I was married for 10 years. The man I married had been my boyfriend since I was 15. One of the practical upshots of this situation is that I had never had sex with anyone but him.
As much as I was looking forward to the making out prospects of being single, I was more than a little worried about the sex bit. I had questions. What if I wasn't any good at it? Was it possible to have sex without the other party ever seeing my bottom?
I figured the first-time hurdle would be the most difficult. I figured it would be uncomfortable, and awkward, and not necessarily fun, but then I would have leapt the hurdle and could move on.
1. Going from two incomes to one. I have to learn about things like investing and retirement, and I have to figure them out on my own. How do I turn a teacher's paycheck into financial stability?
2. How do I look naked? My ass is no longer something I'm terribly comfortable with.
3. How little shaving can I get away with? I have no idea how much shaving, waxing, and personal grooming women who aren't on cable TV actually do. I have no idea how much the guys I might sleep with actually care.
4. Falling down. I'm not terribly graceful — falling over the coffee table and breaking my leg is a very real possibility. How long will it take for someone to find me?
5. Something will break. What if something terrible happens to the car or the plumbing? There will be no one to take me to work or help find a bucket. There's no longer built-in catastrophe assistance.
Sometimes, in my dreams, Mike (the boyfriend) and Jake (the ex-husband) are interchangeable, and I find this hugely uncomfortable upon waking. Sometimes they’ll just swap places mid-dream, or I’ll be doing something with Mike in my dream, only it’s Jake, but it’s really Mike. Sometimes I’ll relive something I did with Mike, only it’s Jake, and I’ll know it’s Jake and then what is normally nice and normal feels uncomfortable and icky and wrong.
I try not to compare the two relationships, only because I don’t want to be unfair to Jake, don’t want Mike to feel compared, don’t want to make out that these two people are in any way alike, or that I am in any way the same person I was then.
I was in Boston when I found out my divorce was final.
In late November, our lawyer let me know she had scheduled the "bifurcation hearing" for December 30th. This concerned me, as I was supposed to be on the other side of the country I was not terribly keen on abandoning my holiday plans to make a for-show appearance in an uncontested divorce. Jake was only required to be there by phone, so I asked for the same and hoped for the best.
On the train from New York to Boston, I worried a judge would call and I would have to discuss the details of my marriage and its demise while the armrest hog next to me and the kicking child behind listened in, but the phone didn’t ring.
I forgot about the hearing once I got to Boston. It was luck, really, that I heard my phone ring in my pocket while my friend and I cut through a department store on the way to the parking lot. It was our lawyer, congratulating me. No one needed to talk to me. The hearing was deemed not necessary. The divorce had become final the day before. I thanked her, and hung up.
My initial thinking, in hiring a divorce lawyer, was that I wanted to go ahead and let someone else do it. Our divorce was straightforward: we had no kids, no property. We had already agreed on a settlement, and, with the help of our fathers (both former lawyers) had drafted the settlement agreement ourselves.
We had an initial meeting, the three of us. Once we clarified our points, all that was left was sending in various forms to her, sending various forms to each other, signing various things in general, filing various papers.
This process took almost two years.
I started feeling as though something wasn’t right several months in – everything just appeared to be at a standstill. The majority of our correspondence with this woman was following up: “Has this been filed?” “Is there something more I need to do?” “Did you send me a copy of that paper?”
This year, for the first time, I wouldn’t have to face the nightmare of dealing – alone, since Jake is, as always, in China – with the complications of joint filing with someone who owned a business.
Finally, I could file single. Finally, the process and paperwork would be straightforward. Finally, I could get this done in February. I was even looking forward to the tedium, since the tedium would be all mine.
I have long believed in the good people of H & R Block. They have, for years, led me safely through the complexities that are Jake’s forms with nothing but kindness and sympathy. For this, my first solo tax return, I wanted to trust in them again.
Getting divorced has been, in many ways, merely tedious. The paperwork, the emails, the forms, the waiting in line.
The most time-consuming has been taking my name back, but the intense happiness of reclaiming myself largely mitigates my exacerbation at the amount of work involved in doing so.
The Social Security Office, for example. An intriguing place – from the woman who walked in screaming that they would see her now because she was being evicted in an hour and had no time to wait, to the man who tried to climb over the teller wall, to the woman clobbering the number-dispensing machine to death with her cane. The chairs are plastic and orange and uncomfortable, and the wait is long. But, by the end of the afternoon, I was myself again - according to the institution all other institutions look to.
