Divorce as a Birth Canal

As our first mediation day loomed heavy on my calendar, I found myself trying to crawl my way back up the proverbial birth canal, in an attempt to avoid this seismic transition of birthing a new iteration of our co-parenting partnership into the world.

In birth, there’s that moment just before transition, when your legs shake and your whole body contracts at an intensity you’ve never felt and you feel like you might vomit, where you might try negotiating with the universe. Never mind! you might think. Maybe this baby can just stay right where they’re at—even if they’re too big, even if their container no longer fits.

Logically, you know somewhere in your depths that’s actually impossible. But reckoning with the transition before you feels somehow more impossible, so you negotiate with the universe anyway.

To be fair, my co-parent and I have already been birthing a new way of living together into the world for over a year, practicing new communication norms, financial frameworks, childcare schedules. But this moment of transition we’re about to face—of trying to fit that non-traditional framing into a binary legal framework—had me wanting to crawl my way back up to a too-cramped but well known way of being in this world.

So much of that instinct, I think, comes from the sheer panic of the financial vulnerability of having chosen to primarily mother this last decade, in a society that is not set up to recognize, protect, or reward that work. We mothers are safe, so long as we stay within the bounds of the nuclear family structure. If we don’t, we must reckon with re-entry into a workforce that looks very different than it did a decade ago.

When I sit with that, though, I know my fear is older than just me—the knee-jerk instinct to claw back up to the safety of my old relationship comes not just from my own conditioning from this permutation of society, but from my mother’s conditioning, and from my grandmother’s before her. How far does it go, I wonder?

I remember this cycle with my mama growing up. I remember so desperately wanting more for her, and seeing her choose what felt safe over and over again. When she tells me the story of my grandmother, I understand why.

My mother was the fifth of eight children (side note: can you imagine birthing eight humans consecutively?) My grandmother was a mother and part-time art teacher, and my grandfather carried the financial load by designing national educational policy. When he died abruptly in my mother’s thirteenth year of life, my grandmother had to contend with raising eight (!) children alone.

My mom’s side of the family has this sort of sardonic sadness to it: my grandma was witty, whip-smart, and melancholic. There is this energetic heaviness amongst all of my mom’s side of the family, and I wonder how much of that is just the residue of the sudden loss of not only a spouse and father, but also and importantly the financial breadwinner of the family in a family of eight children.

Part of me knows this life is one in which I am meant to face that panic and perpetual survival mode born from my grandmother’s abrupt loss—contending with the unexpected death of your spouse, beloved, and financial anchor.

When I feel my panic, I think of my grandmother’s own, and try to hold our panics together. I think of what it must have taken for her to quell her devastatingly impossible desire to crawl back up the proverbial birth canal toward a life she did not choose to walk away from, and face the need to abruptly transition into a reality in which forward was the only option. I think of my grandmother and her character: a recipe of strength and gumption, wit and will and ultimately, faith and surrender that carried her through her transition.

Some transitions are abrupt and not what you planned or hoped for—that was the hand my Tetta was dealt. Some are chosen, conscious, slow, deliberate—that’s the hand I hold.

Still, though, the panic from my mother, and her mother before her, lives in my body: it bubbles up into my chest and lungs and throat screaming “this is not safe!” The panic is visceral and palpable. Some of it is warranted. But some of it is a story handed down to me. This is the part I’ve been tasked with healing.

My panic may come, in part, from my lineage, but so do the tools to face it. As I face the precipice of moving our platonic co-parenting out of the construct of marriage, I face this transition equipped with the strength, gumption, wit, will, faith and surrender of my mother, and her mother before her. The only way out is through.

With love,

Sara