The women I was
On making peace with the past.
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In March of 2020, a woman packed a bag and boarded a flight. As Covid closed the borders, she left her home and husband in Nairobi and returned to her parents in North Carolina. It was temporary, she told herself, until this Covid thing blew over.
She used her husband’s credit card to book the flight. He upgraded her seat like he always did. She sat in the exit row and stared out the window as the sun rose pink on a sea of clouds, stunned to find herself alone on an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean.
She didn’t know then that it was the first day of spring, that far below the earth was tipping toward the light. She didn’t know yet that she was leaving her marriage. But when she packed, she left her wedding rings behind.
Spring 2021
A year later I was no longer married but not yet divorced. I wanted to mark the first anniversary of my new life, but what do you get for a not-quite-wife?
Back when I was married, I bought traditional wedding anniversary gifts—paper for year one, metal for year 10—because I found the rules reassuring. Marriage was a marathon, it seemed to me then, and the goal was just to keep going. But there are no traditions for divorce, no Hallmark cards for complicated grief or registries for rebirth. We honor long marriages, no matter how miserable, but not the courage it takes to make a change.
I decided to invent my own traditions and throw an anti-versary party. For my paper gift, I bought myself a cactus piñata and stuffed it dollar store treasures like ring pops and Mardi Gras beads and llama tattoos. This felt both whimsical and satisfyingly subversive. Emboldened, I strung my patio with streamers and giant paper flowers. Friends bought a cake topped with pale pink roses. I smashed the piñata, blindfolded and barefoot in the warm spring sun, unleashing the sweetness inside.
It was not a celebration so much as a declaration: this rebirth was worth marking. It was the first party I ever threw for myself.
Spring 2022
By my second spring, my divorce was final. For the first time since I was 26, I was bound to no one.
Yet my dreams betrayed me. Night after night, I dreamed of the day I left. I was back in my Nairobi home office, heart pounding, slipping precious things into my suitcase. I knew, in the urgent way of dreams, that I had to make it to the plane. But I never did. My ex would always appear and accuse me of abandoning him. “You cannot leave,” he’d cry. “What will happen to me?” I’d freeze in shame and wake up sweating.
To abandon something means to cease looking after it, to forsake, to leave to a terrible fate. We condemn a mother who abandons her children because they are helpless without her. In my dreams, I leveled that charge against myself: I had left him when he needed me most.
But there is also an older meaning of the word: to relinquish control or to end an attempt. We can abandon hope or pretense. We can abandon a fruitless quest. My marriage had long been ill and I could not will it well.
One night, in my dream, I heard myself reply to his cries. “You cannot keep me here,” I told him. “I am not responsible for your happiness.” I woke up smiling. Even Dream Liz knew she was divorced.
Spring 2023
By my third spring, I was ready to dip my toes into the dating pool. By chance, I started seeing my neighborhood pharmacist. One day he bought me a candle with my birth sign. He’d looked up my birthday in the pharmacy computer, a romantic misuse of medical information. There was just one problem: there were two birthdays linked to my name in the system.
“Which birthday is yours?” he asked.
“One of those is mine,” I said, “And one of those is my ex-husband’s.”
“I’ve made a terrible mistake,” he said. “I will not be giving you the candle.”
In the early days of dating, there were four people in our relationship: the two of us and our exes. We were always comparing each other to what we knew before. She would always. He would never. We didn’t want to rehash the past, but we couldn’t help it. Loving them was how we knew ourselves.
“You reach for me in your sleep when I get up at night to get a glass of water,” he said one morning. “Do you think that I’m not coming back?” How could I explain that I spent my marriage reaching? That I woke up alone after my wedding night because my ex had stayed up partying and never came to bed?
These exchanges made me angry. Of course my pharmacist was coming back to bed. Yes, it could be that easy. No, it never had to be so hard. Building a healthy relationship after an unhealthy one means holding these two truths side by side.
Spring 2024
When you start dating, you give your suitors pseudonyms—the Pharmacist, the Brazilian, the Composer—until they prove themselves worthy. It’s a game but also armor. If a pharmacist flakes, you can always find a new pharmacy. If you don’t let people in, they can’t let you down.
During my divorce, I referred to my ex as the Trash Panda. If my divorce was a dumpster fire, he was a raccoon picking through the scraps. It’s unkind, I know, but so is divorce. I couldn’t bear to battle the person I’d once loved most, so I fought a raccoon.
Then, a few weeks ago, an old friend came to visit. We had met in Nairobi, and we swapped stories from my married era. We spoke of the parties my ex and I had thrown and the house we had built. “You’re different,” she said afterwards, “you use his name again.”
I was surprised to find that she was right. Sometime in the last spin around the sun, I had laid my armor down. The Pharmacist had become my partner, someone I planned to love for life. The Trash Panda had become a man who was once my husband, someone I married too young and loved until I couldn’t anymore. The dumpster fire had burned itself out.
When news of my divorce first spread in my family, a kind uncle reached out to me. Divorce, he said, was like a book falling off a shelf. At first you lay there, cracked open to the world. In time, the book closes. Eventually, you put it back on the shelf.
I didn’t know what he meant then, but I do now. My divorce no longer lives in my bones. It has become a chapter in my story, the fulcrum between my old life and my new. On the first day of spring, I started tipping towards the light.
One of the unexpected joys of starting over has been hearing from others on similar journeys. If something resonates with you, I’d love for you to leave a comment, drop me an email or share a post with a friend!
Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.
Other posts in grief:
You can always come home
I packed a carry-on, seventeen long years reduced to a single suitcase, and boarded one of the last flights out before the Kenyan borders closed. I didn’t know yet that the call with my father would divide my life into before-and-after, but I think about it all the time now.
I loved reading this, Liz! Amazing new starts deserve this kind of pausing and note-taking ✨
Co-incidentally, I too am a comms professional and writer! So glad to run into you (virtually). Looking forward to reading more of your work 🎊
Love this ❤️ I was at a retreat in January meeting new people and someone referred to my husband as “my second husband”. I was so shocked because I have never thought of him this way - ever! But I have thought of myself as “a divorced woman”. Luckily for me too that label has gone far, far away. ✨ it’s so good to let go of these stories.