Creating a New Life

Suppose you just finished reading the story of your marriage and divorce. You’ve closed the cover of the book and someone gives you the job of writing a sequel. Or perhaps it is easier to see your divorce as one chapter in the book of your life, just a sequence of events that occupied space and time. In either case you feel the time has come to begin a new story. Where does the energy come from to create a new life? Wouldn’t it be easier to accept that fate has handed you the life you have and just get on with it? How will you deal with your day to day struggles and create new dreams at the same time? The fact is that divorce causes change, so things will be different whether you want them to be or not; some sort of new life will emerge! The question then becomes whether you are strong enough to take charge, and direct the inevitable changes from your heart with clarity and vision.

Strength. Just when you think you’ll have to give up, you can’t. When you are afraid to take on a new challenge, you have to. If a voice in your head tells you to retreat into the safety of sorrow, you have to scream back, "Now is the time to hold on to what I want with all my might." It takes courage to be a single mother filled with power. It means you have to take responsibility for your own life.

Clarity. When we feel like we have no choice our minds close down. Clarity of thought happens when the mind is able to wander, imagine and dream without the voice of reality crashing the party. Often as mothers we spend hours problem solving for our kids, creating solutions for the family and feeling locked into circumstances beyond our control. It is like sitting in a Physics class all day without a recess! Give your thoughts a chance to wander.

Vision. There is one thing you have to have in order to create a new life, you need to know what you want to create. Without that little piece of knowledge you will wander aimlessly waiting for happiness or good fortune to fall into your lap. Picking a direction or goal and walking towards it will always be more satisfying than meandering from point to point.

Loving Again

The journey towards loving again is not about finding the right partner; it is about finding yourself. I planted my hopes and dreams in my marriage. I set what I wanted aside for the sake of the relationship. I stopped asking myself who I was. I knowingly chose to do this because I held in my mind a picture of what love was supposed to be. Love means something else for me today! The first step I took to write a new definition of love was to believe in my ability to stand-alone. I had to learn to love all that I was, to forgive the bad decisions, and to focus on the positive things I had to offer the world. I needed to feel complete, competent and happy on my own.

So often in playing our roles as wife and mother we forget that inside our body is a woman’s spirit that belongs to us. A girl child who laughed with glee at her first slumber party, dancing with girlfriends and discovering the power of friendship. An excited teen kissing her parent’s goodbye as they left her college dormitory room. A mother crying with joy as she watched her five-year-old swim the first race of her life. We have created our lives by the choices we have made and the experiences we’ve had. Now we have a chance to create a new love relationship.

Opening myself up to love and intimacy took courage. The only way I was able to step into the dating scene was to convince myself that I wasn’t committing my life to a man if I agreed to meet him for coffee. I decided that dating could be a creative process, a chance to discover what I really wanted in a new relationship, an opportunity to practice with the pieces of my personality I’d lost during my marriage. I used my imagination as I began to write the story of my new life- line by line, choice by choice, and day by day. For me this process was about creating a new picture of who I was even though I was using the same materials—like taking the collage that had been my life and rearranging the images until the entire effect was new. It was a chance to dig deep within myself and remember who I was, resurrect the pieces of my heart that had been left behind in childhood or cast aside during my marriage. I showed up as myself, ready to be loved but also ready to be rejected. If I didn’t like to cook, I’d tell my date the truth and skip the domestic act. If his passion was boating and I was uninterested I was honest. Instead of being worried about someone loving me I had fun as I allowed the love I had for myself to show. I’d been through marriage; kids, and divorce; life was too short to change who I was just to attract a man.

I realize that this can be a hard attitude to put on if you’ve been dateless for months and really want someone to like you. But the truth is that your date will find out who you are sooner or later, so you might as well put all the cards on the table at the start.

One last detail many women forget—the relationship is for you. You are not interviewing a man for the role of father or breadwinner in this beginning stage of romance. You are looking for a man who ads joy to your life, respects who you are and is fun to be with. This is discovery time; the serious evaluation comes later! Have the courage to build the relationship you want.

Beyond Surviving

Three years after my divorce I was sitting at my desk in the middle of the family room, and everything felt different. I could breathe. I looked out the window and actually saw the beauty of the hills, the trees, and even the mud in the front yard. Through every divorce ordeal, I would chant to myself, "I will survive this." As I sat there thrilled with what I’d accomplished, I said to myself, "I did survive." I was now surrounded by the new life I had worked every day to create.

There may not be any visible difference between a life that is survived and a life that is celebrated. I still had the same job, the same daily responsibilities, and the same expectations. I had spent three years going full speed every day, working to change my life, to put the pieces back together, to create a new home for my children. In that one breath, as I exhaled into the beauty around me, I realized it was time to let life in. I was tired of being a survivor. I was tired of feeling poor.

Over that three year period I had grown used to living in survival mode. I stopped asking myself when things would get easier, because I had accepted the fact that the rest of my life was going to be hard. Yet in my heart I knew that I couldn’t live the rest of my life in this frantic, heroic state pushing my needs aside to forge ahead. At some point I had to resume the living of my life. It was time to let go of divorce as a handicap, to leave my protective cocoon of being too troubled to really enjoy life. I wrote in colorful, free strokes these words across the papers on my desk, "It’s time to use your wings."

Wings to me symbolize freedom of spirit. When I realized that something had to change, that I had to stop surviving I asked myself, "How can I live free within a life that is already defined?" The answer to that question for me was learning how to open up to life; to let others in, to be open to opinions, ideas, and new relationships that I was closed to while I was focused on surviving. It is a subtle shift, the move from survival to living, one that happens almost entirely in the mind. But I was convinced that actions often follow thoughts and I wanted my actions to change.

The only place in my life where I allowed my mind to be empty, free of worry, free of guilt and full of hope was in my garden. I planted the seeds and I determined what would grow and what would be dug up. This was my domain, nobody told me what to do or how to do it. I used my garden to change my thoughts. I learned from the dead plants that looks were deceiving, as they defied the odds and sprouted leaves after freezing over the winter. I learned from the smallest seed how to bury something and have the patience to wait for beauty to grow. I did have one place in my life where I felt alive, I think we all do even if we have to look back to our childhood. The challenge is to take that same feeling and sense of wholeness that we have experienced and apply it to our lives today.

In the mind is where a woman’s most powerful tool is located, her ability to create—and I don’t mean arts and crafts projects. We create children, homes, meals, schedules, gardens, and most of the family life our children know. If we are able to keep our family afloat with this creative ability during the survival period following divorce, we most certainly can use our creativity to shift our thoughts into believing that we have a right to live a happy and fulfilling life.

Remarriage

The idea of getting married again terrifies many single mothers after the heart-breaking experience of divorce. Not only do you have to worry about the relationship between his kids and your kids, your kids and him, his kids and you—you have to blend the life of mom with the life of a partner. There are so many aspects to all of these different relationships. You are building a new life, new career, and new definition of family with your own kids, yet at the same time the blended relationships are also going through a new growth and adjustment period. Then there are the rules and expectations that each family unit brings to the table, like how many household jobs should each child have—if one partner doesn’t believe their kids should do chores, do the other kids have to do chores? It isn’t just the two of you this time—so in many ways a second marriage is harder than the first.

One good thing about a second marriage is that you know what you want. I actually thought about writing a relationship contract to make sure that everything was clear. Like an employment contract where you outline chores, responsibilities, vacation time, sick days, and pay schedule! Then when disagreements happen, and you both feel pushed or unloved, the contract could be brought out and read as a reminder of the agreements made. Wedding vows have a contract-like flavor. Maybe I should have been more specific when I wrote mine: "I promise to cook three days a week, do the laundry, change the sheets, feed the dog, weed the garden, care for the kids, and make love whenever I’m not tired!"

The biggest disappointment I have with this great new relationship I’ve created is that I still feel like a single mother. Somehow when I was envisioning my new life, I imagined that I would start over again and that when I found the right person my family once again would feel complete. I planned to find a man who would become another full-fledged parent for my children. My kids would think he was awesome and appreciate all the little things he did, like nightly homework, fixing bikes, and giving guitar lessons. They might protest at first, but I was sure that over time we would all settle into a groove that was familiar. I wouldn’t be attending back-to-school nights alone, or sitting through endless children’s sporting events by myself. What I forgot when I was imagining all of these things was that this new man was going to have children of his own, a job, and a life too. He therefore could not be a slave to my needs. Darn!

With all the problems that come with marriage, my single mother friends thought I was crazy to try again. Everyone asked the same question: "Why would you get married when you already have all the kids you want?" Living with someone outside marriage no longer holds the societal judgment it once did; why be legally bound? To me, my marriage symbolizes the completion of a circular path. I lost my dream and fell down into the depth of grief. I’ve lived with the death of my spirit, and that death created space for new dreams.

In so many ways I’ve risen from the ashes of my old life. I’ve learned how to love myself. I am coming to this marriage as an independent, self-supporting, confident, competent and talented woman who expects an equal partnership. That sentence in itself took years of work! I may have been devastated by the divorce and heartbroken over lost love, but I am still alive and willing to try again. In the end I don’t want to be alone. I feel challenged and hopeful with the prospect of starting over using my life experience and wisdom as guides.