Thoughts you might have the year of your Covid divorce.

I have walked through my fair share of grief and loss. My brother died from a sudden accident when I was 24. Five years later, my dad died of heart failure. Within the span of approximately ten years, I lost my brother, dad, both my grandparents and my uncle. I became intimately acquainted with the awful task of planning a funeral: picking out caskets, choosing readings for memorial services, minding the character count for headstone epitaphs. None of that prepared me for the death of my marriage.

The year of my separation and divorce was a year like none other I’ve experienced. It was saturated with a persistent daily dose of grief and loss, stress and anxiety, loneliness and utter exhaustion that left me emotionally threadbare and physically on fumes. My thoughts were ragged, erratic, and only occasionally coherent.

I’m sure there are others out there who have walked this road with more mental clarity and fewer heaps of tissues. But if you’re anything like me, I share some thoughts you might have the year of your separation and divorce:

1. You will have moments that sometimes spread into days of incapacitating, chest-clenching anxiety. Thinking beyond today will paralyze your breath just as it rounds your throat. You will think there is no human possibility you have it in you to make it through all that tomorrow demands: all the fragmenting life changes squeezed mercilessly into a few months, a year.

2. You will be reacquainted with a fear of the dark. You will feel it creeping towards you as early as noon, 1pm, 2pm, 2:15. You will wonder how it can already be 3pm. It will start slowly like a ringing in your ears, a fist pressing into your chest with increasing pressure, an arthritic hollowness that vibrates through your joints. It will wake you up at night and whisper in your ear, remind you how limited you are, how afraid you should be, how little control you have. Then it will shame you for not sleeping, until the sun rises, until the darkness relents.

3. You’ll feel newly insecure about your marketability “out there” on a dating scene you haven't seen in a decade and a half as a tired, 39-year-old mom of three with stretch marks and stray grays. You’ll find yourself white-knuckling a mug of coffee in the early morning hours, scrolling through pictures of celebrities without makeup. “See,” you’ll tell yourself as you catch your own exhausted reflection, “we’re all just normal people with tired eyes, crows feet, and uneven skin.” (Except for J.Lo. and Jessica Biel. They were obviously sent here from another planet to taunt us.)

4. You will wonder how you let the narration of your life go so wildly off script. You will want to hunt down the narrator, tell her she’s got it all wrong because this isn’t the story you would have ever written. You’ll want to edit and revise, take out whole chapters. But then you’ll realize with terror that your children would disappear and parts of you, so many parts both tender and wise that have come to make you who you are today, would disappear also.

5. You will go whole days eating only potato chips, an occasional slice of cheese, and peanut M&M’s. You’ll think about how you used to eat salads and meat and meals that required plates and bowls, but you won’t be hungry enough, interested enough. You’ll find yourself in the Taco Bell drive-thru for the first time in twenty years, relishing just how cheap their tacos are in this time of no stable income. You’ll eat tacos out of your lap in the parking lot and suck salsa straight from the packets like a feral raccoon while you review your lawyer’s comments on the 16th draft of your separation agreement.

6. Your friends will encourage you to try some dating apps, get out there and have a nice time, lean into new freedoms. You’ll download two that seem the least skeezy but still feel a sickness filling out your profile as if you’re an inanimate object, a product on a shelf to be picked up and considered by some man you’ve never seen. The app will encourage you to include cheesy taglines--I feel famous when, Me in the wild, B-side of my camera roll--as a way to get more attention and you’ll feel all sense of your own human decency slip through your little swiping fingers as you scroll from one 6 ft tall man with a shirtless selfie to another. You’ll wonder a) at the remarkable correlation between dating apps and the occurrence of 6ft+ tall men b) what you were doing the exact moment dating and romance jumped the shark.

7. You’ll regularly sob over your sleeping children, whispering to them over and over how much you love them, how you are always with them in their hearts even when you are away, that you will be back in just a couple of days. They will sleep soundly through it all, snuggled under their covers with their stuffed animals tucked below their arms. You will feel like your heart is being ripped straight out of your chest when you leave them...and again when you return. You will hold them close in the mornings when they awake to you, telling them how much you missed them, how often you thought of them, how proud you are of who they are, how it’s okay to be sad or angry or confused or any emotion they might be feeling about their mama and papa being “unmarried”. And they will say they love you too before moving full steam into playing make-believe “dog dog” and ninja warriors.

8. You’ll have conversations with so many acquaintances who will bob and weave like pro boxers to avoid having to acknowledge your impending divorce. Once you mention it, they’ll admit to having known and say things like, “What an awful time for a divorce,” and you’ll think, yes, yes in fact it is. You’ll promise yourself to say something, no matter what it is, to the next person you meet who is in the midst of loss to offer them the kindness of simply acknowledging their pain.

9. Your inner circle will get desperately small and you’ll have a profound appreciation for friends who have walked through divorce and are willing to tell you straight that it’s like ten thousand deaths with no funeral.

10. You’ll scrounge together coins to buy yourself dinner but commit ALL of your hypothetical future fortunes to a yet-to-be-founded non-profit providing free legal counsel, mental health services, housing, childcare, job placement, and ax throwing for women in the midst of divorce.

11. You’ll find yourself in the back alley of a lawyer’s office in a face mask, yoga pants, and hoodie, initialing each of 22 pages of your separation agreement. The legal secretary will ask if you mind her having a smoke while you sign away your marriage, half your time with your children, and half your earthly possessions page by page on the hood of someone else’s trunk. You’ll be struck by the juxtaposition--beginning your marriage in a white lace gown, flowers everywhere, champagne overflowing, that one drunk cousin who never fails to deliver, ending it in a quiet back alley with the Marlboro woman and a cloud of smoke. You won’t know what to do next, bawl or feel relieved or both, so you’ll end up driving to the local natural foods store to buy bulk granola you don’t want. You’ll eat it in your car, crying, listening to Folklore.

12. You’ll thank God for Taylor Swift.

13. You’ll consider tattooing “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit” on your neck. You’ll decide that though it might add a real element of mystique to your dating app profile, this is not the most judicious idea you’ve ever had.

14. You will wonder what happened to your brain and if it will ever come fully back online. You will leave your car lights on overnight multiple times within the same week. You will get out of your car and walk away from it, proud you remembered to turn off your lights, before realizing you left the car running. You’ll forget your phone number and mix up meeting times and walk into doorways and furniture. You’ll send the wrong text to the wrong people and drive aimlessly around town trying to remember what you are supposed to be accomplishing. You’ll jog through town with your Harvard shirt on backward.

15. You’ll seriously toy with the idea of chopping all of your hair off. You’ll tell your stylist what you’re thinking and she’ll look you dead in the eyes without blinking and say, “No trauma haircuts.” And you’ll think, whatever I pay this lady she’s worth every damn penny.

16. You will pack a bag the first week your “nesting” period begins and not unpack it for ten months while you bounce from location to location on the days and nights you are away from your kids and your home. You’ll get used to waking up in the middle of the night with no idea where you are or in which direction the bathroom is located. Multiple times, you will drive to your previous temporary housing and then have to turn and drive back across town to your new temporary bed.

17. You’ll find yourself sitting in a small box in the center of a huge courtroom while a judge asks you intimate questions about your relationship with the husband from whom you are mutually separated and with whom you have worked months in mediation to establish a legally sound and binding no-contest separation agreement. You’ll sit there wondering if you’re really on the set of The Handmaid’s Tale while the judge and two lawyers bat around personal details of your marriage and family life like a cat toy. Then you’ll listen as the judge says putting your kids first makes it all confusing and he’s just not convinced you and your ex were really separated long enough for his liking. He will not sign on the divorce yet.

18. You will have your blood drawn for a physical and stare at the red liquid coursing through a small plastic tube, wondering at how your body still bleeds, your heart still pumps, your lungs still expand and compress, even so. You’ll realize all the ways your body shows up for you every day and carries you through. You’ll jog on days when you have the energy and walk on days you don’t, and each time you’ll marvel at how your body keeps pushing, keeps adapting and managing the stress even when your mind wants to throw in the towel. Some days it will be all you can muster to just lay there and stare blankly at the ceiling for hours, and then too, you’ll be amazed that your body knows what it needs and demands your respect.

19. Still, you will have a sinking fear of dying just as soon as the divorce is finalized--from cancer, from a crippling auto-immune disease, from a car accident, from any list of stress-induced ways to lose a life. Your fear of dying will only be superseded by how pissed off you’ll be when you’re dead: for having done all this work, having fought for what’s left of your life to then just go and kick the bucket. You’ll decide to haunt the judge who delayed your divorce.

20. You’ll wonder what on God’s green earth you did to deserve the friends you have because they will save your life. Literally save your life. They will show up again and again and again in ten thousand ways you never could have hoped or imagined. They will Venmo you pizza money and self-care money and front your lawyer fees. They’ll send you care packages filled with chocolate and coffee and encouraging notes with quotes from Mary Oliver that make you cry every damn time. They’ll offer to help you with the downpayment on a house you can’t afford on your own. They’ll drop off fresh-cut flowers and take-out and jumbo bags of peanut M&M’s. They’ll offer their apartments and basements and parents’ homes to stay in on the nights you’re without kids. They’ll insist on taking you in on your first Thanksgiving away from your kids, and then when the whole family goes around to say what they’re grateful for, they’ll say your name and your kids’ names and it will make you cry into your turkey. They’ll pray for you when you don’t have words of your own and show up at your door again and again to let you collapse into sobs in their arms. They’ll sit with you, for hours and days, just holding your grief with you, honoring your sorrow, holding space for your tears until they dry up on their own. And they’ll see and name and hold out a future for you that you cannot yet see or hold. They’ll tell you “you’re a catch” and a badass and they’ll get angry for you when you’re too spent to get angry on your own.

21. You will desperately want answers and need wisdom and wish in your heart of hearts that someone would just show up and save you from all this mess that is a marriage, a shared life, a once-upon-a-time dream, imploding. You’ll scream and cry and flail about and solicit all the advice a brain can contain before collapsing into yourself. But there, in the quiet of your solitude, you will hear your own voice and you will be reacquainted with your own knowing. You will learn to listen to and trust yourself in ways you haven’t for decades, a lifetime. You will remember you are trustworthy, wise, resilient, kind, and brave. You will learn how to physically hold yourself when you cry alone at night. You will remember the sorrows and losses you have already weathered. You will look back with compassion and love for all the selves you have been and look forward knowing you are the only one who gets to decide who you will become. You will know in ways you never have that you are enough today. And you will begin to really believe you will be enough tomorrow.