My life is the most unusual thing. I spent four days last week being married again and raising my kids in the old family home. I had gone for a quick one day visit to see my sixteen year old daughter, who lives with her father in Virginia, and thought I would save money and stay at my ex-husband’s house (the same house we all lived in together). He and I get along well enough for that; we were, after all, friends for eight years before we dated and then married.
There was a sudden death in the family, the beloved husband of my ex-mother-in-law, a stellar person whom my kids adored as if he’d been their blood grandpa from birth instead of a late-in-life addition to the family. I’m a big believer in funerals, so I stayed three more nights and left right after the funeral. My son came down from Washington, D.C. and all we were missing to be one big happy family again was my daughter who is living in South Korea teaching English. We had plenty of conversations with her on FaceTime, passing the phone around (“Hold On, Here’s Mom;” a little while later, “O.K., here’s Dad”), and from the outside you never would have known that this little family was asunder.
I was surrounded by loving people, woke up in a house every day that contained other people who cared about me. And like a steak taken out of the freezer to thaw, I began to soften, to interact, where before I was a solitary thing, speaking when spoken to but not initiating much. It’s the trap that waits for an introvert who gets divorced, falling out of the habit of easy discourse, falling back into oneself instead of projecting out into the world.
I came back home to Atlanta with only my dog and cat waiting to keep me company, and I felt the shift deeply, from many back to one, from a surfeit of warmth back home to my lonely apartment. My therapist has spent a great deal of time hammering into me the difference between being lonely and being alone, but I am not sure it ever took. I am an introvert who loves people, who struggles to put myself out there so I can be loved. I realized after the trip that I have stopped pushing myself to reach out, that I have given it up in favor of what feels comfortable. I don’t like being alone, but neither do I like driving by myself to events peopled with lonely souls like myself who are looking to “meet up” and end their loneliness. It seems too forced, too obvious, and my affinity has always been to life’s subtleties.
I have no immediate answer for this one. I suppose I’ll bestir myself when I get sick enough of being on my own. But I did enjoy being married again for a while.