Yesterday, over Zoom, our therapist proposed something radical.
She told us we needed to arrange to come in to meet her in person.
My husband and I began therapy in May 2020, just a few months into the pandemic. Our marriage was in shambles and I was in love with someone other than my husband, but in-person therapy was not an option.
So we started seeing our therapist through a computer screen, and that is how we have known each other ever since.
In order to come to therapy in person during our coveted 5–6 pm time slot, my husband and I will need to arrange for a sitter for our two children. We will need to drive 25 minutes to her office, and then another 25 minutes home after our 50-minute session.
I am calculating the cost in my mind. Even after we submit the claims to insurance, our therapy costs nearly $200/hour. A sitter for two kids costs at least $25/hour. If we wanted to eat dinner afterward together, which our therapist recommends, we would need more hours of childcare and more money for food.
We are lucky not to worry that much about money right now, but I can’t help but focus on the numbers.
The cost in dollars and minutes of one in-person therapy session to work on our marriage feels almost laughable.
We are heaving that giant Sisyphean rock up the hill, and for what?
We are still here because we love our children so much it hurts, but they are so difficult to manage that we can barely breathe.
We are still here because we still rarely sleep through the night and don’t have the physical energy to think about the logistics of divorce.
We are still here because things aren’t that bad between us in the day-to-day.
We are still here because the grief of leaving still feels worse than the grief of staying.
So we are still here, stuck, talking into a computer screen once a week so it feels like we are doing something.
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I have looked up divorce online more times than I can count. Narratives about divorce speak of the hardship of missing your children, financial instability, and all sorts of grief.
Of course there are inspiring stories of divorce, and I have found many of them here on Medium.Emily Mark
,Deb Groves Harman, and Yana Bostongirl have all written honest words about the healing and new beginnings that can happen on the other side of divorce.
Those essays give me hope that there could be something good for me beyond the grief.
But it’s not really the potential for new beginnings that makes me think so much about divorce. A full-life overhaul is what scares me the most about divorce. I don’t really want that much to change.
I like my new mattress, and my children’s toys on the floor, and the default “Home” address on Google Maps. I like planning our family vacations, and the calendars I make every year with photos of our kids.
What does keep me coming back, and what lingers as a fantasy in my mind, is this idea of segmented time. I want more of it for just for me.
I want more time to be able to fall in love again.
Photo by iStockPhoto.com
My husband and I don’t fight often, but it’s safe to say we are no longer in love with each other. If we wanted to stay together and thrive — not just stay together for practical purposes, but to truly be in love again — it would require pushing that boulder all the way up the hill.
It’s unfair that my chances of finding love again seem better as a divorced single mom than as a married woman in a stable home with a husband who wants to make things work.
I’m not trying to glorify life as a single divorced parent. I know there are many divorced parents who struggle to find time for themselves, let alone for love.
But right now, the odds are definitely stacked against my marriage.
Falling in love requires time. It’s one of the most exciting ways to spend your time.
But my husband and I would need far more than a weekly in-person therapy session to fall back in love with each other, if that is even possible.
We would need to get away alone more than once a year, to find someone who could manage watching both of our children. We would need the money and time to make it such a regular occurrence that we could somehow reconnect with each other. The chance of reconnecting is still a gamble on its own, given all of the past hurt and resentment.
It’s agonizing to think about being divorced and spending half as much time with my children. But when I do fantasize about divorce, I think about what I would do with that forced time away from my parenting duties.
I imagine I could exercise more, make dinner just for myself, wake up on my own time, and read a book on a Saturday afternoon.
Eventually, I imagine I could use that time to fall in love.
It’s the time I desperately need with my husband, but that time only seems possible with a financial windfall, discovery of a real-life Mary Poppins, or divorce.
And somehow divorce just keeps popping up as the most realistic option.
…
A 50/50 custody divorce would force me to segment my time. It would allow me time to re-claim my identity outside of motherhood. It could give me time to fall in love again, though not with my husband.
I don’t know if the net positives would outweigh the debilitating grief that also would come from divorcing my husband. That balancing act in my mind is why I’m still stuck.
But I can’t help but think about how cruel it is that one of the only ways my husband and I could avoid divorce would be to find the exact thing that divorce could offer us — time to be ourselves again, away from our children.
Finding love is so much more difficult in this house of ours with our new mattress and our kids’ toys strewn about.
Sometimes it feels so much easier to give into the grief and start over.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com