The Day I Said "I Do," He Left To Take A Nap

I wasn’t planning on sharing this today… or any other day for that matter.

But I needed this to pass through me today and release it.

So thank you, Karen, at Saved by Grace, for going first and inviting me to sit down and write what I would have rather kept buried.

I didn’t even remember the buried memory about my own wedding day until this week, when my ex-husband is set to remarry.

And I have never told a soul what happened on my wedding day except my new husband, but I am guessing many at the wedding also knew but never said anything directly to me.

What I know as a therapist, and what I would tell anyone who seeks me for counsel, is that when a memory keeps resurfacing and is stirring in your heart, pay attention.

Stop pushing away the hard feelings and sit with the discomfort. Ask what it is here to teach you. Give it safe passage through your body and release it.

So since I am building this Substack on midlife identity and the shifts that take place, I am going to do it in real time with a memory that is difficult for me to write about, one I had buried for so long until this week, which would not be ignored.

At the end, I am going to give you an exercise that I have done in the past and continue to do, as I honor, release, and give grace to the younger me who didn’t know the things the older me now knows (as well as the things I am still figuring out).

It was the day I said “I do” that I realized I was not actually chosen in return.

My then-husband disappeared from our wedding reception for over an hour.

Not a fight. Not a scene. He walked back to the hotel room and decided to take a nap, while I stood in a room full of people eating dinner, wondering where my new husband had gone. It was his sister who found him. She marched him back into his own wedding and told him, in no uncertain terms, to get back out there.

I didn’t know it yet, but that was the first flag. Not the reddest one. Not even close. Just the first.

Sixteen years later, that same sister would sit across from me and say she could not “continue to watch me be treated like this.” That it was time for me to leave.

When your sister-in-law is the one telling you it’s time to go, it is well past time to go.

Today, that man is getting remarried.

I like his fiancée. That’s the part I wasn’t expecting to have to sit with.

She’s smart. Warm. Tall in that effortless way I’ve never had access to. When I met her, my honest first thought wasn’t dread. It was something closer to oh. Of course. That makes sense. They fit together in a way we never quite did, and as a therapist, I can clearly see that this is good for him. Which means it’s good for our kids. Which is, by a wide margin, the thing that matters most.

So why do I feel like I’m standing on the edge of something, watching a party I wasn’t invited to?

I’ve spent years telling people that stepparents are just more adults to love your children. I believe that fully. I have also, if I’m honest, been the one who found love again first. I have a husband now who is steady and kind, and I do not for one second wish I were still married to my ex. None of this is about wanting him back.

It’s about watching someone else quietly move into a role I used to live, but it is also a reminder of my shame of not being chosen on what was supposed to be the most important day of my life.

To be left in a room of people all whispering and asking the same question my then sister-in-law asked out loud: “Where the hell is he?”

Here’s what I didn’t expect, and what none of my training warned me about: it took our entire marriage for me to understand what I was worth. Two decades of slowly gathering the evidence, piece by piece, until I finally had enough to leave. And now I’m watching him proclaim “worth it” with someone who never had to teach him.

That’s not about her. I want to be clear about that, mostly to myself. That’s an old wound, wearing a new dress to somebody else’s wedding.

There’s a name for what I’ve been circling, chewing on, wrestling with, and finally am writing about, and understanding it helped more than I expected.

It’s called disenfranchised grief. The term belongs to the researcher Kenneth Doka, and it describes a specific kind of loss: one that doesn’t fit the template we’ve all agreed to recognize. Nobody brings a casserole for the ex-wife when her ex-husband remarries. There’s no card for this. No ritual. By every visible measure, I am supposed to feel nothing but relief, or at most a polite, distant goodwill.

But grief doesn’t check whether it has permission.

What I’m grieving isn’t him. It’s the role. For a long time I was wife of. I was the one who hosted the holidays, who knew which cousin was allergic to what, who existed inside a particular family constellation with a particular seat at the table. That role didn’t just end when the marriage did. It’s being inherited. Someone else is moving into it, and some part of me is standing outside, watching the lights come on for a party that’s still going, just without me in it.

But it is also the wound of my own shame of not being “worthy” of staying awake for.

To pretend I didn’t notice. To dance with the kids on the dance floor as the DJ waited for the sign of his return to start the “first dance” song. To hold back the tears of shame of being left alone on my wedding day in front of hundreds of witnesses.

I wasn’t left at the altar, but at the party. I am not sure which is worse.

I learned that day what I would have to do for the next eighteen years… trying to explain away behavior I didn’t understand, quietly tucking my disappointment and base-level desire for respect under my arm. To not ask for too much. To always “turn the other cheek”.

This day. His wedding day is reminding me of the girl who used to believe she didn’t deserve any better.

And that’s what’s hard.

That is what I am grieving…the younger me who didn’t know her worth.

Because I know my value now to my bones.

And so should you.

A new love and a new life built on these principles is what I have now, so I am grateful for the lessons because I love my life and the man I share it with. When I fully understood my worth, this new love who also knew it and knew how to hold it arrived.

But that took some work.

Jung had a word for the self we build to move through the world, the socially legible version of who we are. He called it the persona. It isn’t fake. It’s real work, built over years, worn into shape by repetition. And personas, it turns out, don’t dissolve cleanly. They can be handed off. Someone else picks up the name, the seat, the role, and keeps walking.

I am not being replaced as a person. A role I spent twenty years building is being occupied by someone new, and the little girl who questioned her value resurfaced. My nervous system, understandably, cannot tell the difference.

I write about midlife identity, about the unbecoming and rebuilding that happens in this decade of life. I have never once written about this particular version of it: watching someone else step into an identity you used to wear. The wife of. The namesake.

I wonder if she’ll take his name.

I kept it because it was the same name as my children, and that shaped the woman I am today.

Now there might be two of us.

I thought I’d done the work here. Mostly, I have. But grief has a way of finding the one door you left unlocked, and walking right through it dressed as someone else’s wedding.

For her sake, I hope he stays awake.

So here is an exercise you can do if there is a part of your past you want to forgive and let go of the shame attached to it. To feel the emotions, to honor who you were, and to give grace to all the parts of you that have you here now. They are all valuable pieces of the puzzle that make you uniquely and beautifully you.

Before you begin, find the memory. Let it surface fully, not just the facts of it but the feeling. Let yourself feel whatever comes.

1. Notice where it lives in your body. The belly, the throat, the chest, the jaw. Just notice it. You don’t need to fix it or push it away, just locate it.

2. Take a few deep breaths. Lengthen the exhale a little longer than the inhale. This is how you tell your nervous system, in a language older than words, that you are safe now. That this is memory, not danger.

3. When you feel steady enough to hold the memory without being flooded by it, take out paper, an actual pen if you can. Find that version of yourself at the moment shame took root. Not the whole marriage, not the whole decade. One scene. The one that still has a pulse when you touch it.

Write to her directly, by name if that feels right. Not about her. To her.

Tell her what you know now that she couldn’t have known then. Not to excuse what happened to her, but to place it. She was doing the best she could with the evidence she had, and she hadn’t gathered enough of it yet.

A few prompts, if the blank page feels too wide:

• What were you afraid would happen if you asked for more?

• What did you believe you had to earn, that you actually already deserved?

• What would I want you to know, right now, before you spend one more year believing the smaller version of the story?

Write until it stops feeling like performance and starts feeling like something is loosening. You’ll know the difference. One reads like a therapy homework assignment. The other reads like relief.

Then, if you can, read it out loud. Something changes when shame is spoken instead of just written. It was built in silence. It doesn’t survive contact with a voice.

Tell her she was worthy then, too. Not worthy later, once she learned better, once she left, once she gathered enough evidence to finally believe it. Worthy the whole time, even standing in that room straining to hear where everyone went. The worth was never the thing in question. Only her ability to see it clearly yet.

With love, gratitude, peace, and finding all the reasons to choose myself and knowing my worth today and always,

Jada

P.S. If this piece stirred something you haven't looked at in a while, that's worth paying attention to. The Bridge, one of the resources inside The Practice for paid subscribers, is built for exactly this: doing the deeper work of naming what a role cost you, and what's actually yours to keep.

P.P.S. Please share with the person in your life you know could benefit from reading this. Leave me a comment and let me know what lands for you.

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*One other thing… I am going to start adding paid member posts, so stay tuned for those!