by Christine Gray

I’m feeling wonderful at the moment. I have finally figured out what to call myself, now that I am getting divorced after thirty years of marriage. I was taking a walk this morning, trying to wrestle with making the choice to live a healthier life. It was a perfect Colorado morning – crystal blue sky with puffy pristine white clouds here and there, a constant but not-too-strong breeze, ambient temperature in the middle seventies, early enough so that I knew I could get through the walk before the breeze quit and it got suddenly hot in the bright sun. The kind of morning my heart should be singing and I should be loving each deep breath I took as I walked.

Instead I was feeling morose. Sorry for myself. Sitting on the pity pot, as the saying goes. I was painting every picture of my future I could imagine with that darned can of invisible black paint that seems to appear every time I start looking at my life through the eyes of my bad attitude. I could hear other people judging me for not having a job. I could hear them telling me I’d never be able to find anything but an entry level position for the rest of my life. I could hear my husband telling me I needed to get a grip on reality because I just didn’t understand the way the world functioned.

“Life sucks,” he says.

“You can’t possibly do anything to earn a living that also makes you happy,” says the voice of my dead mother.

“That’s just the way it is. Suck it up and get going. Make the phone call to the agency that will be sure to get you just the kind of job you’d rather take Strychnine than do until you die,” says the voice of society. Pretty bleak picture, don’t you think? I’m good at those sometimes. So good I’ve pretty much paralyzed myself and done nothing rather than move into that scenario.

Oh, and yes. I am old, after all – old enough to retire if I had only had a conventional job from which one retires. I was walking through the beautiful countryside looking at the wildflowers along the side of the dirt road, smelling the horses and cows and warm pasture grass. I was thinking about working a forty hour week with two weeks vacation a year if I was lucky. I was thinking of earning the attendant beginning level salary that sort of job would entail, with no health, dental or retirement benefits. It’s a wonder I could put one foot in front of the other I was doing such a number on myself.

I imagined my mother traveling around the world and all the people she met on trips and became friendly with over the years. I thought I would never be able to do that. I thought if I did go on a trip and happened to meet some people I liked my own age and we got to talking about our lives, I would have nothing to say. “What did you do with your life, Chris?” someone might ask.

“Nothing,” I might answer. “I’ve only been a housewife for the past couple of decades.” The silence would be deafening. What do you say to one of those rare, worthless, unproductive people? Those housewives? People who didn’t get it about the world. People that lived off of other people and didn’t pull their own weight, especially when their kids were grown and didn’t require their constant attention and help any more. Brainless golems. High maintenance bitches who fed off their husbands. I tried to remember more of the labels my husband had used over the years. No wonder I have the self esteem of a gnat, I thought. Those are some heavy labels.

Suddenly I saw myself sitting there with that same group of imaginary judgmental people, and the scenario changed. “What did you do with your life, Chris?” someone asked.

“I’m a retired housewife,” I would say. After all, that is what I am. I’m divorcing my husband, and in a few months I won’t be anyone’s wife anymore. When you leave a long career, people generally say they’re retired. The only person I’ll be making a home for is me. Sometimes I might have one of my kids with me, or maybe the dogs, but mostly it’s just for me. I can do whatever the heck I want. Isn’t that what retirement is? No one to answer to but myself?

I’ve been attempting to recreate myself over these past few months. Who am I? What is it I’d really like to be doing? I ask myself that all the time. When I sit at my computer and write as I am now, I am pretty happy. When I put on the mantle of helping others with my counseling skills, or my trainings in various kinds of energy work and shamanic guidance, I’m in a good mental place, too. When I think about the possibility of traveling and seeing a little more of this planet and its diversity I feel excited about being alive and healthy enough to do that. I can start small. I can go somewhere new for a weekend. I can limit myself to a tank of that very expensive stuff, gas, or not. I can take a friend or just go myself.

The world began to open up from that dark and ugly place I had been in only a little while earlier. I realized that I am my own worst critic and judge. It is my own thoughts of myself as worthless that are the most damaging. I am severing the ties I have with my husband for the very reason that I don’t want to accept his vision of me as my vision of myself any more. I’m resigning from the role of Fall Guy. He’ll have to find someone else to blame for all that is not right in life. I’ll have to find some other role than feeling put upon and limited by what other people think I should be doing, whether I want to or not.

Yes, I like that idea. I’m retiring from a whole way of relating to the world and life itself. I was feeling sorry for myself because it seemed even my own children were sharing these negative attitudes towards me. After all their father uses every opportunity he can to point out how I’ve destroyed the family and increased everyone’s already heavy and difficult burdens. He means I’ve added to the difficulty of my kids figuring out who they are. He means by divorcing him I’ve put undue financial burdens on him. He means I’ve shaken up his reality and forced him to think about and do things he’s refused to look at for many years.

Perhaps what he is saying is true. I have dropped a bomb into an old way of being and blown it apart. All of us, this little nuclear family of wife, husband, and two children is shifting and changing in fundamental ways. It isn’t easy. There are times when it really hurts, and when it seems pretty scary. But in my opinion it is so very much better than staying stuck. That useless housewife role is nowhere to be. No one takes you seriously, so you can’t take yourself seriously, either. People assume you have the brain of a pea, if that. Your kids look at you and carry away the role in their minds of, oh, that’s what a long term marriage looks like. That’s the model of what the wife looks like. An unhappy and disconnected and angry man is the role of the husband. What kind of picture is that?

So I’ve retired. Yeah, that’s what I was. Now I have ten, or twenty, or maybe more years to be something else. I can show my kids you really can change your own reality when you put your mind to it. Maybe I will get one of those jobs I mentioned before. If only to check it out. If only to earn some money and some self respect by contributing to my own welfare. I can meet lots of new people. I can see what other people do in the world to get by.

In the meantime I can do the other things I love. I can write, or draw, or paint, or do the energy work. The world is my oyster. My opinion of myself is what really matters, after all, and I can work on throwing out that darn imaginary can of black paint that keeps appearing out of nowhere. So maybe when people ask me what I’ve done, or who I am, and I say I am a retired housewife, they’ll have a funny look on their faces for a minute. And then I’ll laugh. Maybe we’ll laugh together. A retired housewife? What a preposterous idea.

Yeah. My point exactly.