One woman’s creative journey to finding hope after divorce Article Susan Schaefer Bernardo
T
oday, I painted my front door blue. It’s been three years since my husband moved out, but our divorce was just made final. It’s official. I’m my own “head of household” now, for the first time in 20 years. With a loan from my parents, I have been able to keep my house. I am blessed and immensely grateful, but there are times when I wake up in the dark, terrified, my brain stuck in a loop of fear. It’s the same old fear I’ve been battling for many years now: that I am somehow “not enough.” My marriage was divided along conventional lines. After baby was born, I became the homemaker and he the breadwinner. He climbed the career ladder, I kept our son safe as he climbed everything else. We both put in long hours. The bills got paid, we upgraded from renting to owning, and five years later we upsized again, bought and remodeled a bigger house in a better school district.
I put a lot of love into creating a pleasing home for our little family. A la Martha Stewart, I painted walls, planted roses, even built my own chicken coop. We hosted amazing parties, had another son. On the material level, our marriage and home life seemed as solid as my minivan and his plasma television. American Dreamy. But there were deep cracks in our foundation -- poor communication, a lack of partnership, hidden emotional scars. External stressors took their toll, too: a demanding job, a miscarriage, societal expectations that stifled our spirits. We didn’t spend enough time patching the cracks with joy and gratitude for the gifts we had been given. Rather than us getting closer as we went through life’s struggles, the cracks between us widened into chasms. Eventually, he had an affair and fathered a child with another woman, and the home I had been making all those years crumpled like a house of straw in a hurricane.
We may come to divorce in different ways, but we share the same challenge after we get through it: remaking home.
18 Newport Beach Lifestyle | April 2014