The Next Chapter: Can Divorce Be a Good Thing?

After going through her own divorce, Mothering magazine’s Candace Walsh began to wonder, Can divorce be something positive? She posted an online request for other women’s stories and received a deluge of responses, which she compiled in the book Ask Me About My Divorce: Women Open Up About Moving On (Seal Press, 2009). Here, two stories from real women coping after divorce.

“The Love List”
Julie Hammonds

It began, as so many things do in my life, with a list. First, a list of losses: a 7-year marriage, a home, the feeling of security that comes when you know you belong to one particular person and place. Standing in the kitchen that rainy morning, I decided that any plan for my future had to begin in the fertile ground of love. What were those things I loved, exactly? Years had passed since I last asked myself that question, or listened to the answers. Beside my list of losses, it was time to make another, more joyful list: a love list. I walked upstairs to my desk and pulled out six sheets of blank paper, a box of crayons, and a spool of clear tape. Taping the sheets together to form a poster-size rectangle, I attached them to the pantry door where I would see them each morning. At the top of this big, blank paper I wrote a question: ‘What do you love?’”

“Several Things I Know and a Few Things I Don’t”
Melanie Jones

On December 31, in 24-below weather, one year after my husband left, I ran a 5-mile race. It was a nighttime event called the Resolution Run, and I didn’t tell anyone I had entered. I toed the line, and when the start gun went off, I started out into the midwinter darkness. Every step I took moved me farther away from my old life and one step closer to a new one I didn’t yet know. The next morning, I registered for my first marathon. Running 26.2 miles scared me. A marathon was bigger than me. I was going to have to dig deep and find resources I didn’t yet know I had: to get stronger; to rise to the challenge. I loved every minute of it. Running with nothing but the sun on my face and the sound of my own breath was true love for me—something more pure and clean than I’d ever shared with another person. I called my first marathon my 26.2-mile victory lap, and it absolutely was. I crossed the finish line and kissed my ex-husband goodbye.”

From the book Ask Me About My Divorce edited by Candace Walsh. Excerpted by arrangement with Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright (c) 2009.