bitter. I see jewelry store ads hawking diamond rings with starry-eyed men proposing to simpering women. It’s almost funny. I watch reality shows were women buy $6,000 wedding dresses and I wonder how many of them will end up divorcing the man of their dreams. My seventies wedding dress was $200 and I still have to figure out how to get rid of it. I can’t throw it in the garbage, but I don’t want it. My daughter thinks it’s ugly.

Marriage is for other people. It’s not something I can even think about at this point. I am not in that safe, secure world where I can count on someone to support me emotionally. Everyone else seems to be in a different plane of existence with their perfect, happy lives and I am an oddball, somehow not fitting into this delusional world.

I can’t take companionship for granted because it’s hard to find. I have to make an effort to seek people out in order to socialize. I don’t have a built in friend at home to talk to and I spent a lot of time alone. I envy people with parents and siblings. Mine are gone; my sister and parents are deceased and all of my remaining relatives live far away. It’s a whole new world from being married.

The tendrils of an old life are persistent. As much as I enjoyed shredding my marriage certificate, when you are married thirty years to some person and all the connections aren’t very easily severed. Reminders of the past can be purged, but not all memories don’t go away. They sometimes arise unbidden and unwelcome. We have a child together. I still have to e-mail her father sometimes about her. Seeing him in person makes me want to leave immediately.

My mission was to get rid of part of my old life. I took down all of our family portraits from the walls. Occasionally an old photo crops up despite my best efforts to destroy them all. I have hundreds of photos before I had a digital camera and I went through every one of them and removed the ones of F. The less stuff I have, the lighter the burden. I was cleaning out old tax records that detailed the minutia of my distant past. I felt numb, and slightly sad looking at them.

I still get along with most of my ex-in-laws. I knew some of them when they were pre-teenagers, before I was even married. My daughter, Melissa, has a strong bond with her cousins. We still all get together once in a while, although it’s kind of awkward with F’s new wife. I don’t care that he’s remarried, but I just don’t want to be around them. My mother-in-law, Rosemary, has also been supportive. Her husband dumped her as well, so she understood what I went through. My mother has passed on, so she’s kind of a substitute.

I still have my married name, because I didn’t want to change it while my daughter was in school. Now I am too lazy to change the driver’s license, state bar license, passport, bank accounts and such. I feel like I should change it, but my maiden name doesn’t seem to fit me either because I am not that person any more. It doesn’t seem to matter much anyway.

My Un-anniversary also means Un-fettered. I don’t have to deal with another person’s preferences. I cook what I want, when I want. F liked certain foods, preferably meat, but now I don’t have it all the time. He didn’t drink because he was an recovering alcoholic, so now I drink wine or beer. It’s a strike for freedom. He would come home late, probably from spending time with his girlfriend, turn the bedroom light on to read and wake me up. He didn’t care. Now I don’t have anyone to disturb me. The bed seems empty and cold, but no one wakes me up.

If I make a mistake, I don’t have someone rolling their eyes in exasperation, like I am so stupid. I deal with the error however I can. No one judges me except myself. I have learned to accept my shortcomings. If I get lost going somewhere, I figure out where to go. If I use a weed wacker instead of a lawnmower to cut the weeds in the yard, it’s okay. I am doing the best that I can at the moment, and that’s good enough.

I still dance on the edge of fear all the time. Fear that I will never be truly independent; fear that a disaster is just around the corner; fear that I will never make peace with being alone. The car may break down or get wrecked, an appliance may quit, or I might get seriously ill with no one to help me. It is a gnawing fear. It’s like Michael Binkley’s Anxiety Closet in Bloom County. The monsters come out at night when you are trying to sleep and keep you awake. Fear is a lack of trust in oneself that a crisis can be handled. Earning that trust is a long, hard process. I am still working on it and probably will forever. I get through the bad stuff, but it’s a struggle.

My un-Anniversary means that holidays aren’t the same. I have to try and not compare myself to others or I get really depressed. I have to work at having a positive frame of mind and it doesn’t come naturally. Holidays always seem to be made for happy people with lots of family and friends and I don’t fit that mold anymore. Christmas and Thanksgiving are not what they used to be. I had to figure out how to make them work. No more large turkey, if it’s just me and my daughter. If I am lucky, I spend Thanksgiving with friends. With my daughter at school, no Christmas tree. I make no more Christmas cookies because I am the only one around to eat them and I gain weight if I do. It doesn’t get any easier the older you get. I don’t get a lot of presents, maybe one if I am lucky.

Trips aren’t the same. I feel like an incompetent tourist. I have to make all the arrangements myself. It seems it takes me hours to decide what flight to take and what hotel to stay in. I have to drive to the destination or airport myself. I eat alone in restaurants. I have to find my own way around an area and sometimes I am not good at doing this. I blunder around. I still don’t feel adventurous enough to do certain things on my own and I force myself to go places. I found camping by myself creepy; not that I like camping. Being in a foreign country by myself is stressful. Driving on a strange, busy highway is un-nerving. I still manage to enjoy myself, but it’s not the same as it used to be.

One of these days I am going to celebrate my Un-Anniversary, because overall, despite the emotional pain and trauma, it’s a good thing. It forced me out of my comfort zone, because staying the same is unbearable. If I was still married, I wouldn’t be forced to try new things.
I have an incentive to try new activities because it means I can get out of an empty house. Someone I know says that “pain is the vitamin of growth.” It’s just a really big pill to swallow.
Opportunity is out there, I just have to find it.