Still Counting: Reflections on Anniversaries After a Divorce
By Joy Juliet Gallagher
August 17th is the day I was married, but it’s not my anniversary anymore. A birthday is a birthday no matter what, but anniversaries are slippery. They can slide right through your fingers if you’re not careful, or lucky.
Last year, on what would have been our 10-year anniversary, I texted my ex-husband a picture of our sons running through a rainbow in the sprinkler. He gave it a thumbs up and asked me a question about the weekend schedule. Neither of us mentioned the date. What was there left to say?
Technically, we were still married, but it was only a matter of time before the papers would be signed. He has a new girlfriend and she spends the night with him in our old bed in our old house. That fact feels more final than any signature ever could.
We didn’t go to Hawaii to celebrate ten years. There were no fancy restaurants, no cards exchanged or presents made out of tin, the traditional gift to mark a decade. (In another life, I’d have made a tin-foil envelope for a card, perhaps, or given him a can of corn as a gag gift.) Instead, I reread Maggie Smith’s stunning poem Bride for the one-hundredth time. I scrolled through the wedding photos that popped up on my phone and tried to remember who we were when we said, I do. For the first time, I noticed how young we looked.
I’ve spent so much time trying to understand how we started there and ended up here. I’ve realized that settling on an answer is like looking at a disco ball and trying to point in the direction of the light. There are moments when it seems like maybe I’ve finally landed on an answer. But then I wait a minute and everything shifts again. As the years go on, I spend less time trying to understand why our marriage ended. I’ve learned it's more important just to accept that it did.
After a loss, birthdays and anniversaries take on a new significance. They no longer symbolize another successful year of life or love. They morph into a reminder of the growing gap between before and after. The number of years we were married will always be finite: seven. But the after stretches on forever. We don’t celebrate those anymore, but I still count them. I think I always will.
I’ve spent so much time trying to understand how we started there and ended up here. I’ve realized that settling on an answer is like looking at a disco ball and trying to point in the direction of the light.
It's been three years since all four of us lived under the same roof. Three years since I bought myself a slim emerald ring to hide the smooth white line that my wedding rings left behind. Three years of trying to remember to change the oil in the car and set the timer on the coffee pot. Three years of buying my own flowers and learning to say I love you to myself.
Maybe one day I’ll be ready to share my bed with someone new. For now, it feels right just to stack my night table high with books and fall asleep still holding one of them in my hand.
“Are you happier now?” People sometimes ask, after a marriage ends. The answer is complicated. I’m not sure I’m happier, or if such a moving target is even a reasonable goal. I’m stronger now. I trust myself more and other people less. I understand myself better. I understand my ex-husband better, too, though I prefer to think of him as my childrens’ father now.
We’ve both become calmer and more present parents during the days we have with our boys. We’re both more aware now of how fleeting and precious those days are.
There have been plenty of times that I’ve thought our marriage was a spectacular failure, an embarrassment. Perhaps our seven-year firecracker of a union isn’t as impressive as the ones that burn on for decades. I understand why choosing each other year after year is worth celebrating, even though life didn’t turn out the way I imagined it would on our wedding day.
But we became a family on that day, and we’re a family still. When our youngest was asked to draw a family portrait in preschool, he drew all four of us together in one neat line. Our story has been anything but neat and linear. What if we measured our relationships not only by years lining up one after another, but by the ways in which they shape us? By that measure, maybe our marriage wasn’t such a failure after all. Maybe the last few years haven’t meant nothing. Maybe they still count.
Joy Juliet Gallagher's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Isolation Journals, New Limestone Review, and more. She is a graduate of the writing program at Kenyon College, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon, with her two young sons. She is currently writing a memoir about intersecting grief, divorce with kids, and rebuilding life after loss. You can follow her work on www.joyjuliet.com or @joyjulwrites on Instagram.