D-I-V-O-R-C-E

Martha Wiseman

Word Count 926

divorce, v.: transitive, intransitive; active, passive
divorce, n.: subject or direct object; more rarely, indirect object

My parents divorced; they were divorced. To say “They are divorced” would be inappropriate, would seem to negate their deaths, depending on what happens or doesn’t happen in any possible afterlife. They divorced in the early 1960s, before divorce was as common as it became.

When they told me they were getting divorced—“getting a divorce”—I was not surprised: for a year, my father had been living in the North and my mother and I in the South, but even before that obvious separation, I had and still have no memory of their being together. They both cried (“were crying”) when they told me. I bought each of them a present. These are the only things I remember of that day. I do not even remember what presents I chose for them. I was ten.

My first husband left me, and I felt the directness of being the object left, even though I knew we probably couldn’t and shouldn’t go on. But I cannot say he divorced me, unless I say he divorced me at the same time as I divorced him. We divorced each other. True, the immediate impetus for divorce proceedings—which proceed only to one end—was his girlfriend’s pregnancy. But by that time, our being apart had had an adequate gestation.

We divorced.

We are divorced.

He is now divorced from his second wife.

My current husband and his first wife divorced, though I think she might say he divorced her. Would she say, making herself the active subject and the result a direct object, “I granted him a divorce” as if it were a gift?

I believe I will not be divorced from my current husband, and he will not be divorced from me. We will not have been divorced from each other when we reach whatever future awaits us. We have no children—not from previous marriages, not from ours—and, therefore, no children of divorce, those subjects of psychological and sociological studies.

My friend Sylvia divorced herself from her family. She did not talk to any member of her family for years. As far as I could tell, they contested her action, or her lack thereof.

I once began a story about someone who wanted to be legally divorced from his birth family. The story was to become a libretto for a comic opera. Neither the story nor the libretto was ever finished, and the opera was never written.

I divorced myself—if I stop there, I am talking about severe dissociation, which indeed I have experienced a few times. What I began to say is, I divorced myself from New York City after twenty-four years. I maintained obligatory visitation rights, because my father was still living there. It was not a difficult divorce; I knew I wanted out. Visitations were fraught.

Sylvia divorced me—she, the actor; me, the direct object, subject to her actions and their consequences.

We’d been friends for twenty-seven years. One day in the first year of the pandemic—which divorced many from what, whether satisfactory or unsatisfactory, they’d been used to—Sylvia called to say she was driving the hour-plus to come and see me; we could sit outside on my deck. I had made other plans for the day but said she could come in the late morning and stay a few hours. I know I did not sound entirely enthusiastic about a visit. Being with Sylvia could be trying. Later, she texted to say she was not coming. Trauma sadly visited her in the next few days, weeks. I called. I emailed. I wrote a note. I told her I loved her. Finally I received an email: I need to take a break from our friendship. Please respect this. Sylvia

So I did not divorce her, but she and I are divorced, and our friendship is quite, quite over.

The end of the friendship has given divorce (indirect object) a painful luster once again. It has also given divorce, both directly and indirectly, a somewhat liberating power.

Divorce negates marriage, even friendship. It sunders, it parts asunder, but it cannot negate the past. It can only rewrite what came before. The rewriting may become a rigid frame around the before, or it may, at least eventually, and perhaps only for a time, be freeing: you are, or will be, or might be, freed to compose a new syntax, to see the grammar in a new light, with a new lightness.

Martha grew up in both New York and North Carolina. She has been an acting student, a dancer and choreographer, and an editor. She retired in 2020 from her position teaching literature and writing in the English Department and running the writing center at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.