dear belle burden

words that were the beginning of our end

Dear Belle Burden:

Let me start by saying thank you for giving me the permission I needed to write about the night that snapped me in two. While my Mom said you never start a thank you note there, I must. Your extraordinary novel and not surprisingly, best seller Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, felt all too familiar in many ways. I have heard folks say things about famous families and a lifestyle that may have felt more privileged than most. This pain is all the same. And the novel is a force.

I write today from a new vantage point. With the distance of 16 years in a second marriage, heaps of self-discovery and that pain way in the rear view mirror. Though revisited on every page.

It is 8:20 pm on an ordinary Thursday night.

“I’m not happy.”

My husband of fourteen years shared these words with me. He has just returned from a weekly business trip.

We had been through the wringer of our challenges including infertility issues and three miscarriages trying to have a second child. We finally got pregnant on our own after waiting to see a very high-profile and hard to get into specialist.

Photo by David Sink on Unsplash

I am sitting in the quiet night of our dark living room. The girls are tucked in with stories. Emma is 9 and Quinn, 18 months. The door-sized windows run the length of this old ballroom-made-living-room, back when our Lake Shore Drive mid-rise was divvied into condos. The tree top view of Belmont Harbor below, sparkles with docked boats bobbing in peaceful ripples. If you squint, it looks a bit like the ocean of my Jersey girl youth.

These are words that burned an equator into 2005.

And my memory.

I want him to be happy, I think.  In an instant, I also imagine what life would be like without this view. Him. Could I move back home? Back East?

We had moved back to Chicago a second time from New York. This time, I was four months pregnant with Quinn. Away from family and back to the Windy City. A second move there for his career. For our family. I knew what I was in for now and had established myself as a freelance reporter and editor there. We spoke of commuting as an alternative. To stay close to my Dad and sister for support. His work a a syndicated television sales exec, on the road three days a week, had been a challenge as well. But one I knew how to handle. Returning to have another baby there actually felt somehow comforting and familiar. And when he was home, he was a present father.

That I am in fact sitting in the dark when I hear those now infamous words, is also not lost on me.

I don’t have to imagine a life without him.  I feel like Ma on Little House most weeks here on the prairie. Pa goes off into the field to fight the execs and score a sale, and Ma holds down the home front. Just the right apple sauce squeeze packs for lunch box snacks, a green shirt for field day, air in the trike wheels we race down the lobby halls on rain days, a Shania Twain playlist in the car that keeps us singing awake as we cruise toward nap time.

Outside the house, we are the envy of friends, family and colleagues.

“You two are goals”, says my young cousin Jamie, who is husband hunting.

My husband’s boss makes it a point to tell me at the annual holiday party, “We could not do our jobs without you”. This “thank-you-for-your-service-pep-talk” is no substitute for the five-star family vacay we have so clearly earned. For every mile he has clocked away from home, we deserve 10 in the frequent flyer program of my mind’s eye.

“I am not happy” is not what you want for the boy you have known since 1988. London. Study abroad. Sure, I want him to be happy. I especially want that for the kids we were before kids. I was sideswiped by his announcement that evening in ‘05. But not entirely as I look back from here.

“Do you think we should talk to someone?”

“I can ask Carol who she recommends for couples.” She is a therapist friend.

I imagine he will say no. Change his mind. Go to bed and wake in a better mood. I also imagine I am divorced, like my own parents and that if Mom did this, well then, I can too.

“Yeah, I think that’s a good call” he says and disappears toward the bedroom.

Two appointments in, we are not nudging anywhere toward happy.

“Are you here to walk through a new door, or for a stranger to give you permission to leave?”  I point toward the male therapist. Slim jeans. Suede Gucci loafers. Cobalt oxford. Dark hair. He is serving neutral, but I think he knows where we’re heading.

“If you have one foot out the door, you can leave tonight,” I hear myself say.

I am not sure where this voice comes from. I watch the words float out slowly across the air. I get a rush of warm from my toes to my forehead. Tears loom close to overflow. I am nauseous but somehow standing. Not letting myself cry.

I have an 18-month-old and a 9 year old. I have a dead mother and live far from my family and closest friends on the East coast. I have moved here for him, given up a pr career, manned or rather womaned this solo ship like a rockstar. I have given in to a coming and going sex schedule that syncs to his travel and we are making the most of weekends with the kids. Or maybe for the kids?

“I pretty much have one foot out the door,” he speaks toward the therapist.

I channel a force that knows in my marrow, that I deserve better. And more.

“Then you can leave.”

Permission. This is what he wanted.

We will arrange for a time to tell them at some point I guess. For now they will just think it is another trip. I am markedly calm. Part of me is clear. I recall thinking, he must be seeing someone. Nobody jumps out the window on a 14 year marriage with four small words and no escape hatch.

I head out to my friend Nate’s apartment. I hear the words leave my lips for the first time.

“Yes, separating.  No, he says there isn’t someone else.”

He does not believe this is true. “Guys don’t leap like that,” he says. Pretty certain there is someone else. I am learning, there usually is.

He orders in Thai and serves it at the island of his vintage stainless-steel kitchen. I can’t eat. The tears find their way out.  I am in a heap on the floor.

“I am afraid I will never have this again. I will never have sex again, or be naked again. Who will want me”? Two kids, divorced. Saggy breast feeding boobs.”

He wraps me in the kind of cashmere throw that people with no kids toss casually over the arm of a chair. He advises me five minutes after I announce my probable divorce demise that I should probably “not take to the bon-bons”.  Subtle. But wise.

At the suggestion of a bright female friend, I checked on all of our accounts. To be honest, I did not know where all the money was, or how much our mortgage payment was monthly. I made all my married friends do a financial deep dive for their own “what if” could be true too. I have heard you talk about all the ways you did not know about much of this either. Many of us, leaving it to the men. Trusting in a marriage. A partnership.

I arrived back to my girls in the morning and we tell them that Dad is moving to his own house. You will have TWO houses. I use this same phrase with their teachers and the school counselor. “Broken home” was served up when my folks divorced in grade four and I will carefully rewrite this script. Two houses. Two parents that love you more than the whole, wide world.

I later find the cashmere throw, where Nate has tucked it into my overnight bag. A security blanket for the ages. It now rests on a chair in my home, to this day. Decades later.

The case for leaving the state with children in Illinois is called “removal”. The lawyer said short of abuse or non-payment of child support, it would be costly and rare to be able to win sole custody and move them with me to New York.

I became Nancy Drew. Unlike how your story unfolded, I was searching for the why. Combing through papers, emails and bills. One charge to Lady Foot Locker that was most definitely hot for me.

Then there was his My Space account. Yes, he was too old to have one of those. But there it was. A bit of witty repartee with a female writer who he was complementing and I knew in an instant. He had been married to a writer for all of our lives and had barely taken note of a piece or headline. A quick search revealed her address. The building he moved to was next door.

They met at the Mall of America. Business trip. she worked at J. Crew. I will leave out all the remaining details. In a no fault state, the courts did not care and I was learning daily, I did not either. The very idea of being away from my children when he was with them was the heartache. I had survived it as a kid, could they?

I will spare you the endless court dates. Our shot at mediation. The creative visitation schedule and the horrific financial fear that nearly took me out on several occasions. All of the mistakes and missteps I made became warnings for others. I am certain that is why every sentence of your book lands so hard with me, and so many of us who have been there.

Divorced and 42. I had never been on a date in my whole life. Just when you think you have figured out the rest of your years, the plot changes. The earth shakes like a plate tectonic shift and you do everything not to fall through the crust, hanging on to the mantle with every ounce of dignity you can muster.

Much like you, in hindsight, I see the pink flags I missed. I see my own part in our demise. With the help of a lot of therapy. I was a grieving daughter who needed more than he could give or understand when we were just two years into our marriage and 27. I wanted a sibling for my eldest so she would never have to be alone. This was all new thinking post loss. What if I went early too?

Nurturing a marriage was difficult with kids and his travel. We could have done a better. I could have done better. The little trio we made when he was out of town was sturdy. Important. Filled with routine and magic. The reasons I married him that felt solid have changed. Perhaps I was a better mother than a wife? All this to say, even if he had come to me with the truth, honesty I had long wished for, I don’t know that it would have changed much.

Belle, I am remarried now. We met online. I heard you can’t imagine it. I could’t either. Wasn’t looking. He arrived in a pretty self-actualized package. Never married and fresh from a broken engagement. Seven years younger. He moved in before we made it official and he had enough love (and patience) for the three of us. I never intended to marry again. The truth is, I think I never wanted to get divorced again. We made our own version of a pre-nup. Everyone goes out with half of what they came with and half of what we grow together. This pact is a good one to make in the bliss of the beginning.

He laid bare his moving in needs. A place of his own to recharge at day’s end. To be able to close a door and reboot his introverted bones. We work at happy. Happily. Communicate a lot. And above all else, make room to nurture our marriage. He is an epic stepfather. Ask my girls.

Yes, there was another woman. No, I won’t share any of those details. Yes, my girls now know. I never said a bad word to them about their Dad. Ever. My friend Nate calls this my “Grace Kelly” moment. I made a pact not to, and stuck to it. I picked him and they only ever get one Dad. When my girls asked and were old enough to know my truth, they asked my husband before they asked me. I will say that I never knew it could be quite this good on the other side. I often think I should write my ex a thank you note on my newly monogrammed stationary. When I talk about him publicly, I now say ‘their father’.

I will never know the details of why or how the switch flipped for him. Some days I wished I did. I wonder if that is why it felt like such deep and disenfranchised grief? I am so grateful you are showing the world that while this is not a grief society acknowledges, it is profound. Betrayal trauma is real.

I just bought tickets to hear you speak at The Bedford Playhouse in June. I have told everyone I know to buy the book and sent it to a few friends. You think it could never happen to you until it does. I wish I could send it to my Mom. I wondered when I was in it, what was worse, divorce or death. You talk about this perspective your stepmother shared. Having experienced both and sitting beside women who are grieving a spouse, I agree with you. It’s a kind of death, a grief of a future you imagined that would never see old age. Soul crushing. Pain filled, but not the same.

You are giving us permission to say it all out loud. To share what we have learned and earned. Drop our shame and take charge of our finances. Hope I get to tell you just how thankful in person.