You’ve Been Served
Melissa Giberson
Painting by Naomi Koffman
Word Count 975
It’s 1978, I’m ten-years-old. One day I wake up to find that life has completely changed. There’s yelling when previously there was none. Objects, like hot hair rollers, are thrown across the room. There’s a suicide attempt from the living room window. I watch both my parents leave the house without saying anything and I wonder if anyone is coming back. The beginning of my parents’ divorce is the end of my childhood.
By eleven years old I’ve learned divorce is a gateway to bad shit, like men coming into my house to date my mom but really, they’re more into me. Divorce is the welcome mat to comments like, “You’re so pretty, one day men will chase you with a mattress tied to their back and a club in their hand.” Divorce is when a forty-something-year-old guy, hired to fix the bathroom shower, shoves his tongue in my unsuspecting mouth while taking advantage of my curiosity to see what he’s doing. Left alone in the house with him, I hide in the closet under the stairs holding my breath lest he hear me because I can hear him calling my name. Worried my pounding heart will reveal my refuge, I go outside. I see him watching me through the tiny window in the shower he’s being paid to fix. He’s on the second floor, and I’m on the patch of grass between mine and my neighbors house, but he might as well be pressed against me in a crowded elevator for how his eyes feel on me. I’m not out of middle school but I know divorce is dangerous and leads to all kinds of bad stuff.
I’m twenty-four years old and engaged to a great guy, that’s what everyone says. My fiancé is handsome, well-mannered, and respectfully employed. His parents are happily married, a novelty for me, and I have no doubt he’ll be a good provider for me and the kids. Sitting on the steps in a converted house in which I now work as a social worker, helping troubled teenagers, I confide to my office manager, a motherly woman twice my age, that I’m afraid to get married because I’m afraid to get divorced. She talks me down from the ledge, says it’s nerves. She’s a guest at my wedding the following year.
Twenty years go by. I experience my first same sex attraction and wrestle with whether I’m gay, trying to convince myself I can’t be, I’m married to a man and we have two children.
My husband is supportive, I don’t think he was surprised. We employ an in-home separation for eleven months before he moves out. It’s surreal, we’ve lived together for over two decades. Who am I without him? Divorce is inconceivable. Lurking in my subconscious are the ghosts of my childhood trauma. I don’t consciously think these things, but they hold me hostage and I prioritise keeping my children from experiencing anything remotely similar. We agree not to legally divorce. The kids need consistency more than ever. Our separation is agreeable and we specify our intentions in a notarized document that includes a provision to seek the most amicable and economical means, like mediation, when the time comes to legally dissolve our marriage.
I’m forty-six years old. My husband is no longer supportive. He sees the kids less than when he first moved out, has become unreliable, and less communicative. I focus on the kids and hold onto my dream that he’ll come around and we’ll resume co-parenting, the kids need this from us. I’m a mama bear fighting to keep my experience of a contentious divorce as far away from them as possible. In my husband I see signs of my father, with whom I’ve had an inconsistent, sometimes nonexistent, relationship since I was a teenager. The tape in my head tells me fathers leave and this can’t happen to my kids, they need their dad. I need him. It’s the morning of Rosh Hashana. My daughter is studying abroad and my son and I prepare to go to temple. I step out onto the driveway. A man I don’t know crosses my front lawn and says my name. I acknowledge him and he hands me an envelope. I’ve just been served divorce papers. I’m silent but turn ghostly white, feeling the blood drain from me. It’s the only activity in my otherwise paralyzed state. The man asks if I’m okay but simultaneously says, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” He walks back to his car and I wonder how long he’s been sitting there, waiting for me to step outside.
I feel violated, like eleven-year-old me being watched from the bathroom window. For the next few years, I will experience the residual effects of this trauma whenever there’s a strange car parked outside my house. Before it subsides, it will manifest as an increased heart rate, a sour stomach, and perspiration the moment I step outside or round the curve of my street putting my driveway into view.
I’m forty-nine years old and officially divorced, wearing the label I have feared since adolescence. Despite the court’s urging to maintain communication, my ex-husband will not co-parent with me and remains on the periphery of the kids’ lives. I failed to keep this albatross from them. My worst fears have been realised. My kids know the same trauma of living through a factious divorce and having parents who don’t speak to one another. There are no shared holidays or celebrations. Milestones are crossed without their dad’s participation: college shopping, high school graduations, and college freshman move-in days, are all performed without him. There’s a loss with each one. It wasn’t only me, but it was my long-held fear and they got hurt on my watch. Grief has moved in, residing within me.
Melissa is an occupational therapist and an emerging writer with published articles in Kveller and Highly Sensitive Refuge. She is the author of an anticipated memoir about her journey with a late in life sexual awakening and the subsequent journeys through grief, loss, love, and self-acceptance. She is the proud mom of two children and shares homes in New Jersey and Provincetown, Massachusetts with her partner and their two cats.