My Husband Left On My Due Date So I Filed For Separation

It was not that he was dishonest. It was that his interest was real in the moment and then less real, and then not real, and he did not understand this about himself and therefore could not account for it. He was the kind of person who felt things intensely and briefly and then moved on to feeling the next thing intensely and briefly, and the women in his life had the experience of being completely seen and then not seen, which is a specific and disorienting variety of being loved.

I had been completely seen for about a year. Then not seen for two. Then pregnant with Noah and alone in the particular way of someone who is technically not alone and who understands that being technically not alone is a completely different condition from being accompanied.

Rebecca, my attorney, had been precise and unemotional about the legal proceedings in the way I had come to depend on from her. Legal separation was not about the end of something, she said. It was about clarity. It was about establishing the boundaries that allowed for whatever came next, whether that was finality or a different arrangement. She did not recommend what I should want. She was there to help me get what I wanted once I understood what that was.

What I wanted was for Noah to be safe and loved and to grow up inside a structure that was honest even if it was not the structure I had originally imagined.

What I wanted was not to spend the rest of my life performing the role of Ethan’s wife in a production that served primarily his need to believe the story had worked out.

I called Rebecca the next morning while Clare took Noah for a walk around the block.

“The legal proceedings are moving as expected,” Rebecca said. “The separation papers have been served. Ethan will need to respond within the required period.”

“He’s been calling.”

“That’s his right. Speaking with him outside of legal channels is your choice. I’d recommend that any substantive conversation about the separation or custody happens with both attorneys present, or at minimum that you have documentation of what was said.”

“He wants to meet.”

A pause. “What do you want?”

I looked out the window at the empty street where Clare was walking with Noah in the carrier, her figure small at the end of the block. “I want this to be over. But I know what over requires.”

“It requires a conversation about custody,” Rebecca said. “That can happen in mediation, which I’d recommend, or in court, which I’d recommend less. Either way, you will eventually need to be in the same room with him and make decisions about your son’s future.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to be ready for that today.”

“I know that too.”

“Call me when you are,” she said. “And Maddie. You’re doing well.”

I was not sure what well looked like, exactly. I was upright. I was present. I was eating the toast Clare made and watching Noah breathe and answering my attorney’s calls and not answering Ethan’s and slowly, in the imprecise and nonlinear way of these things, determining what I actually wanted rather than what I had been wanting by default.

By the end of the first week at home, I had developed the specific orientation of a new mother, which is to say my world had contracted to the size of one small person and I found this contraction not imprisoning but clarifying. Every decision filtered through a single question: what does Noah need. The answer was usually simple and physical and immediate, and there was a relief in that simplicity, in the directness of a need that could be met, that contrasted sharply with the complexity of everything involving Ethan.

Ethan’s voicemail on a Tuesday morning: I know I haven’t been perfect. I want to be different. I don’t understand why you won’t give me the chance to show you.

I listened to it twice.

The first time I heard the words. The second time I heard the tone, which was the tone of someone who is more confused than remorseful, who has experienced the consequences of their behavior as an external event happening to them rather than as something they have produced. He wanted to be different, he said. Not I have been different, not I am different, not here is the evidence of the difference. The desire to be different, expressed into a voicemail at eleven on a Tuesday morning, was offered as though the desire itself were the changed behavior.

I had spent three years inside the gap between Ethan’s desires and his actions.

I put the phone down and picked up Noah, who had been making the small sounds that preceded the larger sounds, and walked with him to the window and looked out at the street and thought: not today. Today there is this, and this is enough.

Clare was preparing to go home.

She had stayed for two weeks, which was longer than she had planned and which she had extended without discussion, simply remaining, which was the kind of friendship I had never fully articulated how much I needed until I had it in the form I needed it. On the evening before she left, we sat in the living room after Noah was down, with the television on at low volume neither of us was watching, and she said what she had been thinking for several days.

“You know he’s going to try to frame this as you keeping him from Noah.”

“I know.”

“And you know that’s not what’s happening.”

“I know that too.” I turned my wine glass. “He’s not being kept from Noah. He’s being asked to be a father in a way that requires documentation and accountability and a schedule he doesn’t control, and that feels to him like being kept from something.”