My Divorce Changed Me To The Core
How I went from stifled to strong and unrecognizable
I’ve been divorced for almost 20 years. My youngest daughter was 4 when her dad left, and has no memory of him ever living at home, all of us together.
Even though decades have passed, we still have conversations about all that, as she continually tries to unravel her “daddy issues” that plague her.
Just the other day she says to me, I just can’t ever begin to imagine the two of you ever being married. This is because what she sees now are two personalities that seem so incongruent to have ever been together, living in harmony.
But we did. Until we didn’t anymore.
What she is imagining is all wrong.
What she can’t imagine is me being a different person almost 20 years ago.
But I was.
The morning after my husband left me I called my parents to deliver the news. There were tears and disbelief, and my dad said to me, you need to be strong for the girls.
And so I just was.
My dad was the wisest person I knew, so I listened to that eight word instruction he gave me, and moved forward with a different sense of purpose.
Like a phoenix I rose from the ashes of my freshly disintegrated marriage, and I became strong and different than I had been. I had instantly become a single-mom overnight to a 4- and 7-year old, on my own to flounder or prevail.
We are in part who we come from.
I believe that we are all molded from what we come from. We’ve all had some of our parents’ best notions instilled in us to one degree or another, but along with that came some flawed ones too.
Coming from a traditional household where my mother quietly ran the home and raised the children, I never saw her have authority or opinions that differed from my dad’s. This wasn’t because he was some overbearing husband that didn’t allow her opinion, but because women of that era were more likely to sideline themselves and defer to their husband. It’s just how it was.
This is what I saw. This is what I learned, and I suppose modeled myself after. I think I was wonderfully raised, but didn’t really know that husbands and wives could live differently than that.
Or that it was okay to co-exist in a different manner than one so traditional.
What I know now is that I was stifled.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my husband’s opinions and inability to see things anybody else’s way was constraining. He was always right.
I contained myself. I contained my true thoughts, and my true self, and unconsciously allowed him to oppress me with his overbearing control.
And I don’t think he was purposefully being oppressive. He just was who he was.
Once I was free from a marriage I never intended to be free from, I could see that I had been stifled. Unbeknownst to me, my marital cloak had become heavy over time, and once it was shed, the strength within was able to grow.
What I am is strong and unrecognizable from the woman I once was.
When I was divorced and on my own I quickly became unstifled.
More bold. More authentic. More confident.
Less mild. Less reserved. Less who I was, and more who I was meant to be.
Those close to me could see it. They could see that I was “more myself.”
This is what my daughter sees now. It’s hard even for me to imagine choosing to be with my first husband, knowing how he is.
But knowing the girl I was, I know why I chose him in the first place. And I know why he chose me. That’s a different story for another time.
It’s just that now I’m a different person, a better version of myself.
My daughters wouldn’t recognize me if they saw me back then. And there may come a day when they’ll see how their growth over the years has transformed them too.