My new baby looked … different. He slipped out, and was wiped off, and handed to me, and if I hadn’t watched it happen, I would have sworn someone gave me the wrong baby. He was perfect, but he looked nothing like my other babies—the three children of my first marriage. Ben had dark hair, and dark skin, and dark eyes, and looked like a tiny, old Tibetan man. Sam, Ivy, and Will had all been fair and blue-eyed at birth, with wisps of light-brown hair that they would lose quickly, to be replaced by full-on corn silk. They had been yellow-pink skinned, but this baby was tawny olive-brown. Like my new husband, Tom.
I grew up in a big, noisy family with two parents and four children, and as a girl, I always knew I wanted to build the same kind of family for myself. At work in my twenties, I sometimes closed the door of my office to draw up secret charts of what years my children might be born in, how old I would be, and how old each of them would be as the next one arrived. I always laid it out in a way that left time to have four.
Twelve years and three children into my first marriage, when I finally decided that I had to divorce, it was the terribly sad ending of a marriage my husband and I had hoped would last forever. But it was also, separately, an enormous rupture to my sense of my self and my place in the world. I think this may be true for many women for whom marriage and family have become completely entwined, women for whom being The Mother of the Family constitutes a large part of her identity, women who have, perhaps unknowingly, or maybe slowly, over time, come to inhabit the house of the family more than they inhabit the house of the self. There is mourning that goes on for the marriage that died, which is deadly enough, but then there is a whole second wave of grief about the loss of the family—the figurative shelter you lovingly built, the home you thought you would live in … forever.
For many women, but especially for mothers, there is a potentially fatal piece of damage inflicted during divorce. It has to do with the inability to suspend disbelief, to give your self over, knowing what might come. As divorcées with children, we sit in trendy wine bars, smiling over a glass of merlot, on first dates. Silly is gone for us; we can’t be wowed. We try to be buoyant, but inside we feel heavy, like party balloons the morning after, suspended at some middling place between ceiling and floor. We listen, nodding at whatever man was brave enough to ask us out, while secretly we wonder what is wrong with him, because now we know there is something wrong with everyone, including ourselves. We sip and smile and think: Could he ever love my children? Does he gamble? Does he watch porn late at night while he “works”? Is his eye twitching? What if I fail to actually love him, even if I decide to? What will happen then? Another divorce?
It’s impossible; we might as well go home. After experiencing the dismantling of her family, it’s a huge hurdle for women to ever truly believe in the permanence of a marriage again, no matter what charming prince is across the table. I’ve remarried now, but I’m not sure I’ll ever really feel safe again. Sometimes I wonder if safe is a childish concept that I somehow never understood I was supposed to let go of, like believing in Santa.
The disappointment, guilt, and sorrow I felt about taking apart my family threatened to swallow me whole. Looking back, I see that I created a little delusion to survive it. I let myself believe that I could divorce my husband, and maybe find a new husband, but either way, I would be able to continue on as planned, with the continuity of my little family intact, and decidedly Not Ruined. Even once I found Tom, and got pregnant, I let myself believe that this new child could just be the fourth child in my excellent lineup of children. During the pregnancy, I dismissed any talk about this baby’s being the kids’ “half-brother.”
“Those are just words!” I told the kids with a cheery wave. “He’s going to be your brother.”
Ridiculously, it took the jarring visual of this olive-skinned baby to drive home the stark reality of my divorce and remarriage. This was a new baby, with a new man, a new set of DNA mixing with my DNA. It was not just a simple addition to my existing family, but a wholly new concoction of person, who was only half me, only half like Sam, Ivy, and Will. An uncomfortable second wave of insight beached right after this one. This different baby reminded me that my other three children were not just mine, either, as I had conveniently let myself come to feel, but uniquely their father’s and mine together.
As children of divorce grow older, concrete reminders of the union manifest themselves in ways that become increasingly impossible to ignore. Lately, any time my friend Anne sees a photograph of Will she cups it in her two hands, lowers her face toward it, studying.
“He looks just like his father,” she marvels quietly, shaking her head.
I want so much to disagree, but the problem is—it’s true. I come from a tribe of sturdily framed, average-height people. At seventeen, my oldest son, Sam, now towers over me at six feet one, with a long slender body that is identical to his father’s body in youth. Whenever my second son, Will, sees me struggling to assemble/wire/set-up/install anything, he takes it from my hands, gently.
“Mom. Let me handle it.”
He’s only eleven, but he can already do whatever it is. My former husband, John, has all these genes and abilities, too. He comes from a line of brilliant inventors, and I have to realize that now my own son does, too; he’s forever linked to that line. Even my daughter, who, thank God, looks a little more like me than the boys do, shows signs of genetic infiltration. She has her father’s German toes, where the second one is longer than the big one. They don’t descend in order of size, like mine do. Daily I have to relearn to give myself over to these truths. This happened.
Divorce with children isn’t something a family goes through, recovers from, and forgets about. Parents who share custody live out the new reality every week in an unnerving cycle of recovery and loss. The children have to broaden their notion of Home and Family into two homes and two families—learn how to go back and forth, pack and unpack, readjust and reacclimatize, over and over and over, every Thursday night, every other weekend, and half of every holiday, until they are grown. I want to close my eyes to how exhausting this must be, the thousands of arrivals and departures I have saddled mine with.
When I found out I was pregnant with Tom’s baby, I dreaded telling John, and put it off for weeks. I didn’t want to hurt him in the Being-the-Father Department. Because in between the lines of our divorce had always been this: Our marriage hadn’t worked, but we had created three lovely, kind children together, and we held the pride and delight of this as a sort of balm to the wound of our divorce. We wouldn’t be married anymore, but we would still be these children’s parents, and I believed there was still a kind of union to that, one that could perhaps endure despite the fact that our marriage could not. Re-coupling didn’t threaten this; we both chose new partners who respected our roles as the primary parents. But one of us having a new baby, with the new spouse, might.
After weeks of procrastinating, I called him. With sweating palms, I sat on the edge of the bed we once shared, and told him I was pregnant. There was a moment of silence, and then he said, quietly, meditatively, “Something about this feels vaguely like a violation.”
Incredible, really, that he could hit it right on the head like that, even under the stress of an emotional moment. This is another surprising thing about divorce. It’s never black and white. You couldn’t live together and be happy, but that doesn’t mean that your former spouse isn’t still remarkable in many ways.
Nothing about family life post divorce and remarriage is simple. All these years later, I still sometimes lose my emotional bearings, like when Tom is at work and John and his wonderful new wife pull into my driveway to pick up the children to go for a summer vacation in the cape, boats strapped to the trailer, trailer chained to the hitch, boogie boards stuffed in the way back, coolers packed with drinks and snacks.
“Will, honey, put those water bottles in the cooler in between the front seats,” John says gently.
“Sam, catch this cord I’m throwing over the top of the car.”
Ivy appears with her duffle in one hand and her beloved, ratty pillow under her arm.
“Hi, Daddy.” She smiles.
Sam catches the rope on the second try and gives it a pull. His father heads around the back of the car, kissing the top of Ivy’s head on his way. He takes the rope from Sam’s hands, neatly ties the perfect knot. Pulling a rigging knife out of the pocket of his cargo shorts, he cleanly cuts off the excess rope.
Every time they leave on a trip, after I hug all the kids, and their stepmother, too, I hug John. I always hold him just for an extra second, to get his attention.
“Keep the babies safe,” I whisper in his ear.
“I will,” he says, and turns away.
My kids slide the minivan doors shut, and John pulls out of the driveway with almost everything I love in the car. I always cry. And pray. As the car pulls away, the kids wave from behind glass, and laugh at me, and think I am crying because I will miss them, which is only partly true. I’m crying, too, because the visual of my former husband and my children happy together is just too loaded for me despite what I know. It’s the general outline of everything I once wanted—a whole and simple family. For one terrible, dizzy moment I think: What have I done? Was I insane? Look what we all would have had—a whole family, a normal family, a happy family that goes on vacation in a minivan to the cape! An iconic middle-class fantasy, yes, but one that has somehow, without my noticing, become my holy grail, like a house ringing with laughter. And look what we could have avoided—years of strained phone calls, holidays split down the middle, the lingering scent of ruin.
A day after Ben’s birth, we brought him home from the hospital. Tom and the big kids returned to work and school, and Ben and I settled into a symbiotic daytime routine of nursing and sleeping, cocooned in our soft room. The Percocet I took for the stitches and the natural drugs my body made while breastfeeding and falling in love with my baby dulled even the lingering residual pain of the divorce. For a day or two, I got to think my former husband and his family might still be my friends, got to forget that there were ever lawyers involved. I felt clean again, and in a sacred place.
I stood with Ben at the bedroom window in the warm, slanting autumn light. I was already in love, fully accustomed now to his dark beauty. The back of his head was cradled in my palm, and I kissed his soft face again and again in a surge of love, kissed his cheek, his nose, his forehead, the perfect pucker of his tiny, full lips.
I caught a glimpse of us in the nearby mirror, walked Ben right up close to marvel at the reflection of his face, his dark eyes. Then I pulled my gaze back, to take in the picture of us together. I expected to see what I felt reflected back at me, a radiant mother and exquisite child, a picture of myself like all the other pictures of me holding my newborns—hopeful, happy, relieved—a new mother in the afterglow of birth, full of milk and love.
What I saw instead was bewildering—as confusing as when Ben came out and looked so different. I looked different, too. My face looked foreign to me. It wasn’t the face of the young woman in all those other photos, but an older face, with dark smudges under the eyes, carved lines, uneven patches stained brown by the sun. Disappointments were mapped in creases across my skin, and my eyes had retreated a little into the sockets, looking somewhat less sure of the world than they were in all those other simple and gleaming bringing-the-baby-home photos. I may have been full of milk, but I was neither new nor glowing and knew all at once that I never would be again.
I felt heavy and confused, like in the moments when you are emerging from a deep and vivid dream, when fantasy and reality swirl together for a moment in a thick, viscous mix. This baby wasn’t just an addition to my big, whole family. This was a new baby, in a new family, mixed with a taken-apart family, made with a new father, with the other father nearby and still very much engaged. And I wasn’t a young mother. I was a new mother, and an old mother, and a new wife, and an ex-wife, and a daughter, and an ex-daughter-in-law. I was dented and bruised and odd in ways that were now permanent, and could no longer be hidden. It became clear in that moment that the past would never cleave from the present, and there was no starting over, not really. Despite the tiny new socks and the new, unstained onesies stacked and ready in the changing table drawer, none of this was simple or clean, and ever would be again. The truth began to swim toward the surface and finally broke through the heavy but invisible barrier between land and sky, earth and heaven, knowing and not.
So much happened before this.
I am humbled to report that this piece has been under construction for a long time. The part about Ben’s birth was written five years ago, but it took several more years of internal work for me to understand what was really at stake, and to find a way to weave in the pain of the divorce, the remorse, and the interior rumination. The essay was really my attempt to grapple with the question Stanley Kunitz asked in his poem “The Layers”—“How shall the heart be reconciled / to its feast of losses?”
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