I Got Everything New

One of the great pleasures of my life was buying a house on my own after my divorce. Picking it out by myself. Asking only myself what I wanted or didn’t want. And then picking out furniture for every room all by myself. Then decorating it with photos and artwork that I mostly created myself. After a thirty-year marriage where the boundaries between me and him had been blurred, I still sometimes am left wondering who I am and how I so thoroughly lost myself. I still ask a lot of questions about what I actually like and dislike. I still find myself surprised to discover that things I thought I knew about myself either were wrong or have changed in the intervening years since I last decided on that.

I care a lot less about my house looking like it came out of a decorating magazine and a lot more about it looking like it is mine. I do a lot of crocheting and knitting and a number of my walls are covered with creations I’ve made with my own hands. If there are any walls uncovered, or beds uncovered, give me time—I’ll have something up there soon. I may start on the ceilings, too.

In my bedroom, there are over two hundred race medals hanging on eight different medal racks. I never put these up in my marital home. You can decide what you think that means. But to me now, I put them up to celebrate myself, to remind myself that I can do incredible, impossible things. That I used to be a kid who hated P.E. and who no one wanted on the team. I used to be unable to run a mile without collapsing. And now I can move my body in a lot of ways I never could before. I’m strong and tough and I’m proud of that.

I have what I consider to be the perfect kitchen, granite countertops and not too many shelves I can’t reach without a stool (or climbing onto the counter). I’m an adequate cook and I can make healthy, inexpensive food quickly. But I’m a really good baker and my dinner rolls are practically perfect (most of the time), plus my cakes, cookies, and brownies are great. If you come over to eat sometime, enjoy what I have. If you ask for a recipe, well, that’s a bit of a family joke because I don’t cook by recipe. Like, ever. I have a constitutional inability to follow directions exactly. I have to make some kind of innovation.

And then there’s my porch swing, which I bought for myself for my fiftieth birthday, which came, as it turned out, four days after I was asked to live the marital home. I still like sitting on that swing and breathing deeply, sometimes closing my eyes and remembering how much little kid Mette loved swings. So much I would sometimes make myself sick on them, swinging until I threw up because the motion was so delicious. Part of my new life is actually looking back, way far back, to who I was in the beginning, the person I forgot and tried to push away because I was so busy growing up.

I have my books up, too. The bookshelves with my books on them are in the living room right off the front door, along with framed pictures of most of my book covers. I’m proud of my books, every damned one of them. They cost me as many scars as my race medals have. They may well have ended my marriage. And yet, I survived. I won’t say I’m thriving. But I’m here. I’m still kicking and screaming.