Wednesday, July 25, 2007
My Ex
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There was a time when the sound of his voice would make me want to throw the phone. There was a time when I felt he was the most evil man on the planet. There was a time when I wished he would have an accident on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Now we talk to each other several times a day. Civilly. We discuss carpooling, soccer schedules, tuition payments. One time, he put my trash out on pick-up day. I like his new dog.
My ex. We’ve all been there.
It would have been hard to believe a few years ago, when we were deeply involved in a relocation suit, a child study, court dates and several hundred thousand dollars of legal bills, that our relationship would ever reach a state of placidity, low-friction cooperativeness, blandness, and lack of nuance. But that’s where we are now. It gives me hope for the human spirit.
My ex and I did not have a passionate marriage. We had a passionate divorce. He thought I was stealing his children and taking them to another city to live with another man, and he was going to fight me tooth and nail. My children were my life and I would never live a single day without them. That was the opening bid in our divorce, and our positions didn’t change much through several years of battling. Lawyers loved it. Guardians ad litem loved it. Child psychiatrists and mediators loved it. We did not love it.
What had been best about our marital union — its reasonableness, its fairness, our cooperativeness, our respectfulness — was torn asunder in the process of disassembling our marriage. We became people we hardly recognized, and that is a nasty place to go with someone you care about, or yourself. One day, when I learned that he had bought a house without my knowledge to keep the children at their old school, I threw a loaf of French bread across the room and screamed. Our son, age eleven, looked at me in shock. I did not recognize myself.
Several years later, things got settled, more or less. We both have much less money. I will never recover financially from the divorce, but getting my children to live with me was worth every penny. My ex and I, partly out of necessity, partly because it is unpleasant to be unpleasant with someone you talk to everyday, began to be civil. It was best for the children, and best for us. Civility, in some sense, is less taxing than anger or bitterness.
Now I reflect that the “bones” of our relationship are still in place. Fundamentally, we still agree on many things: we have similar values about our children and the kinds of people we would like them to be. We have close enough visions of what we think parents should be in a child’s life, and close enough ideas of how our children should act in school. We know each other well enough to anticipate what we will disagree on — presidential politics, whether or not to call someone “sir,” how to spend money — and we avoid these topics if at all possible. This allows us to tap into our collective, historical parental wisdom about our children, to try to guide them to the finish line without being too much of a drag on them. This also gives me hope for the human spirit, the spirit of healing.
Recently we had to make a decision about how to handle something in our oldest son’s life. This was a complicated decision, and I wrestled with it, thinking it over, trying to look for patterns, signs, helpful pieces of intelligence in my child’s life. My new husband, who has great insight into his step children, was stumped. My ex and I discussed the issue, this child’s history, his earliest days, our visions about what he might become, and came to a useful, unifying agreement. I was glad to be able to tap into this store of memory.
We’re still related, just not married. My ex. We’ve all been there.
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