The Tortured (Single) Parents Department

Dispatches from the crying days.

I let myself take a crying walk for the first time in months. Maybe even a year. I used to take them regularly during the early stages of my divorce. But I hadn’t seemed to need one for a while. But today when my daughter and I shopped the aisles of Michael’s looking for supplies for a diorama project (not due until Wednesday! We are ahead of the game!), I could feel the pull of a pseudo-panic attack tugging at me.

“Pseudo” because I knew there was no way I would succumb to falling apart in public, and I’m pretty sure if you can control a panic attack it’s not actually a panic attack. But I felt a weight, an emptiness that had been inexplicably gnawing at me all day. I think I need to go home and take a shower and cry, I thought. I promised myself the release as though I was planning to indulge in a plate of late night chocolate chip cookies later.

But when I got in the shower, I felt numb and tears wouldn’t come. I was pissed off. I’m not one of those women who say they can’t cry anymore thanks to SSRIs. Pffft, please. Not sure what kind of heavy duty meds could ever knock the crying reflex out of this girl, but here I was. Hot water poured over me and I couldn’t fucking squeeze a teardrop. What kind of catharsis blue balls is this?

I had given up any hope of emotional release by the time I leashed up my dog to take a guilt-walk, but when I stepped outside, something imperceptibly shifted. Maybe the young couple jogging down my street with their ferocious looking dog glancing haplessly back at my pink-turtleneck-sweater clad sixteen-pound hypoallergenic dog going absolutely apeshit gave me a pang of low-grade humiliation. Look at them, all athletic with a sporty dog, and me, braless in my Coca-cola sweatpants with my designer rescue dog wheezing as she yanked the leash in pursuit of an animal who could literally eat her.

No, it wasn’t that—I really couldn’t care less about the spandex Millennials running effortlessly down the block. I think it was the particular grayness of the sky, the fact that it was colder than I expected. A crying walk, my body whispered to me. That’s what we need. A car turned onto my street and the driver smiled at me. He looked like one of my best friends from college, and the tears came quickly after that, in tandem with a longing to be the recipient of that familiar affection.

I felt the threat of another hypothetical panic attack, the telltale heaving breath warning me that if I wanted to, I could just sink back into it. I was not about to lose my shit on the side of this busy street, but I did let one audible sob escape as my breathing became deeper and faster.

I didn’t give one flying fuck who saw me. I needed to let it out, all of it.

How can I possibly be enough for these children? (I am, I am.) There is not enough of me to go around, not enough hands to hold the greedy demands of my daughters, my home, my body, my students, my work, my book. And there was absolutely nobody to hold me in this moment as I cautiously let myself unravel, safely outside the confines of my home. I walked past an ancient tree, its gnarled trunk half-buried in the ditch, and wanted to throw my arms around it, let my body sag against its roughness, hand it the entirety of my weight.

“I couldn’t stop retracing my steps.”

That’s how my current iteration of my query letter to literary agents begins. My oldest childhood habit has never left me—I cannot stop retracing my steps, following the trails I carefully left myself with breadcrumb memories as landmarks. As I try to pinpoint what’s brought me to this melancholy moment on a gloomy Sunday evening, I realize it’s anniversary season. Two years ago, the real unraveling began. Two years ago, there were six beating hearts under this roof and now there are three. The thought slams into me, stark in its simplicity; judgment or regret or relief aside, the realness of this fact makes my breath catch.

March 2023

On that mid-March day in 2023, the house flooded and I got on a plane to say goodbye to Nancy. Then came the anniversary of her death. Then the funeral. Still to come, looming in April, even more unraveling, quicker as the spool of thread binding my marriage together recklessly tumbles to the ground, faster than I can keep up with.

Soon will come the weeks we went through the boxes, the lies I could no longer tell myself, the final trip, the end, the end, the end. Safe in bed after my walk, I will morbidy look through pictures on my phone, searching my two-years ago face for clues. I am struck that exactly on this day in 2023, I was beginning my book-writing nostalgia pilgrimage with an unplanned, post-funeral visit to one of my childhood homes with my parents.

I feel the weight of this season grabbing my feet and pulling me under, once again whispering that it would be so easy to succumb. But I know there is no way that I will ever fall apart. I recognize my own somewhat unbelievable resilience with a sense of admiration, but the magnitude of my strength also fills me with exhaustion and rage.

My breathing evens out, my roadside weeping winding down with a series of ragged inhales like a baby at the end of a crying fit. I have turned around, I am heading back to my street. It is time to wrap this up. But then I feel another pang of loneliness hit me, wonder if I should call my mother, imagine calling her “Mama” as she answers the phone greeted by my sobs, even though I haven’t called her that since infancy.

The vulnerability of this vision inspires a fresh wave of tears, and I am oddly relieved that I get to cry some more. I am grateful for another round, my brief reprieve nothing more than last week’s false spring. It’s not quite over yet. I decide to walk a bit longer, skipping every song on my playlist except the saddest Taylor Swift tracks. Mostly only folkore and Tortured Poets Department songs make the cut.

I let myself walk backward through time, mentally retracing the two-years-ago anniversaries, anticipate the upcoming series that will strike over the next two months, understanding I will allow myself to sink into the depths once they arrive, also knowing I will never ever allow myself to get stuck in it. There is too much at stake.

My spring 2023 photo search shows me that yes, two years ago, the post-flood purge was beginning—my camera reel is full of old photographs I found in bins from the basement juxtaposed with me donning rediscovered tiaras tucked away from the princess era.

I cry for my girls’ trauma and mine, for everything that was lost, for the maiden/mother who got us into this mess in the first place, for the truest essence of me who gave herself away in large ways and small. I cry for everything that was found, too. For the redemption and reclamation and remembering. For all that I’ve learned and gained. I cry with regret and rage and gratitude and power.

As I walk, I remember a haiku I wrote in the early divorce weeks:

My life in three parts
Does every woman do this?
Wild / un-wild / re-wild

We’ve been talking about the wild woman archetype in my writing circle, how she weaves her way into every stage of life, potentially going dormant in motherhood but never really disappearing. The wild woman is the true north that I have carried with me always; perhaps she carries me now, whispering to me of my own power.

As I turn again for home, I am inhaling and exhaling deeply through my mouth, somehow both sated and exhilarated. My crying is a gift—not something to be afraid of or a marker of instability like many of my former partners have claimed. My ability to feel deeply, to name and metabolize and grieve and express, has allowed me to release what I’ve been carrying—this pervasive burden that has been homeless and adrift. Taylor sings me home:

I didn't have it in myself to go with grace
And so the battleships will sink beneath the waves
You had to kill me, but it killed you just the same
Cursing my name, wishing I stayed
You turned into your worst fears
And you're tossing out blame, drunk on this pain
Crossing out the good years
And you're cursing my name, wishing I stayed
Look at how my tears ricochet

XO,
Steph

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