Part 3

The Honeymoon's Over; True Stories of Love, Marriage, and Divorce
by Andrea Chapin, Sally Wofford-Girand

(Page 3 of 3)

You are divorced. The lawyer is making phone calls, writing papers that will take months to finalize, but that doesn't matter. You take off your wedding band; there is no white mark where the ring was. No band of light. Nothing.

The Alabama lawyer has an Alabama vendetta with Jesse's father. He takes the case for free and tracks Jesse down at his brother's health food store. Yes, the boy is with him. Call him now. Tell him you want the boy home and maybe we can make this easy.

With your Irish girlfriend holding the baby girl in the Tuscaloosa Ramada Inn, you call Jesse. But he thinks you're in Boulder. He thinks you're cold cereal, not a woman who will force him to appear in court within two hours, who will ignore his pleas to TALK TO ME and stand in that To Kill a Mockingbird courtroom under that slow ceiling fan with bubba judge leaning over you from a high, high place, baby girl in your arms. Listen to these words I'm saying.

Bubba gives you temporary custody of the boy, and Jesse has visitation rights. Back in Colorado, you will keep a journal of his caretaking for a year.

1. He brought the girl home sans diaper.

2. He took the children to a mortuary so they could visit death.

3. No naps.

All things are equal in the journal, and your careful handwriting proves you are the sane parent. Something has bent and turned inside you, but emotions cost. Emotions are expensive. You make a living, banish diaper rash, read the kids Maurice Sendak like you were trying out for the role. The children laugh, you win.

In the meantime you meet the man who should have been their father, who to this day is their father. A gentle, Ron Howard of a man who will testify at the custody hearing with such nervous sincerity, he will swear to tell the truth by raising his left hand, then his right, then his left.

During a break, Jesse grabs your arm.

"I'll cut you a deal," he says. "You don't ask me for money, I'll give up the parental rights. I won't bother you again."

For the first time, he keeps his word.

He never sees his children until they're old enough to make plane reservations on their own. They come home quiet. Your son puts his arm around you. Your daughter starts a journal. They ask you why.

Why, Mom?

You didn't know then, you don't know now. Not really. A kingdom, a band of light, the determination to live in a world you made up, Daydreamer. Of course, you don't tell the children these things. You look at their faces and have nothing lofty to give them.

Walt, who should have been their father, with his good-smelling skin, says, "Nobody loves you more than me and your mom." He tells the children he will never leave them, and he does not.

You try talking divorce with other divorced women who complain about their husbands' sins. Emotional unavailability. Lack of financial support. Toilet seat up. You don't say much, but even back then, you know where the funny parts are. Garbage. Can you imagine? Ha ha ha. You don't have the heart to unleash an incomprehensible new age sociopathic circus on women with good sweaters, let alone your children.

You become known as a risk taker, an entrepreneur who can make a million-dollar business out of 350 bucks and her kitchen table. You are in a Forbes cover story for this feat, which you stop cold to begin writing at forty. Nobody sells a first novel, plus you're old. Novel in the drawer, novel under the bed, they don't know who you are. You are elaborate with reasoning. Unstoppable. The children will never know poor.

The day of garbage is a time you rarely visit. Those were busy days, life arrangements that lasted decades. And you almost made it dry until last year, that car accident in Maine, T-boned by a truck on icy old Route 46.

You don't remember anything but the sound of your daughter crying in a strange room that has nothing to do with time. You don't know what happened. You ask her why she's crying. She tells you she's afraid she can't take care of you the way you've taken care of her.

She's twenty-nine; your son is thirty. Here they are, those children who waited until they were past eighteen to meet their father, still a guru. Those children who stopped asking about their dad and started asking how you pulled together a life they remember as mostly decent.

You're cracked up bad from the inside. Hangman's fracture, they tell you, fastest way to get out of this world.

They tell you so many times that you shouldn't have walked away from this accident - you're ready to offer up apologies. Anyway, you're not looking for a way out of the world anymore.

They rig you up in a somi brace, neck to ribs, for six immobile months. In the end you'll be okay, you'll be fine, but somewhere around the third month, you start weeping and don't stop until you get to that whorl of a marriage, the dreamy girl you were, the shoulder-padded woman you became. You weep until you don't anymore, and you begin to move again.

Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

© 2007 by Sally Wofford-Girand and Andrea Chapin

About the Author

has been an editor at art, movie, theater and literary magazines, including The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Translation and The New Theater Review. She has lived and worked in Mexico and Spain and acted professionally in Germany in a thirty-six city tour of Edward Albee's Seascape. Her fiction has appeared in literary journals, and her articles and essays have appeared in magazines such as More, Self, Redbook and Martha Stewart Living as well as several anthologies, including The Day My Father Died and Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty. She teaches writing at New York University and lives in New York City with her husband and their two sons.

Sally Wofford-Girand is a literary agent and founder of Brick House Literary Agents. She worked on Wall Street before seeking refuge in book publishing. She is a member of the international rights committee of the AAR and a board member of Ledig House, an international writers colony in New York State. She lives in New York City with her husband and their three children.