same-sex divorce – Pamela Helberg

Today’s the day. Ninety days ago I signed my divorce decree, and now we can get divorced. I simply have to go to the lawyer’s office to sign the final paperwork. I didn’t know going into this divorce that the 90 days is a “cooling off” period. I just thought it took that long for the paperwork to make its way through the court system. My lawyer corrected my misperception. I said, “You mean to tell me it only takes 3 days to get married but 90 to get divorced? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” She nodded sagely. I suppose there’s some sort of job security for her in it working this way.

I don’t know. I imagine I’d still be in the same place even if I’d had an extra 90 days to contemplate getting married. In fact, we did wait an entire year between the time I proposed and the day we finally married (to read more about that, click here). We were unraveling at that point anyway. Earlier this week I received an email letting me know that the lawyers had drafted the final decree dissolving our marriage. The past few mornings have been a miasma of mixed feelings. Yesterday I woke up with an outsized case of anxiety, and this morning I am not feeling any better.

A divorce is a death, a loss, an end. And in the hours since I received the lawyer’s notice, the past fifteen years have been flashing before my eyes as I understand happens before any death experience. The good, the bad, the ugly. The beginning, the middle, the end. Not that there’s necessarily a correlation—these things have a way of spiraling and weaving. There were signs of our eventual demise early on, had I been more aware, and we experienced moments of grace toward the end, even as recently as last week when we had dinner with my brother and his family in Seattle.

On our first date, we attended an Indigo Girls concert on the Pier in Seattle. Cliché? Maybe. I still remember what I wore that warm July night. I was on my way to her house a few months later when Al Gore lost (was robbed of) the election to (by) George W. Bush. On September 11 almost a year later, we awoke to a phone call from her sister-in-law on the east coast, telling us to turn on the television, that a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. Together we watched astounded and in disbelief from her bed as the airplane careened into the second tower, which then crumbled. I told her how Aaron Brown, whose presence on CNN that day I found so stabilizing in a world come apart, had once been a local news anchor.

We attended at least two family weddings as a couple before we had our pre-legal same sex marriage commitment ceremony in September 2003. We dubbed it our Silly Ceremony. In retrospect, I wonder if perhaps we made a mistake calling it that. If perhaps we did not take ourselves or our union seriously enough from the beginning. We called it that because at my father’s wedding in April 2001, one of my relatives pulled me aside to congratulate me on my new relationship, to tell me how much she loved my new love, and then, almost as an aside said “But, you two aren’t going to have one of those silly ceremonies are you?” Of course. We had to after that.

I worked for the Catholics when we had the Silly Ceremony. I’d only been in my position there a few months, but still felt comfortable enough to invite a few of the friends I’d made in that time. My parents, by then divorced, came. My kids. Her sister. My brother and his family. Our neighbors. Her good friend, the holiest person we knew, officiated. We partied epically. People danced on the tables.

The temptation is to pick through the remnants, parsing out the good from the bad, categorizing events into a sort of giant, fifteen-year tally sheet. We spent many summer days playing Scrabble on our deck. And we kept score. One of the things that attracted me was her ability to string a sentence together, to spell. We fell in love online and spent our first few months there before we met in real time, exchanging instant messages and emails. She knew how to punctuate, a skill akin to tantric sex for a writer.

Even though we’ve essentially lived apart these past two years, and even though she officially moved her belongings out for good in mid-February, I am still sad to have finally completed this one last act.

We’ve been circling around the issue for a couple of years, been to couples’ counseling with two different therapists. Said the D word then reconciled again, deciding to give it one last go, at least twice. So, when I signed the decree 90 days ago, I guess it felt like anything was possible. Three months stretched out ahead in a sort of eternity. I still had 90 days worth of health insurance. We settled into a sort of amicable truce. She came up to see the cats. I stayed at her new place on my way to and from the airport. We had a few dinners, spent Easter with my family. Celebrated our birthdays in June with a lovely dinner on the Bellingham waterfront.

But this week, once we got the email from our attorneys letting us know that the final FINAL papers were ready, that we could sign them on August 21? Then I realized that this is it. The end. I know. I know. I didn’t want to get married in the first place. Marriage is a patriarchal institution. But I started thinking about having a fixed date for the demise of our relationship. In previous relationships we just sort of came apart in fits and starts. There were no hard and fast dates and times to affix to the ending. No “on thus and such a date we officially broke up.” At least not one recorded in the annals of time for all of perpetuity.

From here forward, August 21 will be complicated. One part heartbreak, one part freedom. One part new adventure. One part wistfulness. It’s particularly metaphorical that the eastern half of the state is currently on fire. We spent one of our happiest road trips in recent memory exploring the Methow and the Okanagon a couple of summers ago. We set out in the jeep one weekend and just kept driving until we reached Conconully. We drove up Hart’s Pass where I wanted to camp even though it was 32 degrees up there. I guess if I wanted to read something into the fires, I could. I was sitting in a friend’s house in Winthrop the first time she suggested (offered?) divorce, in an email. I’ve always joked about having a scorched earth policy when leaving jobs and relationships. It’s a policy I have worked to change in recent years. I would like the end of this relationship to be different. Gentler.

I’m trying to resist the urge to get sentimental, but finding resistance futile. Scenes. Memories. Events. Dates. In the course of those 15 years my children grew into adults. I forged a new career, realized my dream of becoming a published writer, changed careers, returned to school. Had a job with a Fortune 150 company. Became a runner. I found myself and so doing became many things I never expected to be, including single at 52.

This morning, I woke up early, the result of a nightmare. I haven’t had a dream that I can remember for months now, but there was a grizzly bear in my early morning REM, pointed out to me by the bobcat that was in my house. I hate waking up in fear. It makes it that much harder to roll over and go back to sleep, so to ward off the boogey men (and bears), I turned on the light, put on my glasses, and fired up my iPhone so I could read the news.

As if the news would make me feel better. Yesterday morning, I read about two little boys who were squeezed to death in their sleep by an escaped python. I hoped things would be better this morning. And they were. On NBC.com (still listed in my favorites bar as MSNBC), is a story about how difficult it is for same sex couples to get divorced.

Normally, divorce isn’t cause for celebration, but this article warmed me to my very core because it validates my story and the reason I’ve been working on my memoir. For years now, my writing coach, mentor, and friend has been telling me that I was a pioneer, Daniel-Fucking-Boone is how she put it, and here is proof, validation from others inside the struggle, that indeed, I was a pioneer and that as a matter of fact, gays and lesbians who want to get divorced are STILL pioneers all these years later. Which makes my story, though it is 16 years old, relevant.

One of my biggest fears in writing my story about my lesbian divorce and custody battle was that I’d be a big old caution sign on the road to same sex marriage equality. Don’t get me wrong—I think it is high time that gays and lesbians who want to get married finally get the same rights and protections as straight couples. But I also know from experience that just because we have those rights suddenly conferred upon us, the legal system isn’t going to automatically know what to do with us when we want to get a same sex divorce.

I know because 16 years ago, I tried. Obviously, I wasn’t legally married to my lesbian partner 16 years ago, but I was the legal adoptive parent of two children and had been in a relationship with the co-parent of said children for 10 years. Neither of us was the biological mother of either girl. We both had equal rights as parents, or so I thought. We both had been able to adopt because, as more than one lawyer or adoption specialist said there weren’t any laws against it.

Same sex couples were not explicitly banned from adopting in Washington State as they were in other states in the 1990s, but that did not mean that the legal system had any idea what to do when two mommies split up and needed a custody arrangement. We bounced around from lawyer to lawyer, burned through multiple family therapists, mediators, and a guardian ad litem and depleted our savings accounts (or at least I did), before settling on a less-than-optimal parenting plan just to end the pain.

As Susan Sommer from Lambda Legal points out in the nbc.com article, same sex couples who are getting divorced, are pioneers, alone and without a map in this new wilderness. And while we may have embarked on our domestic adventures all starry eyed and idealistic, that idealism can fade fast when one is suddenly homeless and without access to her children. Add to that the financial woes involved (the costs of same sex divorce are currently double that of heterosexual divorces, and triple the cost if children are involved, according the nbc.com article), and same sex couples with children certainly need to start thinking realistically about their futures and the futures of their children.

It shouldn’t be a stretch. We have had to find our own paths to where we are now, many of us without the support of family or the legal system, and even now, when we might like to think the legal system has finally caught up, it hasn’t. We need to protect ourselves and our children. We can continue to learn from one another, as we have for most of history.

I am going to start thinking of my story as an important road marker rather than as a caution sign. We don’t have to all find our own ways—there are trails and maps in this wilderness if we share our stories and go into the unknown aware of the dangers. As Elizabeth Schwartz, a Miami attorney who works with gay and lesbian families, says in the nbc.com article, “sometimes divorce is the beginning of a bright new chapter for people.”