You Can't Go Back
It has been just over five years since I started what I called a “sabbatical” at the time, with the intention to take a year off attending Mormon church services. It has been over three years since my now ex-husband woke up one morning and demanded that I be out of the house to begin a “separation” by the time he got home from work. I later found out that he had filed for divorce without telling me.
This Substack is called “Kicking and Screaming” because I am still struggling to make sense of and to enjoy my new life. It isn’t what I wanted. It isn’t what I chose. There have been choices along the way, and things have gotten better. I don’t spend every minute of every day wishing this hadn’t happened to me like I did the first year. Most days are a mix of good and bad, just like the days before, like everyone’s days, I suspect. But I still wish I could go back, to the Mormonism I loved in my twenties and thirties, and to the marriage at its best when we believed that it was “eternal” and that we couldn’t possibly stop loving each other.
I sometimes make a list of things I have lost as a result of the abyss I fell into following my daughter’s death. I lost faith in a God who loved me and would never allow bad things to happen to me if I only followed the long list of rules that Mormonism preaches. I lost so many friends and family, probably eighty percent of the people I once knew and thought of as the foundation of my life. Some of them still flicker around the edges. Some are gone for good. I lost my marriage, my sense of self, my will to live much of the time, my career as a full-time novelist, and my financial stability.
When I write it out like that, it seems obvious why I want to go back. I want to have not lost those things. Who likes losing things? Maybe it has taken me longer with my autism to accept the promises of a new life. There are things I enjoy on this side. I like being financially independent. I like doing my job well and getting feedback from my boss that I’m improving. I like being in control of my financial stability, something that I never experienced as a writer. I like owning my own home and choosing how to decorate it all by myself. I am slowly learning to enjoy a different sense of “family” with my adult children who don’t necessarily care about all coming to spend time with me all together. I’m also rebuilding a sense of community around friends who have connected me on this side of the divide.
But I sometimes go back to the church shown here in this photo. It’s not a place of community. It’s not the space where I lost everything, where people know me. When I show up there, it is anonymously. I wear one of the new dresses I bought after I threw out every single item of clothing I’d ever worn to church in the purge days of the divorce. I sit by myself in the back row, far away from the front row seats my now ex-husband insisted on for the thirty years we were married, and which he began to refuse to sit next to me in during that last year before the sabbatical. I sing songs—loudly—that I may or may not believe in anymore. I try to feel at home here and never succeed quite in doing. I often have to play on my phone to distract myself from the same damaging messages about unworthiness and the “covenant path” that sent me on the sabbatical in the first place.
Why would I go back there? Because I miss it. Yes, it damaged me. And yes, I also miss it. I’m allowed to hold these contradictory feelings at the same time.
It’s not as possible with my marriage to go back to anything like what it was, even in the worst days. Most of the last three years, the only time I’ve seen my now ex-husband was in court. Then after that was finally over, I was able to attend events for our children with him. I have managed to sit at a restaurant while he slips back into the role of father (but not husband) as long as I keep my mouth shut and do not try to really participate in the conversation. I suppose this isn’t actually that much different from going back to church and only singing along until I have to leave early.
I am supposed to be a grown up, but I am sometimes still a child, sticking her thumb in her mouth, pulling a blanket over my head, and pretending for a little while that things are the way I need them to be in order to want to keep breathing, eating, sleeping, and working. Life has become a set of tasks to be endured rather than something whole and good. I do at least have hope again that in the future, I will be glad that I went through this and got to the other side. There is another side somewhere out there, isn’t there/