- My future ex-husband and I separated last year, and adapting to an empty house was difficult.
- When my son is not with me, the silence in the house is almost unbearable.
- I learn to face silence and the solitude that accompanies it.
No one warns you of silence. The genre that infiltrates in the spaces to which you did not expect – between the cushions of the sofa, in the dispersed toys left on the ground, in the glass of wine that you have poured because it looked like something you needed TO DO. Whoever is still there the next morning, expired and intact – a silent reminder that you don’t even know what you want, what you need.
This is because your 3 -year -old child is with his father, his half -empty juice always seated on the table as if he is back for that. But it is not only the absence of noise – it is the unbearable weight. A kind of relentless and invisible torture that makes you hear things that you prefer to ignore – doubts, regrets and debilitating pain to ask you who you are now.
I didn’t know what to expect when my ex and I separated
When my next ex-husband and I separated In June of last year, I expected challenges, of course, but nothing prepared me for the deafening calm of a half -empty house. At first, I tried to avoid it. I made plans in the nights that I did not have Joey, surrounding myself the friends who remained – those who did not disperse when my life was disorderly. The others? They did not simply disappear – they transformed my painful reality into a high school drama, bringing together their version of my situation without ever asking mine. Their absence had its own weight.
When no one was there, probably busy with their spouses or less depressive lives, I would ask my best friend, who lives in Maine, for worthy show recommendations. If it was Yellow Jackets or a Documentary of the real crimeI appreciated the opportunity to get lost in someone else’s misery because mine was too much to wear.
When Joey is with his father, his belongings become both a source of comfort and a clear reminder of his absence. I say the names of his monster trucks aloud while I am ranging – Boneshaker, Mega Wrex, Gravdeigge, El Toro Loco, Tiger Shark – hearing the voice of Joey in my mind, the way he announces each with wild enthusiasm.
I pick up her Batman cape, in a crust of whom he knows, and I throw her into the detergent so that she is clean when she returns. I throw hardened drips, I demonstrated the castle of Magna tiles which he built for me, bend his Paw Patrol underwear, make his bed. But these tasks – these are not tasks. This is how I hold it when he is not there.
Silence is difficult to manage, but it becomes easier
Sometimes silence looks like my worst enemy. I run the dishwasher with barely a few plates inside, just to fill the calm. I laundryNot because it accumulates, but because the sound offers strange comfort. Or, I write – pour my pain on the page because it looks like the only productive thing I can do. I write on regret, on the choices that led me here, on solitude and its many forms. But I also write on hope – for Joey, for me.
In therapy, I confessed once I didn’t know what to do with me when I was alone. My therapist, Meaghan, said, “No one has ever taught you to be sad.” And she was right. My life was filled with distractions, from solutions to sadness rather than a space for that. If I felt pain, I fled. If the discomfort slipped, I would find a way to replace it. But now avoidance is not an option. I know that I have to learn to sit with my sadness – not as an enemi to defeat, but as a reality to accept.
And I seem to get closer.
One night recently, I was alone in the kitchen when the “dreams” of Fleetwood Mac came up, and before I knowed it, I turned. I went around in circles, with the outstretched arms, belt, “but listen carefully to the sound of your solitude … in silence to remember what you had … and what you lost …” And there I was – singing, swinging, smiling – in a space to me. A space that I could fill with everything I wanted. And I was not afraid.
Silence is not as suffocating as it was. It is different now – less like an empty vacuum and more like a new territory that I slowly learn to fill in my own voice – a voice that I finally listen to – without someone telling me that it is too dramatic , too needy, too much. And in this calm, I do not only discover How to be aloneBut how to be Me. And perhaps, for the first time in my life, I start to understand who it is really.
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