After
The Continued Chronicles of Divorcing a Narcissist
Have you ever been on a hike and thought you were almost at the top of the mountain but when you got to the peak you realize from that vantage point that what you were climbing was not the actual mountain but a peak along the way? That the real mountain was still a ways off in the distance? That is exactly how I felt after putting my kids on the plane. My new mountain to climb was called recovery. I spend my days trying to find my way in the quiet and the aftermath of a battle lost. I was left to sort through the rubble which amounted to a lot of questions. My own obviously, as well as the questions from the people in my life.
The questions I asked myself on repeat:
How did I get here? You know the answer to that. If you forgot, reread the hundreds of emails, court documents, and your own writing. Do you really not know the answer to this?
Did I fight hard enough? You fought as long and as hard as you could without killing yourself or anyone else in the process.
Do my kids still think of me as their mother? Yes. This cannot be erased. No matter how hard their other parents try (and they will continue to try), no matter how much distance is between you and them or how much time passes before you are together again. You are still their mother and they know this to be true.
Am I going to make it? Yes. You have to.
Is my marriage going to make it? You are going to try. Hopefully you will find the strength.
What the fuck have I done? See: How did I get here?
The people in my life were curious. When they saw me for the first time after my kids moved away their eyes lit up like sparklers. They were scared this could happen to them in some dystopia they feared was lurking in the shadows. “Go ahead, ask. You won’t offend me,” I would tell them. They wanted to know which rocks should be avoided when crossing the river. Hoping not to step on the ones I did. The ones that made me slip and fall into the raging water that made me lose grip of my children and then washed them away for good.
They asked me how the kids were. No clue. But I do know they are resilient. They know who they are. They are courageous beyond measure. They will be ok. I hoped. They asked me when I would see them next. Christmas. They asked me how my youngest was doing. He’s heartbroken.
How did you do this for so long? How did it happen? When did it happen? Did the court take them? What does the agreement look like? What will you do now? All of these questions morphed into one question when filtered through my own self-loathing. How did you manage to fuck this whole thing up so badly that you lost custody of two of your kids? Bingo.
When people asked me how I was doing, this is how I answered in my head. I am doing shitty thanks for asking. Shitty, then surprisingly ok at moments, then numb, then shitty again, then horribly depressed. It’s like I have been strapped to a roller coaster I am not allowed to get off. I just have to wait it out, however long that takes. In the meantime, I just focus on doing the next thing. Then the next thing. Then the next thing.
I didn't know how to answer for real. Was I supposed to be feeling something? Because I didn’t. I was numb. From my core to my fingertips. Numb. I was not medicated, not drinking, not shooting up, not binge watching or overspending. I was somehow going through the motions of my life as if nothing had ever happened. I would wake up at 6am, wake up my son, feed him breakfast, drive him to school, come back home and talk with my husband before he left for work. I did the dishes, started the laundry, picked up the toys, worked out, ate breakfast and then when I finally stopped avoiding myself, I sat at my computer to face a blinking cursor.
There were signs I wasn’t ok. I stopped showering. I didn’t want to shower because then I’d have to see my body. I would be alone with my thoughts. I didn’t want the comfort of the water blanketing me in its warmth. I didn’t deserve it. I also feared it melting me and carrying me away with it down the drain.
I couldn’t relax. If I stayed still for too long, things would get too quiet and I would hear the tape playing in my head. You should be doing something. You are a lazy fuck who should be appreciating this time. Other women would die to be at home and you piss it all away doing what? Punching the air? You should at least be crying to show that you care that your kids moved away. At least have sex with your husband, give him something he wants. You deserve nothing. It’s your fault they moved away. Proof that you are the fuck up you always knew you were.
The noise was endless. A constant stream of insults and reminders of what had happened and that my reaction to what had happened wasn’t enough. Like I was a chef who had been given a bad review which haunted me but I never made any changes to the menu. I just kept my head down and kept cooking for less customers.
What should I be doing anyway? I asked the voice in my head this question and she shut up. There was no answer. There was no should. There was no one watching anymore. There was only me and my dog looking up at me. She was hoping I would take her for a walk and possibly drop a pretzel on the floor at some point during my day. Here I was on the other side and there was no big thing crushing or collapsing me. Huh.
Huh is all I could really muster. It wasn’t depression exactly. It was more like complacent yet functional indifference. I could go to that yoga class my friend kept asking me to go to now that my son was in kindergarten all day. Or I could not. It didn’t really matter either way. There were no feelings attached to any of my decisions anymore. I could go get a job somewhere or I could sit at my desk and pretend that my writing was going to amount to something. Either was fine.
Huh.
I got curious. What happened after huh? I was expecting that after I signed the agreement, there would be more than huh. Something dramatic and Shakespearian. Continuous weeping and sadness or some kind of elation from finally being outside of my ex’s grasp. I never expected huh.
The only thing that got through the numbness was being unexpectedly shanked by something my kids said that was broadcasted to me from their new life. Like when my daughter told me that they were going on a trip. To Ikea. This was a consistent pattern with B and May. When life handed them a huge transition, they redecorated the house by going to Ikea.
The shanking part came when my daughter said they were focusing on redoing the kids' rooms thus making my attempt to redo her room a competition. I never knew I was competing until I found out I was losing.
The huh quickly faded when I realized any attempt to wow my kids with any effort to make something good from this change would still be further outdone by B and May. In my heart I knew this didn’t matter. I knew my kids knew what was up. They knew what they got from each set of parents and each parent individually. Still it was a reminder that the battle would never truly be over, I just had to choose to walk away and not fight anymore.
Then came this new thing I was experiencing. Procrastination. Which I started cleverly calling “process”. At first I was motivated and keyed up to paint my daughter’s room. Then I couldn’t get myself to leave the house to go buy the paint. I decided because I usually skipped over the necessary things in order to do a project, I was going to use this room makeover as an opportunity for growth. Do things like Hank would do them. Correctly.
I would take my time, because I had time. I would even call it meditative. Until I heard about the Ikea trip and noticed that no longer did I feel any excitement about buying the paint. I Kept making things up to do in the room besides paint. The inside of the windows were dirty. I bet that meant that the windows themselves were dirty too. When in my life had I wanted to clean windows instead of completing a goal? I was a fucking Capricorn for Christ’s sake.
When I listened to the voice inside my head say there must be more to do I knew something was up. Turns out there was more. Once the room was painted it meant my kids were really gone. That we would officially be moving forward with this plan. You would think I would have known that based on the fact that I had put them on a plane the previous Saturday. But they had come and gone so frequently that maybe I had been in numbed out denial. That this was just one of those times like all the others.
Any day now they would be coming home on the bus and walking through the front door. Backpack thrown on the ground, shoes kicked off in the doorway (blocking the doorway), uniform and hair disheveled from a long day at school. Nope. I would never witness this again. Somehow my brain had attached this fact to painting the walls of the room from what my daughter called “poopy sick brown” to a refreshing aviator blue.
I feared the painting. Color erasing over all the memories of my children ever being there. Rolling away their existence from the house. Maybe that was the moment that would make it real. IT IS REAL STUPID. There was that voice again. This time it was yelling at me. Huh.
I had an appointment that got canceled at the last minute one morning which gave me the opportunity to go to Costco for the first time without kids. I was already dressed, I might as well do something productive. Anything but buy paint. I was cockily thinking, this is going to be easy, a little bit boring even. No nagging, no barnacles hanging off the cart, no whining. In fact, I thought Cotsco would be empty, a dead zone, the perfect time to shop. Who is even shopping at Costco on a late weekday morning besides mothers wearing scarlet letters who avoid buying paint?
Turns out moms. And not old moms like me. Young vibrant moms who have their shit together dripping with tiny babies and young toddlers. Happy looking moms bubbling over with joy making baby talk with the freshest human beings on the planet safely sitting side by side in their two seater Costco cart nestled into the puffy cart cover their loving mom brought to protect their soft fleshy bodies from touching the cold jagged metal.
This was an unexpected gut punch. Not only did I feel lonely, pining away for my barnacles, but I didn’t feel numb anymore. I felt loss. Loss for my children moving away and growing up. Loss for my youngest son who was no longer my sidekick. The one who had helped me navigate my introverted way through these experiences out in the world. Whose presence made them somehow bearable. It was just unshowered me. An old ship with no barnacles.
Alone with my cart of fewer items, because there were less mouths to feed, I could feel how my life was moving on without me. I had no fucking clue what to do with myself. I had been momming for so long while wielding my sword to battle B and May, no wonder I was numb. This realization made me want to yell out to these glowing young moms to let them know, I have kids too! I felt invisible. If no one cared what I did all day, what should I do all day?
With so much change happening at once, I made a commitment to myself that I would not make any major changes for a whole year. A year of full recovery. A grief year. I was leaving myself space. Space to figure out what to do next, to listen. It was terrifying. So when the voices inside me started encouraging me to get a new puppy, become a foster parent, find a job, I would remind them, not this year. For now, just space. And Costco without kids.
The thing about kids is, they are sometimes clueless about other people’s feelings. They don’t mean to be, it’s just that their world revolves around them. So one day when I was talking to my son on a video call, he felt compelled to take me to the basement. He wanted to show me the ping pong table that he had rigged up to play against himself.
That’s when I realized B was also in the basement. Not even in some other part of the basement but sitting right there on the phone. My son had no clue that maybe this would be uncomfortable for me but then I realized, I felt nothing. I didn’t have to care anymore about him monitoring us or what text I would get after the call was over because we knew the score. He was the victor, my children the spoils.
B sounded exactly like he always had for as long as I had known him. He was using the same aggressive accusatory tone with whatever sad soul was trapped on the phone with him trying to give him customer service. Customer service to a narcissist is more like, do my bidding you minion. I have no idea what company he was talking to but the gist was he was unable to access an account of some kind. He tried to login online, he had the correct information, and now it was their fault and he was demanding that they fix it.
B always started at annoyed beyond measure. He’s not the type to give anyone the benefit of the doubt or to remember that this was just a job, not the person’s mission to lock him out of his online account for his etsy creation store, or his mattress store portal or whatever the fuck his entrepreneurial career was at the moment. But there it was. His voice. His level of annoyance. His arrogance. All the same. That’s when I could tell the cord had been cut. I didn’t have to care about him at all. I was so free from ever having to listen to these rants as his wife or be the one taking his bullshit as a co-parent. I only had to care about my kids which was stripped mostly of having to worry about his role in it.
Or so I thought. It was blissful for a short little while. Weeks went by without a peep from B and May. I was still drowning in grief but I was also learning to breathe again. Without B and May determining when it was I could come up for air. Then, right on schedule, they arrived with their wagon of chaos. Which Hank told me was a sign that things might not be going as well over there as they wanted me to believe. Then I found out why.