Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me.... I once was lost but now am found Was blind, but now, I see.
A month or so before my divorce is final, I find myself singing Amazing Grace over the phone to my new love. I'm singing. I'm playing the guitar. These are things I've not done in thirty years. He is three-thousand miles away and it's his birthday. I'm filled with such gratitude for him and what he has awakened in me that the words from the hymn now symbolize what has happened in my heart. My scarlet letter glitters with what I take to be long-forgotten joy. When I call, I know I need not worry about disturbing his wife or their three-year-old daughter, because he has recently moved out and is staying down the street with his mother. He'll move in with me in a couple of months, after my divorce.
Meanwhile my soon-to-be-ex-husband "Sam" has our two young boys down the street at my mother's house on a daddy-time sleep-over. Over the last months the chaos and pain between us has grown. Each without the other, we've been taking the boys down to Grandma's for sleep overs, and have slept in separate beds for the last two months. All this to avoid the physical closeness that we once trusted...that had endured for the previous fifteen years. Now, time alone together bears a gamut of unsavory possibilities: from unexamined indifference to crushing pain.
[And also, I spoke of the guitar?]
Nine months earlier, when I'd met my "soul mate," this man I'm now serenading, his presence brought all my doubts about my marriage into sharp focus. Alas, we met during a very trying personal time for me and my marriage. For many and varying reasons our marriage had already fallen prey to a classic suite of divorce harbingers that my husband and I didn't see. Further, for many years, a niggling little part of me had worried that I had married the wrong person. So when I met "Joe," who was likewise plagued by doubts in his marriage, our easy camaraderie reminded us, wham, of the things that weren't working at home. We had met and been together for only a few days at a workshop, but those few days changed everything. We told ourselves we'd fallen in love...the kind of love that transcends, um, things.
[By the way, Joe sang and played the guitar like a true artist...and oh boy, he could croon me right to the moon. But, come to think of it, so did Michael Jackson when I was ten.]
We never cheated and we were honest from the beginning with our respective spouses. But doubts and fears rode strong in both our marriages, and they, along with the army of infatuation hormones that had invaded our bodies and brains, executed an incursion. Our marriages fell.
[Then I didn't feel like singing anymore.]
It wasn't until much later that I realized that Joe had been a pretense to let our marriage go. That we could have just as easily let our various marital disgruntlements force its collapse. I began to see that the whole thing had been a kind of agonizing ruse distracting us from the overwhelming but obscured hunger we'd had to reinvigorate our marriage; to find each other again after the turmoil and misunderstandings wrought through all the years of babies, jobs, challenges, and life itself.
That's when I began to suspect there was something mysterious, hallowed even, for us to learn from our divorce. And that was when the real grace kicked in.
T'was Grace that taught... my heart to fear. And Grace, my fears relieved. How precious did that Grace appear... the hour I first believed.
Norman Rockwell
This Thanksgiving, almost three years after I asked Joe to move out, my once-ex-husband and I will sit down together at a table overflowing with family and friends. We are among a growing contingent of pilgrims who have divorced then remarried their ex-spouse. We'll sit at a walnut table, recently procured together for just these sorts of gatherings. It has three leaves and extends to ten feet, sitting twelve. We celebrate all the time now, beckoning friends, children, family, and food to our table. We know what it's like--for us and our children--to be divorced at Thanksgiving. These days we bow down with good fortune.
When I lift my glass to his this Thanksgiving, our eyes will meet...and in our glance will be a thousand joys and sorrows between us, a history and a bond that can never be replaced. We will see our children in each other's eyes, and they, singing Star Wars in the background, will thrive in our togetherness. Best of all, we will rest in the newly-understood safe harbor of our love--knowing it is from here that we move ourselves and the world.
[And my guitar? It's going to stay in the closet that day. We'll be way too busy making our own special music... and that trumps the strings off any guitar.]
