Loss and Divorce In The Time of Covid
By: Thomas Wedge
Tags: Relationships, Trauma, Love, Infidelity, Marriage

Loss and Divorce In The Time of Covid

I knew instantly my life with S was changed forever. The words and phrases in my hand were brilliantly colored, distant, beautiful and even present, at least for S. Words lined up together from a man I had never met and never will meet, even a man S had never met. Phrases of love and affection caring and affirmation, filled with the impossible soothing internet Happy Place all of us can go to instantly….satisfying our every need and want one text, one Instagram, one FB private message, Reddit tribe, one Google search at a time. Find the right thread and you can be happy now, or for a day, a week…. sometimes more depending on the level of reveal. All the texts in the palm of our hands are like little mannequins. Words dressed on a lifeless form.

I stood in the kitchen of our home the one we had built together over 18 months…beautiful and crafted and warm….not especially angry or even surprised just wanting S to explain what was going on.

And it never happened. It would never be explained. And of course THAT’s when I started to ask questions.

We had been married 6 years at that point, together for 11. C was our oldest son 7 with a head of hair never cut. R 3 tough and loving. Two amazing brothers who had never watched TV. Their older brother A (from a former marriage) was turning 26 in December. 3 beautiful boys in my lifetime. I had nothing to complain about and I don’t.

These two magnifcient kids had never seen a pediatrician. Never been to regular school or pre school or daycare. Loved books, Legos and the race of time together. Mostly S’s ideas, but we were Partners in this and I was on board. Why argue with any of it? I was glad to go along with her child rearing ideas. I would be an older Dad with a younger wife and it would work. My resources and her energy would be important together. Its not like I lacked energy. I am 6 lbs over my body weight in high school. Ride bike 60 to 80 miles a week. Lift. Occasionally meditate. Snowshoe and downhills ski. And have some othergreat skill sets to manage life with. I have no interest in professional sports, TV or gaming.

Our network of friends and family and extended family was big and wide and good. We traveled under this huge blanket of love, support, caring that we somehow felt we had consciously created. At least I did.

I drank too much Pinot Noir…I agree. I spent too much time studying the markets. I had vague and important ideas about the Federal Reserve and the way printed money will not end well. But mostly I was home after work for dinner and the kids. I kept bees. We had a flock of 25 chickens. We had done horses. Our vet bills for two dogs and two cats dwarfed our medical bills by many orders of magnitude. We lived in the country and could walk out our back door into native prairie. We planted maple trees, pine trees, fruit trees, wildflowers….S did fermented veggies. Every morning some liposomal Vitamin C in juice. Our immune systems are robust. Breastfeeding continued over seven plus years…

Our financial resources were at our fingertips….books, gifts, house, repairs, taxes, appliances, trips, Etsy, cars, organic food, invoices, bills…we never had an expense we could not deal with almost instantly….$800 for the best winter car tires? No problem. Italian stove? What color do you want? all paid and taken care of easily.

There were reasons for this comfort….for this ease. I was 22 years S’s senior. I belonged to a successful, challenging, enjoyable career which I was still involved in most days. Recently I was able to spend less time at the office. I was able to start thinking what my life might like look like AFTER 40 years of doing the same thing. Would I let up on the Commitment. Responsibility. Hard Work. Trust. Worry. Satisfaction? The words I built my life from? These were words I was soon going to learn S had very different feelings about.

I did not have a plan for retirement…everyone on my Dad’s side lived into their 90's….but I could be myself with this uncertainty because so many other things were certain…until I picked up her phone and handing it to her saw the words of love and affection and caring from a man I did not know…

I write poems. I also read them. When S and I first met and I was heavily damaged from a divorce I did not want. I began to write poems again. S was my muse. On her side of the equation her father was dying. Not a man she liked, but all women are deeply loyal to their fathers no matter how they were treated.

In group (I told S I would do treatment for my Pinot Noir) Joy talks about her father who committed suicide when she was18 months and its as if he had been there all through her life, changing diapers, getting her to school, giving her the keys to the car for her first date, walking her down the aisle. A loyalty over time and place and distance that is unfathonable. Fathers can be nothing, but mean everything. Women’s intimate relationship with men are seemingly mostly determined by the relationship they have or didn’t have with their fathers. (imo)

We saw each other infrequently, emailed our thoughts over and over over to each other…I had forgotten how much I like to write things down to someone I felt I could love….She wrote back about the stories people in waiting rooms told while hoping for an alternative to chemo in Chicago, I responded with my definition of Legal Custody and the date my ex wife stopped talking to me.

Now S and I are separated. Now we are only talking to each other through our Co Parenting Coach…Between us is a long row of Black Walnuts, a wide pasture of switchgrass and a big bluestem and our last garden together with two rows of potatoes dug open waiting for snow….

— — — -

some days

I imagine

I have written 700 poems

and each one is

beautiful and understood

and as I stand

in that place

the world comes

to me slowly and meaningfully

until I am

almost there

The infidelities of the internet are legion and S’s was only one. Still it was the only one that mattered to me. I wasn’t angry or enraged or hurt…I was just mostly curious…why? and how long? and what happened? and what can we do differently? What have we missed? …it seemed possible for me to help repair the damage…it wasn’t like she was spending the weekend with him or driving off “to get groceries” to meet up at a local Holiday Inn Express….but it was too late. S was already gone…not just with her new boyfriend…but in a million other ways that collect and build up and reach some critical mass and then change your life forever.

I must be old. I did not see it coming. It’s amazing how many reasons couples can come up with for why things did not work out. The Litany of Grievances (LOG) appears suddenly bigger and deeper and wider each day that goes by as you frantically search for an answer, for comfort, for a solution to all this suffering you are both feeling, have been feeling…and are going to keep feeling for a long time.

So what do you do? One of you does not want your life to change that much…so you do therapy to keep it the same…but therapy was not designed to keep it the same. Therapy is designed for couples to grow and build and support each other…and of course if two people REALLY want to do that they have already been doing that in their relationship with each other!…How many times does a married couple, or significant others ever get to therapy in time to CHANGE the outcome? The reality is that if you are just getting to couples therapy you are probably too late. This was pointed out to me after 8 months of couples therapy…actually by a therapist I was seeing. “Why didn’t you tell me that in the beginning? I asked. It would have saved me a ton of money!”

We drove to WA state to have a face to face with a therapist we both liked. We could visit friends. The road trip put us together for 8 hours each day with the boys in the back seat and we could talk…sometimes for even 20 minutes at a stretch, but S was not going to talk very much. Not her style. So talk therapy did not hold much appeal. Instead go to some lonely beaches on the coast and try to connect. I was hopeful, but I had been right all along. S had checked out a long time ago, she just didn’t know how to say it. She did nothave the words or the Voice or the balls to tell me.

You know things are REALLY going to accelerate DOWNHILL in a relationship if you see you wife or signficant other reading Glennon Doyle Love Warrier, Carry on Warrier, Untamed. These books are designed to cause marital strife. The books are ostensibly written about a woman truly finding her genuine self, but they are also about getting okay with the idea of crushing the shit out of responsibility, selflessness, trust, fidelity, humility, honesty, and communication. Each woman must honor her own discontent. Fuck the rest. Don’t dismiss it or bury it or deny it yourself even if its at the expense of your husband and kids…and heaven forbid don’t actually talk about it with your husband or your therapist…find friends who will applaud you forhaving an affair, and rationalize it, and maybe honor that too…like its an exclusive Club you deserve to belong to. If you are not getting what you want…for sure don’t ASK for what you need. Jesus, don’t do that…never ask for what you need. Especially from the people who love and support you.

Therapy is a long road. A million different flavors. I was not a rookie in therapy and S was wet behind the ears. I thought it would be good, but as every layer was peeled away more baggage needed to be unpacked. We had resources to keep going. I was game. I could see it would take a long time, but after six months that was it. S said she was mostly done. And she was.

I learned deeply about Attachment Theory…the idea that in the first 24 months of life your Attachment Style (secure, anxious, avoidant) is formed and pretty much stays that way. Your adult intimate partners are the parents/caregivers you either had or did not have. This theory I believe 100%.

S was on the avoidant scale which shows up as wanting distance and space in intimate relationships. We did have kids so we must have been intimate right? Well not exactly…intimacy is really about Truth Telling and if you cannot tell the truth you can’t be vulnerable and if you are not vulnerable you will never get to intimacy…(cue Brene Brown)

But there was more….wanting the perfect unavailable guy to pine away for. I think S liked all the trappings of marriage but rarely engaged in the hard day to day “how can we grow individually and grow us?” while we had these two beautiful children and all the standard other pressing demands of day to day . Read a book out loud together? Not if if means you are side by side in bed. Go out on a date? Ok, but you have to talk a certain way to me with certain words and levels of curiosity you have not shown me in several years….and I actually started to resent you for. Did I mention the amount of resentment, contempt, and criticism I have accumulated in 11 years?

I could tell it was not working. I bought an expensive touring bike and started riding as many miles a day as I could. I knew at some point S was going to say she was done…or some passive aggressive version of that….just waiting until I said the ultimate wrong thing at the wrong time…and of course I did…I told her to “grow up”….and then that was truly the end.

I love and appreciate S. She is a wonderful Mom and she has given the children secure attachment. They are empathetic. They are feeling good kids. If she showed up at my door and asked to talk to me and sat down and said, “I am sorry for the way I have been. Let’s try to work this out” I would buy in instantly. I would continue to trust. I would approach each day with loving kindness. I would do more therapy if that is what she wanted.

I am not without sin in this loss. I have some anger. My voice can be raised at times, I was not always a compassionate listener, I did not approach each encounter with S with a poet’s decorum and mindful loving kindness….but I am a reasonable man. Sensitive and caring and I love to talk….Did I lose my way in the paying attention department? Sure. Did I fail to make S the most important part of my day? I failed. But marriage is like that. You have to work at it and come back and work at. And partners need to remind each other to work at it. And Therapy can only do so much.

Emotional infidelity and the cascade of problems lost trust can create is hard to deal with. Couples often have never had good models of trust or conflict resolution in their life. They have never done therapy. And we still often think like cavemen and cavewomen….we don’t know how to love, to cherish, to hold, to feel comfortable in our skins and we absolutely do not know what to do with all the fear that something like Covid relentlessly reigns down upon us.

I sit in a different kitchen now. I miss my boys. I miss S. I know this is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life and there are days and nights I cannot be with myself…its overwhelming in what has been a mostly secure and strong life.

I read and listen to Thich Nhat Hanh. I watch his face on You Tube videos and it makes me cry…the guy has so much love and compassion in every cell of his body. He says when you love someone you must help their suffering and to do this you must know what their suffering comes from. You must know the cause.

I know the cause in 95% of the time; unprocessed trauma.

Unprocessed trauma, from emotional, physical, sexual, verbal abuse and emotional neglect as children (especially in women) is the root cause of most suffering. You can give it any name you want, but if you do not get lots of love and attention and empathy when you are 1–24 months….your intimate life later on will be challenging.

This unprocessed suffering is difficult to reach…often it appearsa after having their own children when the unprocessed trauma wakes up and they remember what it was and it causes A LOT of suffering both for them and their partners. A diagnoses of Complex PTSD can basically cover all the mental illness in western world.

More effort needs to be made to reach unprocessed trauma early so that we can reduce suffering between people who really love each other. I think the mental health world needs to assume 90% of human kind comes from very dysfunctional family systems and needs help.

Today S and I exchange an occasional email or text about Co Parenting, but our marriage is over. We are not formally divorced but remain separated. This is a status I am learning about but is comfortable for the avoidant personality because it puts the spouse (me) at a distance and S has one less thing in her immediate vicinity she has to be emotional about.