Silver wedding anniversaries were a big to-do in the small town where I grew up. Practically every marriage I knew made it that far. And even gossip about couples grabbing the gold centered on whether they’d live that long, not if they’d still be together when the time came. In short, the vocabulary of my Southern upbringing most definitely did not include the D-word.
Yet there I was standing in the kitchen one morning at 51, smack dab in the middle of a divorce, when the impending date of my 25th reared its big, ugly, gargantuan head, nearly boinging itself right off the calendar at me. Up until then, I hadn’t given any thought as to how I was going to celebrate. A few years before, I’d have keeled over on the spot if you’d told me I might be marking the milestone alone while my husband ate dinner with his fiancée.
Once reality sank in, there was no calming my anxiety. Even my regular meditation practice failed me. Or rather I failed at it. I was certain I’d be dragging myself around all day with a long face, vulnerable to spontaneous bouts of blubbering. So I immediately made a midday salon appointment. Wash that man right out of my hair, so to speak. It was a start, but only; in my mind a big day required something equally big to mark it.
My first idea — reenacting “Under the Tuscan Sun” — quickly fizzled out. Last-minute plane fare was expensive, and my kids were in school. As a single mom, I simply had too many things on my plate, not to mention guilt, to skip off to Italy.
Plan B included making a list of friends who had listened and returned my calls during the separation. I’d invite them all out for champagne and hors d’oeuvres. My treat. Days passed, however, and my invitations remained on the dining room table, untouched.
“You know, my 25th anniversary is almost here,” I said, pitching my party idea to my best friend Sadie one morning over breakfast.
“Just give me the date, hon,” she said.
“But what do you think about my plan?” I said, finally asking her point-blank the advice I had dreaded soliciting for days.
“I wouldn’t spend the money,” she said. “But if you think about it, there’s nothing to celebrate.” I was silent. “Whatever you decide, you know I’ll support you.”
I did know. Twice since my husband had left I’d gone into surgery alone. Twice Sadie had been there with a cup of Starbucks when I’d woken up.
Two seconds later I ditched the party idea. With only eight days to countdown, I was back to square one. I was petrified and certain I’d be spending my anniversary with the person I wanted to least be with: me.
Fantasies of how my husband and I might have once celebrated engulfed me the following week. It was a thoroughly useless gut-wrencher, I knew. As if continually punctuating my pain might somehow relieve it. I concluded Jake and I would probably have thrown a big party in the dream house we’d picked out 10 years before. We’d gone house hunting, and once I walked in and saw all that sunlight pouring in through the kitchen door, I knew the place was ours. Even Jake had been convinced. More than 25 years ago, we’d been as equally convinced about each other.
Jake had grown up in New York; I moved north from Maryland after law school to accept a job in the same company where Jake worked. The day we met he kept me standing in heels for nearly an hour while peppering me with questions before he finally offered me a seat.
“Let me tell you about myself,” he said. I hadn’t asked and wasn’t interested, big brown dreamy eyes or not. Only 25, I had just landed my first real job in New York City. The last thing on my mind was falling in love.
“I bet you didn’t know I was an actor, did you?” he said, opening his desk drawer and handing me his head shot, which gave me all his stats. I wondered how often he’d rehearsed that role.
“Really,” I replied, my tone flat, not wanting to encourage him one bit. Not that it mattered. He liked to talk and kept at it for another two hours.
“Jerk,” I said under my breath, finally freeing myself with pleas of work to do. But Jake never let up. Day by day he drew me in with some offhand comment that was just so funny I couldn’t help but laugh and toss something in return. He said he’d never met a girl who could give back as good as he gave, and soon I was blushing and warming to all his stories. Before long, I was hopelessly smitten.
Nine months later we were sealed in holy wedlock by my grandfather, a Southern Baptist minister whom my Jewish-born husband nonetheless approved of, at the Madison Avenue Baptist Church in Manhattan. Twenty years we lived in Brooklyn, enduring what at times seemed like more than our fair share of troubles, troubles to me nonetheless overshadowed by the two lives we brought into the world.
Within weeks of the seven-year itch, we conceived our first daughter. Equally auspicious, a few months before unlucky 13, we brought home healthy daughter number two. In between, we threw a grand party to celebrate our 10th anniversary and greeted guests all decked out in nuptial gear. Jake was handsome in his black tuxedo, and I slipped easily into my wedding gown. And damned if we didn’t look happily ever after, I thought, flipping through the photo album, never once doubting in all those years that, just like my mom and dad, Jake and I, too, would one day stand side by side, cutting our anniversary cake.
And then one day my 12-year-old daughter found me in the kitchen one morning, broken.
“Why are you crying, Mom?” she asked, rubbing my back.
“Your dad’s leaving, sweetheart,” I reminded her.
“I know, but Daddy still loves you.”
“I’m not so sure,” I’d said.
“Of course he does,” she assured me. “He gave you those emerald earrings you wanted for your anniversary.”
Less than six months before, Jake and I had celebrated our 20th anniversary. He’d loaded the evening with surprises, including a small box containing the emerald earrings I’d seen in a shop the winter before.
What my daughter didn’t know, however, was that three months later her father had a girlfriend. That shortly after he started a new job, he’d begun having an affair with a woman in his office who had a 9-year-old son and two previous marriages behind her.
Still, it was my daughter’s words I hung on to, wanting to believe my little girl was somehow more capable of discerning the truth than I was. Weeks later, though, her father was gone. And five years came and went. And there I was, an A-1 planner without a plan, facing my silver wedding anniversary alone. A woman who had worked her way through law school, traveled the world and made it all the way to New York City, yet still longing for the one thing the women in her small, rural hometown had accomplished that she somehow hadn’t — an abiding marriage.
As I sat home, wallowing, I lifted from the shelf the white wedding album that I’d been avoiding since the day Jake left. My eyes fell on the fresh-faced blonde and her suitor standing at the altar, their future an open slate.
A year and a half before, I’d gone to a lecture one Saturday afternoon and realized I was within a few blocks of that very church. I figured there was no better time to venture a peek, fortified as I was from a two-hour Buddhist lecture, and so I strolled there, only to find the doors bolted. Disappointed, I walked away, avoiding the church from then on, even though the thought of going back lingered.
Suddenly the time seemed right to brave those wooden doors again. So a few days later, when my anniversary arrived, I hopped on the subway.
“Take as long as you like,” the church manager said, leading me inside and then excusing himself. In all honesty I wasn’t exactly sure why I’d gone or what I was going to do. As I looked around, stroking the red-velvet-covered pews, a few details came rushing back — the double aisles, one on either side, the rich wood. The rest was decidedly more majestic than I remembered — eight stained-glass windows, a cathedral ceiling, and a reredos adorned with intricate wood and gold filigree. The scale of my presence in the space where my husband and I had pledged our faithfulness exactly 25 years before was humbling.
Surprised to find myself wanting to recollect more, I strode to the anteroom on the left-hand side of the church where I’d once waited nervously with my attendants on a hot Saturday afternoon. Our flower girl had thrown a fit in that very spot, advising her mother she most assuredly was not walking down that aisle. I laughed, realizing that the little girl who stuck to her guns was all grown up and most surely an executive in charge of a vast number of underlings.
And then I walked through the archway, just as I’d once done, pretending to link arms with my dad, gone 20 years from a heart attack, my head held high, tears flowing, while I marched down the aisle.
It’s OK, I can do this, I said to myself as I reached the front pew and sat down. Brian, the church manager, appeared with a cup of water and left as quietly as he’d entered. Susan Sparks, the pastor, arrived next. I’d read about her online — a woman preacher and a stand-up comic. This was definitely not my mother’s Baptist church.
“Brian told me why you’re here,” she said. “What a brave thing to do. Perhaps you’ll even be able to reclaim this place in a different way.” I hadn’t expected to meet her but half thought she’d say something humorous to lighten the mood a bit. But she was somber, kind. And that’s when I realized that flying off to Europe or partying with my girlfriends would have been all wrong. This was a time for being alone and making peace with my loss. Susan left as quickly and quietly as Brian had done, and I resumed my meditation, breathing in bright white light and blowing all the dark smoky anger out.
As I ran my hands over the plush pews, my thoughts all at once became clear, and I took out paper and pen and started writing my husband’s girlfriend a note. “I imagine it will be as awkward for you to read as it is for me to write,” I began. A month before, she’d been diagnosed with cancer. And while I was still light years from forgiveness, what she and I had in common unexpectedly trumped the enormous gulf between us: We were both mothers. Surprised, I found myself wishing her a complete recovery, though in truth I hadn’t always felt that way.
“I hope your son is doing OK,” I added. “My girls say he’s a nice kid.”
When I finished the note, it was time to go. I’d reenacted my entrance on the left; it was time for my exit on the right. I turned my back to the altar and started as the words “come on Jake” flew from my lips. But once I gathered my wits, I stopped dead mid-aisle, turned round again, and said out loud: “On second thought, I’m going to do this part on my own.” And then I marched down the aisle and out the church, wondering who could possibly be channeling through me, feeling as light as the June air that greeted me outdoors.
Laura and I first met when our daughters ended up in school together. After becoming a stay-at-home mom, most of the new friendships I developed came by way of my children. And so building a friendship with Laura, like other moms who had come before, seemed like the natural way to go. As the girls’ friendship blossomed, so did ours. We talked constantly on the phone, catching up on school gossip and comparing notes on our emerging teens.
It was my husband’s affair and subsequent departure, however, that ultimately deepened our bond. Laura and I became inseparable, and she was a staunch, self-appointed defender of my suffering. Then one day, nearly as quickly as she’d charged into my life, Laura left.
Up until then, Laura had called nearly every day to check up on me, often showing up at my front door to say “you need to eat a good meal” before dragging me out to lunch. Losing weight and sliding back into my skinny jeans was about the only positive byproduct of those early days, but Laura wouldn’t take no for an answer. She deemed it her personal duty to fatten me up again and make sure I got my daily dose of carbs.
When a real crisis struck, she arrived first on the scene again, tracking down a replacement for my favorite Van Morrison CD which had gone missing. I sobbed when she handed it to me.
“Baby don’t cry,” she said, patting me on the back and giving me a sorely needed hug.
One day over lunch we even began giddily fantasizing about going into business together — Heart Menders, we would call ourselves. Maybe by helping others mend their hearts I could somehow knit back mine. I even sketched out a whole line of greeting cards in my head, though our discussions never got beyond the planning stage.
Another afternoon Laura told me a story she’d heard about a woman’s revenge on her cheating husband. One night after he’d gone to sleep, the woman sewed the bed sheets together around him with black thread, securing him in a womblike cocoon from which there was no escape. And then she beat the crap out of him with a baseball bat. After we stopped laughing, Laura handed me a spool of black thread that I placed on my dresser next to the worry dolls my friend Sadie had given me. Talismans to remind me there surely must be another way out of my anguish, and to keep me from places I’d rather not go.
Laura was good for my heart and comfort for my soul, and then what seemed like overnight, she disappeared. And I felt betrayed all over again.
I suppose there are any number of reasons why moms drift in and out of each other’s lives. Kids change schools, move on to different interests, or suddenly get taken with the new kid at the playground. Sometimes the mothers outgrow each other before the kids do. I’ve even heard since that some married women perceive newly single ones as a threat and would rather not have the reminder that their own marriages might be on shaky ground. Until Laura and I broke up, however, I never really thought about why and how all this happened. Nor did I ever find out why Laura left.
At the height of our friendship, my daughters and I went to Florida on vacation. That’s when I first sensed a change in our relationship. The first night of our trip I was feeling self-conscious as the only single mom at the pool — no single dads either — and called Laura for moral support.
“Hi Laura,” I said. “How are you?”
“I’m fine. What’s up?” she replied, no pause between her clipped phrases or reciprocity after my health. After listening in polite silence to my rambling, Laura said she had to go. Our daughters were in the midst of an on again off again tiff, but this wasn’t like her. We’d always risen above our children’s falling-outs.
During one of our daughters’ spats, I’d even suggested to mine that she be the first one to reach out, advice she wound up taking. I’m still not sure whether I was teaching her good manners or using it as a smokescreen for my own ulterior motives. Probably, it was a little bit of both. And so things between the girls got patched up temporarily. At poolside, however, I wondered whether their friendship might have lasted longer than it would have if I hadn’t stepped in.
When we got home from Florida, though, the girls hit a permanent stalemate and refused to make up. That’s when Laura’s calls stopped. Along with the lunches. And the hugs.
I was bitter and angry, never dreaming that the problems in our daughters’ relationship could spill over into mine and Laura’s. Much later on, it dawned on me that I’d been through a similar separation anxiety before — though not betrayal — when my daughter and her best friend broke up in second grade, right after I’d put all that energy into becoming good friends with the mom. How our 7-year-olds could do this to us I couldn’t fathom. To our credit, Alicia and I did try to keep the friendship going, planning an occasional outing together sans kids. But we eventually drifted apart.
As solo parenting and slogging through divorce court took over my daily preoccupations, Laura slipped from my mind. And then a year and a half after coming home from Florida, I ran into her at an awards banquet for our children. This time we spoke and gave each other a hug almost as if nothing had happened. We even talked about getting together for lunch and promised each other we’d call. Our exchange felt honest and good intentioned, yet we only spoke by e-mail after that and never were able to synchronize our calendars. That’s the last I saw of her, now nearly seven years ago.
I’m still not sure why her breaking things off had such a painful effect on me at the time. Had I made too much of our friendship, too mired at the time in my own anguish to see what was really there? Had we grown too close too fast? Did the wound hurt more deeply because it came so quickly on the heels of the worst betrayal I’d ever known, the one by my children’s father? After all, it caught me off-guard just as he had, and this time the betrayal had been not only by a woman, but also a friend. A mom, a person who’s supposed to possess the compassion gene and inhabit the same universe as me. To me, my husband’s betrayal had no excuse. His leaving left me in shock, but at least society warns us that men can do this. What Laura did? That was definitely not the definition of “sisterhood” I’d grown up with.
I sit in the dining room, alone, in the dark, weeding through my youngest daughter Ella’s outgrown clothing. I wonder where she wore this orange top, and with which bottom? The brown corduroy fringed skirt? The embroidered jeans? I unfold each piece, then hold it, arms outstretched against the small stream of light filtering in through the picture window, refold and move on to the next item. With growing children, sorting through clothes is a regular task. This time, though, it feels as if I’m performing some forbidden act, best done in secret. Better done before my daughter returns home tomorrow. She’s away for the weekend visiting her father. Ella isn’t her real name, by the way, but the one I’m using here.
After my husband left, the children toted their clothing back and forth when they visited him, constantly packing and unpacking. I remember watching them as they sat beside their suitcases in the vestibule on Friday nights. Looking like little foster children about to be shuttled off to the next family willing to take them in. Until I could no longer stand it and suggested my husband buy the kids clothes to leave at his place.
For years I’ve been shipping their outgrown clothes to old friends who had unexpected twin girls. Somehow my husband must have gotten wind of my recycling project; a few minutes ago he brought Ella by to drop off the bag of outgrown clothing from his place that I’m looking through. Most of the clothes I’ve never seen Ella wear. And now I have my karmic retribution for suggesting the whole matter of separate clothes for each of our residences in the first place.
I never wanted this separation, and would have worked as long and hard as it took to try to fix things. Anything to avoid whole chunks of memories with my children that now go unaccounted for. But divorce and separation create new zones of privacy, all ripe to be invaded.
“How was your weekend at Dad’s?” I ask.
Fine.
“Does his girlfriend treat you all right?”
Uh-huh.
“So what did you do?”
Nothing much. That response a weekend Ella saw “West Side Story.”
I hardly know if it’s OK to ask these questions. Whether certain parts of my children’s lives are supposed to be off-limits to me now that the family has broken up. A whole new code of political correctness to figure out and follow on my own. Frankly, I’m sick to death of reading articles about how fractured families can all get along better, the term “blended families” so often in print that I’ve forgotten what they call the other kind. You know, the ones where the mom, dad and kids all live together?
For me, the clothes I’m looking through permit a small peek into the nooks and crannies of my daughters’ secret lives. An attempt to fill in the missing pieces of our family jigsaw. Holding on to that nook is a scrap of shelter in the vast wasteland of places gone, smiles posed, bikes ridden, sleep slept, meals eaten and laughter laughed, all without me.
From time to time my mind gets carried away. Scenes of the imagined separate lives my daughters lead flash before me at times when I close my eyes at night. One time I saw Ella floating in a blue airy dress, dancing in the moonlight. In a different dream, her sister stood shyly beside her date, bulbs flashing, people chattering. There was laughter in the background. A woman’s voice, not mine, could be heard outside the frame. Waking up in cold, sweat-soaked sheets, I wondered if the web of silence that had begun to spin around all of us would one day break apart.
Looking in on this other world as I do now sorting through Ella’s clothes, however, does not always dispel my discomfort. A month after my husband left he flew to France with her. After a few days went by, I began to fantasize that he was gone for good. My daughters and I baked cookies. One night, one of Ella’s classmates and her mom came for dinner. After dessert the girls put on a dancing show in the living room, and we all clapped. Two days later, my husband dashed my hopes and left the sound of his voice on our answering machine.
“I’m on the French Riviera,” he said cheerfully. “Buying you girls presents and having a great time.” He closed by sending his love to our daughters. When I replayed the message for them, I got to feel the pain twice.
A few days later, he returned in the flesh. I smiled as the children showed me their designer loot, unable to shake the feeling that my husband’s girlfriend had hand-picked each item entering my home. My skin crawled as I adjusted the new Sonia Rykiel beret Ella insisted on wearing to school.
Here and there I come across a few items I’ve seen Ella dressed in on Monday afternoons when I pick her up in the schoolyard after she’s been with her dad for the weekend. Her once familiar yellow nightgown with the bear wearing a party hat slips out from the middle of the pile. When my husband first left, I sent along some sleepwear for the children. I hold the comfort cloth I haven’t seen in years up against my cheek. Most things, though, I’ve never seen her wear before, like the brown fringed skirt I hold up to the light next.
Just before handing me her bag of clothes a few minutes ago, Ella whisked the hair off her shoulders, unwrapped her shawl and modeled the green sheath her father bought in Paris last month. A blond curl scraped the nape of her neck as she blushed in her inimitable way, a look I often see float across her face in the unspoken understanding between us that she is indeed becoming a woman.
Last month she’d gone to Paris on vacation with her other family. She told me about her father’s plans on the walk home from school one day before she left, delicately unleashing the words.
“I always thought we’d see the ‘Mona Lisa’ together,” I confessed, immediately wanting to reel my comment back in.
“I know,” she said.
When Ella was a toddler, she became smitten with the “Mona Lisa” after seeing her portrait in a picture book we’d been reading together. For months she ran around the house calling after “Mona, Mona.” I searched high and low, found a larger-than-life-size poster, and had it framed and wrapped for Christmas when Ella was 4. It has hung in the entryway to her bedroom ever since. “It’s OK, Mom,” Ella assured me that day during our walk home. “Everything we do together is special. Sitting on the couch with you is as good as going to Paris, so it doesn’t matter if you’re not there when I see her.”
“Oh, but I’ll be with you,” I said. “Right there in your heart. Remember that the moment you see the ‘Mona Lisa.’”
“I will,” Ella promised. And she did. When she returned home, she laid a postcard of “La Gioconda” on the kitchen table between us. The flip side bore the inscription, “I love you, Mom.”
“And I won’t go to Venice without you,” Ella added. “Not if I can help it.” I’d often told her about my favorite place in the whole wide world, and how exciting it would be if we could go there together one day. In that moment, however, whether we ever made it or not became secondary. I worshiped my daughter all the more for the earnestness of a promise I knew she had no power to necessarily keep.
Two weeks after I look through the clothes, Ella’s schoolmate and her mom stop by. The girls put on a pretend fashion show. After I’d gone through the bag of outgrown clothing, something made me put them downstairs instead of mailing them right off. I hadn’t intended on having a second look, though maybe I was just fooling myself again. Anyway, the girls spy the clothes, and Ella’s friend, who is a size smaller than she is, comes upstairs modeling the orange top with the brown suede laces.
“I never got to see this on Ella,” I say to my girlfriend as I hand her the shirt to take home. “But now I’ll get to see your daughter in it at the playground.” We exchange a knowing look. My girlfriend is separated, too.
Four years come and go, and it’s Memorial Day weekend and my daughters and I have been listening to a radio countdown. “Do you love me? Now do you love me?” Ella and I ask each other as we sing along to the Contours’ 1962 hit. It’s a game we’ve played constantly over the years, singing those words back and forth to each other, Ella in her bedroom doing homework, me one flight below tending dinner at the stove. But after each stanza, we’ve always rebounded with some additional lyrics of our own — “yes, I love you.” Just as we do this weekend when I also cash in the frequent flier miles I’d been saving for nearly a decade.
Next spring, when Ella turns 16, we’ve got interlocking seats on a jet plane to Venice. Ella had a part-time job this summer and wanted to save some of her money. She thinks it will be cool for us to go shopping together in Italy for some new clothes. I think so, too.
Beverly Willett writes for national magazines and newspapers and is a contributor to the Huffington Post’s new Divorce page. Visit her website at www.beverlywillett.com.
(Credit: Andrei Dumitru via Shutterstock) 
Friends enjoy a hot cup of coffee in the kitchen 
