divorce Archives - Kate Hilton

Posts Tagged ‘divorce’

Love, Unexpectedly

August 1, 2016

Dear Reva,

I have so many conversations with you in my head that don’t make it onto paper.

Sometimes it’s because life intervenes, and intervenes again. But recently it’s been for a different reason entirely. I’ve been feeling shy. Our letters are public, and while there are conversations I might have with you privately, I’m not always willing to have them publicly.

Which is why I haven’t told you that I’m in love.

This is wonderful, obviously. It is a sensation I never imagined experiencing again and it is glorious.

It is also terrifying.

For starters, I’m out of practice. The last time I fell in love was close to twenty years ago, and we all know how that worked out. And then there are all the complications. Logistical ones: Dependents, responsibilities, schedules. Emotional ones: My shit. His shit. New shit that we are creating by combining all of our old shit together.

Here are some of the things you don’t do when you fall in love at our stage: stay up all night talking about the relationship (nothing is improved by losing a night of sleep); express every feeling you have every moment that you have it (no one at our age needs this kind of drama); make elaborate plans about the future (because you never know, do you?); overlook the other person’s flaws (they aren’t going anywhere); avoid hard conversations (they aren’t going anywhere); and imagine that you and he are going to change substantially from the people you are today (you made that mistake once, and the results were disappointing).

On the other hand, here are some of the things you do when you fall in love at our stage: have excellent sex as often as possible (because life is short and everything still works); get a nice boost from seeing yourself through the eyes of your new partner (interesting! funny! sexy!); talk about yourself as a person with individual preferences and interests, just like you did when you dated in your twenties (and discover that many of those preferences and interests remain the same, which is oddly comforting); and learn a staggering amount about all of your aforementioned shit.

I know what you’re thinking. That doesn’t sound very romantic, does it?

But strangely, it is. It’s about seeing past the fantasy to what is real. It’s about being equally present in Italian hotel rooms and in hospital rooms. It’s about knowing that there are no guarantees, and this might not work, and you might be humiliated, and still deciding that you’re all in. And it’s about being loved for who you are, with all the cracks and dents and imperfections that you would change if you could, but can’t.

It’s not a Disney romance, for certain. But what is it? I’ll have to keep you posted.

Lots of love,

Kate

Pen Pal Project

Second Novel Syndrome

December 1, 2015

My office

Dear Reva,

This is an important date for me. December 1^st was the deadline for my second novel, a project that caused me untold angst. And I’m happy to report that I made it! I handed in my first draft to my agent on Friday.

Here is something you will rarely hear me say, and which I should say (which we should all say) far more often: I’m really, really proud of myself.

Second novels, as you may know, are notoriously challenging. Writers who have been fortunate enough to experience a success with their first book often struggle with their second, so much so that the phenomenon has nicknames, including The Sophomore Slump and Second Novel Syndrome. In the writer Anne Lamott’s words, “The beginnings of a second and third book are full of spirit and confidence because you have been published, and false starts and terror because you now have to prove yourself again.”

And that’s without getting divorced and moving in the middle of the book.

Now I will wait to hear from my agent, who will tell me honestly what she thinks. And I will either rewrite at that point, or we will submit the manuscript to my Canadian and American editors. And pretty soon, I’ll have to start thinking about my next novel (although I have some ideas taking shape already).

I love that you passed me a note in class for your last letter. I should say that I make a point of promising the men I date not to write about them here (although the person I’m currently seeing says, “Why not?”). But let me offer some observations in the abstract.

Dating at midlife is simultaneously easier and more complicated that it was in our twenties. It is easier because we know ourselves better and because we are looking, for the most part, for simple companionship. It is more complicated because we all have baggage. It is easier because people are comfortable in their bodies and know what to do with them. It is more complicated because people have significant responsibilities, and need to shoehorn dating into an otherwise full life.

But overall? It’s pretty fun.

Love,

Kate

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Pen Pal Project

I Can See The Moon

October 6, 2015, my office

Dear Reva,

I passed a big milestone this weekend.

It’s been a year since my husband told me he was leaving. At the time, it came as an extremely unpleasant surprise, and today it still remains something of a mystery.

I’m not going to say that my house burned down and now I can see the moon (as the saying goes). No one wants her house to burn down, and you can see the moon just fine by stepping outside once in a while (except when there is a rare and beautiful eclipse, in which case you can’t see it at all). I don’t think that change, even necessary change, requires a catastrophe to bring it about, nor do I believe that every catastrophe is for the best, necessarily.

But if your house/life burns down, the process of rebuilding is intensely conscious. The life you had before the disaster took shape organically, over many years, and it reflected both the compromises of partnership, and the preferences of your younger self. The life you now contemplate will express your present identity. So what should it look like?

Adversity isn’t identity, and no one would want it to be. We are infinitely greater than the sum of our negative experiences. But it is human nature to reject the idea of pain without purpose. I think that our sense of a true self, of an identity, often comes into focus through our attempts to understand painful events. (On this topic, I was very moved by Andrew Solomon’s thoughts on how the worst moments in our lives make us who we are.)

When you emerge from the shell of your former life, you feel as you imagine a newborn must feel: dependent, disoriented, frightened, and battered by overwhelming emotions and sensations. But then, as your agency returns, you begin to observe your own actions with interest. Freed of patterns and routines, how do you choose to spend your time? With whom? Which activities do you anticipate with pleasure, and which ones with dread? And from these basic cues, you can begin to build a life around your identity, instead of crafting an identity to fit your life.

I wouldn’t have chosen the fire, but it has generated a new life that is wholly mine. Because if your house burns down, why content yourself with simply looking at the moon? Why not shoot for it?

Yours,

Kate

P.S. God, yes, it’s messy.

P.P.S. Really looking forward to seeing you in person (!) at the International Festival of Authors party. Both of us in the same room at the same time: an event almost as rare as a lunar eclipse. We will need photographic evidence.

Follow the Pen Pal Project here.

Read Reva’s last letter here.

Pen Pal Project

You’ve changed

September 22, 2015

My office

Dear Reva,

You’ve changed.

Has anyone said that to you recently? What was your reaction? Did you think the person meant it as a compliment or a criticism?

I ask because I’m interested, in life generally, and in the book I’m writing, in how we construct our identities. And I think that many of us resist the idea that we change. Sure, we change the music we like and the fashions we admire, but our fundamental personalities don’t change, right? Identity isn’t fashion. Identity is fixed.

In fact, the opposite seems to be true. The current neuroscience research suggests that we are constantly evolving, or, as Dan Gilbert puts it in his delightful TED talk: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

I accept that this is true intellectually, but until recently, I’ve resisted it on an emotional level. I’ve always found the idea that people change to be quite threatening. What if you invest all your energy into a relationship – a marriage, a friendship, a work partnership – and that person changes? How can you control that? How can you protect your investment?

You can’t, obviously, which I learned the hard way on several fronts.

When you go through divorce, people tell you that you’ve changed. Usually the person who no longer wants to be in a relationship with you will tell you that (and it isn’t intended as a compliment). But friends will tell you that as well. Some will mean it as an encouragement, as in the end of your marriage will allow you to grow further into the person you are meant to be. Some people don’t, as in, I can see why your marriage fell apart, because you are one of those people who changes, but I’m not, so my marriage is safe.

And because you are, in fact, changing, some of those people will remain friends, and some of them won’t.

Which brings me to the question you asked in your last letter: “Have you via your writing or otherwise ever not been liked?” Yes, I have. And it sucked.

But I’m getting better at dealing with it. Because I’m changing.

Love,

Kate

Read Reva’s last letter here:

Follow the entire correspondence here:

Pen Pal Project

Turning The Page

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

My office

Dear Reva,

Moving day is on Thursday, and I am sitting in a half-empty house. I’m moving to a lovely but much smaller house, and I’ve given away a lot of furniture, all of which was picked up over the weekend. New, appropriately sized couches and chairs and tables will start arriving once we move, but for now, we are rattling around in mostly vacant rooms. We are all adapting surprisingly well to this physical evidence of a turning of a page in our family’s story.

I am thinking, of course, of the events of the past eight months that have brought me to this moment. I remember the shock, bewilderment and searing grief of a husband’s unexpected departure. I remember the blur of months spent putting one foot in front of the other, of just surviving to do it again the next day. I remember the agonizing conversion of a longstanding partnership into a set of legal obligations. I remember my children’s pain and my own. I remember the friends who drifted away, compounding the loss.

But I remember, too, everyone who swarmed around, who called, who let me cry on the phone and in restaurants and in the car and on the tennis court – everywhere, basically – and who acted like it was no big deal that I was leaking constantly, and who fed me dinner and wrote me notes, and who told me that I was fabulous and that I would heal, over and over again. I remember who picked me up when I couldn’t get off the floor on Boxing Day. I remember who took me to the park and found a patch of sunlight to warm me in the dying days of autumn. I remember who left a week of dinners on my doorstep. I remember who took me out for my birthday, and made sure I had a lovely present. I remember each and every act of kindness and love, and I am so grateful. I can’t tell you.

Which brings me to a subject I’ve thought quite a bit about over the past year: the difference between joy and happiness. No one, least of all me, would say that this has been a happy year. But it has been full of moments of unadulterated joy.

I am a big proponent of the cultivation of joy. It seems to me that joy is the great casualty of working motherhood, and of modern life more generally. We treat joy as a frivolity, a distraction from the real work of securing solid, foundational happiness. And that is a great pity, because, as the late, great Maya Angelou observed: “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.”

I’ve come to appreciate the value of joy this year, so much so that I made a video about it.

I am, by nature, quite a joyful person. And this means that even if my life turns to absolute shit in an objective sense, I can still manage to find pleasure in small things. Joy doesn’t require big plans or radical changes. Joy isn’t ambitious. And that means – listen carefully – it isn’t something we can fail at.

Isn’t that a project we should all get behind?

Yours,

Kate

Read Reva’s last letter here.

Read the Pen Pal Project archive here.

Pen Pal Project

Great Expectations

April 7, 2015, 6:30 a.m.

Dear Reva,

I’m writing to you at the last minute this week. I rarely work before school drop off at 8:45, but I’ve been struggling with what I want to share.

Normally, I write to you about personal things, but things I’ve had time to process. This week has been one of the saddest and most stressful of my life. I’ve had several of those weeks in the past year, but we weren’t writing to each other then. But I can’t come up with any other topics, really, because my busy brain is, well, processing.

Here’s what happened, in short: I spent a full day in mediation and arrived at a final separation agreement with my husband, and sold my house the same evening. In other words, I dismantled, in one day, a life that I had spent 15 years building. These are positive outcomes in many ways, actually, but I feel somewhat dazed. When I wake up in the morning these days, I’m often disoriented, as you are when you wake up in a hotel far from home, thinking that you are in your own bed, and wonder: where did that ugly lamp come from? I always need a few seconds to locate myself in time and space.

Being in the here and now: I told you in an early letter that this is my challenge, or as you yoga types like to say, a core aspect of my practice. I know this because I’ve been doing Moksha yoga recently – your influence! I find it unexpectedly grounding. Also, all the sweating makes me feels as though I’m expelling toxic stress, though part is mostly in my head, I’m sure.

I liked your letter about drinking. I’m interested in how we (women in particular, but men also) use numbing behavior to shield ourselves from discomfort and vulnerability. Drinking is one method, certainly, but perfectionism is another; as long as we are focused on the next achievement, there’s no need to stop and ask ourselves why, or even if, we really want whatever we are chasing after.

Have you read any of Brené Brown’s work? She does research on shame, and writes compellingly about the lengths that we will go to protect ourselves from vulnerability. Her point, a good one, is that if you numb one feeling, you numb them all: numb sadness, and you numb happiness, numb fear, and you numb courage. Check out her TED talk here.

I’m also intrigued, though not especially surprised, by the study you cite on women’s declining happiness levels. As Nora Ephron once said: “The major concrete achievement of the women’s movement in the 1970s was the Dutch treat.” I’ve been a stalwart feminist since adolescence, but really, doesn’t it seem, more often than not, like our generation of women got a raw deal?

And we’re supposed to be thrilled with all of our amazing choices! We can choose to have high-powered careers, for example, while other people raise our children, and be exhausted all the time, and wonder what it is all for. Or we can choose to stay home with our kids, and feel judged by working women, and guilty for squandering all our talents and opportunities. Or we can choose a middle road of part time or less ambitious work, and feel uncomfortable with the trade-offs we’ve made.

And many of us in every category are pouring a big glass of wine at the end of the day to numb feelings of frustration and disappointment.

In mediation this week, the mediator began by saying: “All divorces are about disappointed expectations.” I thought it a very profound observation, and true more broadly. Midlife, too, is about disappointed expectations, and a successful transition involves revisiting and recalibrating the expectations we’ve carried into midlife from other ages and stages. I am not saying that we should lower them, necessarily, but that we need to be more honest about them, with other people and with ourselves.

A lot of ink is being spilled these days about happiness, and I’m all for it. We are the luckiest people in the world, and we should all be happier than we are. But until we let go of old expectations, and stop numbing our disappointments, and come alive to what we really want from our relationships, our work and ourselves, happiness will feel elusive. Elizabeth Gilbert circulated a quote this week by Howard Thurman, a preacher and American civil rights leader, and it struck a chord with me: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

It is spring, after all.

Yours,

Kate