empty nest

The ups and downs of being alone

I haven’t spent much of my almost 51 years of life alone. Growing up, I mostly shared a room with my sister and also had a younger brother barging into our room on a regular basis. When I went off to college, I had a roommate — both in the dorms and later in apartments off campus. When I graduated from college, I moved back home for 6 months before my parents insisted it was time to head out on my own. I ended up renting a crappy apartment in an equally crappy neighborhood, because it was all that I could afford at the time. The months spent in that dreary apartment were noteworthy for being the first time I had ever been truly and absolutely alone in my own home. I’m not sure if it was the apartment, living alone, the not-so-great neighborhood or all of the above, but I was miserable and hated the entire experience. As soon as I could, I moved out of the apartment and into a house with three other people.

Not long before I moved into that house (that bears an uncanny resemblance to the house featured in the HBO show Silicon Valley — I suspect the neighborhood is the same), and immediately after breaking up with my college boyfriend of three years, I met my soon-to-be husband. Things moved quickly and in fairly rapid succession, we moved into an apartment together, bought a house, got married, had kids and collected a few dogs along the way. As anyone who has ever lived with roommates, been married, or raised children knows, there wasn’t much alone time for me. That was until the day my husband moved out. He had been my longest lasting roommate and we had lived together for almost 25 years.

With two of my children now in college on the East Coast (while I live on the West Coast) and one child spending only a few days a week with me, I’ve had a steep learning curve in managing this new solo lifestyle. After years of imagining something terrible happening to my children, my nightmares these days tend to be related to something catastrophic happening to me and nobody discovering my body for days or weeks. I even imagine the headlines that will appear when someone breaks down my door and discovers my dog sitting shiva beside my decomposing body.

Yes, I have relatives and lots of close and dear friends. But we all have busy lives and don’t keep in constant touch. Of course, many would notice if I was incommunicado for a week or so. But a few days would not set off any warning bells for anyone. And while I do have a job, my schedule isn’t entirely regular and, again, it wouldn’t be unusual for me to not be there for a few days, or perhaps a week. After having a husband for almost all of my adult life and being a full-time mom for 20 years, it’s strange to not have someone who knows where I am every minute of the day. Strange and somewhat scary.

When I first moved into my current home, I was constantly amazed at the joy I experienced in taking up every inch of closet space for myself. And being able to hang anything I wanted on any wall anywhere I pleased. I experienced great pleasure in doing what my heart desired whenever I desired it. Nobody to judge, or even notice, if I spent an entire Saturday in my pajamas, eating ice cream straight from the carton while binge watching The Great British Baking Show. (Purely a hypothetical scenario, I assure you) I don’t have to make lunch or dinner for any other person, except myself — and if some days dinner consists of toast then so be it.

But while I have enjoyed some of the freedom that being on my own affords, I’ve struggled with much of it.  When unexpected things happen, I don’t have that partner to prop me back up and tell me things will be ok. When the bougainvillea that the previous owner strapped to the side of the house with zip ties collapsed and landed with a crash across the entire width of my driveway, I had to figure out how to free my car and saw through the almost 100 year old thickly gnarled branches and haul them away.  It took me a few weeks to get it all done and when I finally did, I felt good. But the moment it happened, I was beside myself. Who would help me? Who could tell me what to do?

This morning when I looked out the window and discovered that my car had been ransacked in the night, I immediately burst into tears. Someone opened up and emptied every single compartment in the entire car and dumped everything in piles on the floor. A few things were taken: a favorite winter coat I left in there because my hands were full when I got home last night, a couple dollars in change I kept in the ashtray for feeding parking meters, and a few things I bought at Target recently but hadn’t gotten around to bringing in the house. So, thankfully, I lost nothing of major value. But my sense of security took a very big hit. I reached out to my not-yet-ex husband hoping for….what? I really don’t know what I was hoping for. But whatever it was that I wanted from him, I certainly didn’t get it.

What happened with my car wasn’t catastrophic by any stretch of the imagination. But in the moments after I discovered it, it absolutely seemed like it. I felt frightened and violated and, more than anything, alone.

The Amazing Disappearing Act of the Middle Aged Woman

I saw my doctor recently, having avoided her for far too long. It seemed like time to make sure my 50 year old parts were all in working order. Also, I’d been noticing the scale creeping up to unfamiliar levels. Nothing drastic, but I wanted to rule out anything serious. As it turns out, my 50 year old body is NOT functioning efficiently. My cholesterol numbers are at a level that needs immediate attention and, in discussing my weight, I learned something new. 

Making my way through the separation and divorce process over the past two years, I’ve learned a lot about stress responses in the body and how cortisol in high levels can wreak havoc on our bodies. What I didn’t know is that it tricks your body into fearing that starvation is a real possibility. So my brain, thinking that I am in grave danger, told my body to store more of the fats I eat. Much those fats were ice cream and most of it ended up in my mid-section. Great. Just great.

Without taking a deep dive into my bodily functions, I will say that being a 50 year old woman is a thankless job. I don’t think I’m the first one of my kind to find herself in a doctor’s office feeling a little out of sorts. Obviously my lovely doctor sees many of us in this category of life: 40ish or 50ish, empty nester (or almost), divorced (or almost) and trying to make sense of all of the above. I know this because she launched into a speech that seemed too practiced to be designed only for me.

With only the best of intentions, my doctor implored me to take care of myself and to enjoy what is finally going to be “my time.” No husband, no kids (well, mostly no kids) and plenty of time to find new passions and new direction. She reminded me that I still have a lot of living left ahead of me and I owe it to myself to get healthy and enjoy it.

Since that day, I’ve been thinking a lot about how not-unique my circumstances are. I’ve found myself as part of a group of women in my neighborhood who are all divorced (most, like me, after long marriages), most are empty or soon-to-be empty nesters and most of us have endured the pain and shame of our husbands’ infidelities. At work a small group of us have formed what is essentially a support group for women going through divorce. We’re at different stages of the process, but share our stories of life in the trenches of family court.

Taking a step back, I realized that the majority of my friends are either divorced or unhappily married, and most of us are searching for purpose in a world that doesn’t always seem to value us. We have almost become invisible and what often feels like dispensible. Many of us lament that we spend so much of our time struggling to adapt to our new lives and new responsibilities. We share stories of bursting into tears when the TV or wifi isn’t working and we can’t fix it. Or when a storm knocks a giant tree limb across our driveway, or the shower is leaking into the basement. We struggle with these things not because we are incapable, but because, for many years, there was a division of labor in our homes and those were things our husbands did. An efficient family is one that divides and conquers household responsibilities. My friends are I now find ourselves trying to figure out how to manage these new jobs —while still doing the things we’ve always done—and the learning curve can be steep.

Adjusting to our new normal, we see that we have become invisible to our former spouses. Those of us on dating sites also experience a particularly humiliating level of invisibility. We swipe on men our own age and never hear from them. Simply put, we are not the hottest commodity Match or OkCupid. When did we become invisible to men — our husbands AND prospective dates? When did it become so common for men to leave their wives just at the time we’re finally getting the space to enjoy our kid-free lives? Why is it so easy for them to stop seeing us, but most of what we see and experience is a sense of deep pain and loss. 

Men aren’t the only ones who have stopped seeing us, we’re invisible to employers too. My circles of divorced women are finding it hard to make ends meet these days. Rare is the job available to a middle aged mom who has been out of the traditional job market for years — many of us have worked over the years but, often, because of our decisions to be the primary caregivers to our kids, we have salaries that were never meant to be the sole support for a family in Silicon Valley.

After my visit with the doctor, I found myself thinking a lot about sight. What we see, who we see, how we see them, how they see us. It’s an odd and disorienting feeling to be living what so often feels like an invisible life. I’ve also been thinking quite a bit about what it is that I see and who I see. In talking to my circle of divorced friends, it’s clear that we all want to be SEEN again. We want someone to SEE us and accept us as we are. To see —and appreciate—the wisdom we’ve gained in our many years on the planet, the strength we’ve built up, our man y accomplishments, big and small, and that we raised kids who have become pretty special adults. So maybe we need to zoom out our narrow view of our circumstances and start seeing the larger, wider, fuller picture of our lives. Perhaps we need to see more of what we have and less of what we don’t.

In an interesting case of life imitating art, my yoga teacher instructed us to experience this morning’s practice with our eyes closed for the duration of the 90 minute class. While we all wobbled and struggled through poses that are so familiar with eyes open, our teacher read aloud the poetry of Mary Oliver. Oliver, who passed away last week, somehow managed to eloquently voice what so many of us feel. She made poetry accessible to those who don’t necessarily enjoy poetry. She made us see things that we didn’t realize we were seeing. Olliver asked us to reframe how we view the world so that we can see and experience it in all its beauty.

As I stood on my mat this morning, eyes closed and struggling to find balance, a feeling of gratitude came over me for the gifts that surround me every minute of every day.  As I open my eyes each morning the decision to see those gifts is mine.

 

 

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

 

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver