Hello and welcome! I’ve moved my email list to Substack where I’ll be sharing my unfiltered takes on divorce with kids and other mind-bending, soul-shaking in-betweens that a woman will meet in this lifetime. I love having you here and totally understand if it’s not for you. There’s always an unsubscribe option at the end of each email. xo Marisa
The end of your marriage is a lot of things. It’s the breaking up of your actual physical home, the place where you gather and sleep and feed your kids. It’s the fracturing of your finances. A change in how you move through the world, eat at restaurants, rsvp to parties.
But when you’re a mother moving through a divorce most of what’s happening happens on the inside, on the inner layers of your being, down deep below in the fiery magma that boils in the center of you, in the primal foundational layers of your self concept, the place where you start and where you end.
In the early months, sometimes years, of separation and divorce, this is an alchemical process that’s ongoing, accompanying you through each moment of your day, as you pour coffee and click zoom links and tuck your kids into baths and bed. But the bulk of it happens in the dark, in the cover of night, when you’re bumped up against yourself with nowhere to run. Like a piece of meat marinating, the end of your marriage changes the cellular structure of your being, sinking into your musculature, designing you into something new.
Underneath the noise and invoicing of the attorneys, mediators and financial advisors, beyond the unsolicited advice and pitying how are yous, a quieter hum rolls through you. Here’s what you know in your guts and bones that your mind can’t yet begin to hold — here’s what’s really happening during divorce with kids:
Even if you wanted the marriage to end and are the one who initiated it, you’ll have to pry your own sticky fingers off the dream of the family you thought you’d have and …
stumble stupidly and blindly around the empty spaces of limbo, riding tsunami-intense waves of guilt, disappointment, and despair until your psyche and your battered heart are good and ready to release you to whatever’s next, which you’re clumsily hoping will be …
you and your ex uncoupled and untethered toasting at family dinners with both of your new partners and the kids …
but you won’t get there without first burning through the dysfunction that poisoned your marriage because …
friendship with your co-parent is not guaranteed. Friendship is earned. It’s built on trust and respect and mutual admiration. You and your ex currently have negative amounts of that, so …
you’ll have to use superhuman amounts of mental fortitude to hoist the leaden weight of rage-blame-hurt off of your person, to shine a crack of light on what’s wriggling underneath, to see, and then own, and then reconcile, your role in all of this—the bad behavior that sits squatly on your side of the street—the name calling, the yelling, the emotional manipulation, the icy shutouts, the lies, the abandonment (metaphorically or in real life), the enduring what wasn’t working without communicating what you really needed. Because barring actual abuse, it is, indeed, a two-way street …
which will lead you to the reluctant understanding that the road to—and through—peaceful co-parenting is paved with sincere apologies, which by the very definition of a sincere apology can not be faked or phoned in …
and then, if you are one of the lucky few who get to touch into moments of conflict-free, drama-free, pain-free coparenting, you’ll quickly discover that you’ll still be endlessly tested in how far you can stretch without breaking. Some days it will feel like you’re being pulled apart at the seams as you reluctantly build the capacity to …
be disliked by the father of your children, by his friends and family, and maybe even by some of your people, too, people who can never and will never get the subtext and nuance that’s woven into the fabric of the end of your marriage …
lose the thread of recognition for this person you made humans with. It’s disorienting and even frightening to not know who the father of your children is anymore. We become temporarily, sometimes permanently, unrecognizable when fear is the driving force behind each decision that we make. Once he’s no longer gripped by pain things will get better.
sit in the grey cloud of disappointment and concern that emanates from your parents, who are also probably divorced and who unconsciously transferred to you, the epigenetic imprint of marital dissatisfaction that was embedded into them from their family line …
be alone. Really alone. Philosophically and metaphorically and literally alone. Curled up on one side of the bed, hearing the creaks and moans of the house that was once the family home at new and deafening levels. Or stretching your senses to fill the dark corners of the new space you’re occupying since the separation.
dance on the fringe. Of society. Even though 50% of marriages end in divorce, once launched into singledom, you’ll be perched snuggly on the outside of the status quo. Patriarchy and capitalism like us married. So even though you’re capable and modern and woke, there will be moments (like dinner parties and school fundraisers) where you will most definitely feel othered and sometimes, you’ll notice the empty space where your man used to be like a phantom limb twitching in nothingness.
accept that you will be missing fifty percent of your kids’ lives. Like the contractions that rolled through you when they were being birthed into this world you will at times be compressed beyond measure by the sheer fact that you will be missing half of your children’ s lives. This is the “co” of co-parenting, and it will make you extremely sad sometimes.
face your own dysfunction. Divorce with kids will shake out all of the unconscious patterns that were driving every choice you’ve made so far, including but not at all limited to: the way you relate to men, sex, and love, your attachment style, your need for validation, your fears of real intimacy and vulnerability, your over-identification with your kids, your need for validation, your issues with your mother, for sure your issues with your father. You’ll see where you shut down and where you push too hard. All of this, and more, will be splashed across the movie screen of your life, there for you to review and make note—only if you choose to look up and take it in.
forgive yourself. You’ll be tasked with reaching down into the darkest trenches of who you are, where the most insecure, and ugly parts of yourself hide and fester, and wrap your loving arms around the tender, oozing, mess of all of it.
befriend yourself. Divorce with kids will snake itself around you and won’t stop squeezing until you offer yourself at least the same compassion you’d give any other sentient being who is suffering. Not the cotton candy self love platitudes you see splashed across social media, but genuine, nourishing allyship for yourself, taking awkward, wobbly toddler steps toward recognizing something good you did for you today, waving your cheerleader pom poms for the micro wins.
And through it all, you will worry. About your kids, your money, your old age. You will swim in the sea of worry, doing long languid backstrokes in these dark and murky waters until you are winded and waterlogged.
And while you’re being dismembered and dissolved you’ll have to make pancakes and pack lunches and show up at meetings. It’s a wild mind fuck and an impossible ask. And you’ll do it …
because #1 — you’re a mother and you’re built for this. you know what it’s like to push yourself to the back so you can tend to someone smaller. you’ve made a bed of your body on the hard-tiled bathroom floor so your little one can rest softly between puking. you’ve stumbled out of bed in the deepest part of the night, tugging yourself from the clutches of R.E.M, so, so many times, to change wet sheets, banish monsters, tend to earaches and headaches, and …
#2 — you’re starting to get that divorce with kids is breaking you into a million tiny pieces and you will never be put back together in the same way. And when you don’t fight the complete dissolution of all that you once knew to be true and instead choose to stand up inside the chaos, owning it as your chaos, a complete reorganization of your everything takes place, spitting you out, breathless and still unformed, onto the shores of the next iteration of you, which looks like trusting yourself really and truly, probably for the first time ever.
Disclaimer: Notes from the In-Between is not a substitute for therapy, medical advice, or mental health support. If you’re in crisis, please reach out to a licensed professional.