Everything I’ve learned about this woman has been against my will

In some ways, I never felt closer to my husband than after we decided to divorce. What’s the price of honesty when there’s nothing left to lose? Sure, we chased each other out the front door, screaming expletives across our well-manicured lawn. He once pulled out of our driveway and slowed down to shout at me through the driver’s side window. As far as I know, there are no bylaws that address cussing out your soon-to-be-ex on the fringes of your shared property in the HOA handbook.

This honest and cruel work we were doing didn’t always spill into the streets.

We spent a good many hours, while our littlest girls were in preschool, standing in our kitchen—a brown-flecked granite island between us—buffering the accusations we lobbed at one another:

My boyfriend was in a sex cult, and I was a fucking idiot.

My ex-husband was vapid, shallow, and a shell of a person.

I don’t think any of those things are true, but our respective brokenness desperately hoped so. It can be easier to let go of a bad thing than accept that something might just not be the right thing. Villains are useful. They give shape to our pain; they allow us to blame something, someone, instead of contending with the possibility that no one—or worse, everyone—is at fault.

Sometimes I’d lie on the carpet and cry, and while he easily stepped into anger, he’d occasionally shut our master bedroom door and slump down against the wall and allow himself to collapse in grief—which, I for one, appreciated.

But that closeness I felt wasn’t all just in relation to the spectacle of over-the-top emotion. We were engaging in conversation for the first time in years.

“You can’t really mean that? You can’t really be okay with another woman acting like a mother to our kids? I know you.” He mocked me then in a sing-song voice, “It’s just more people to love them!”

He delivered my line.