We were at the checkout counter at the hardware store when he gave me the look. The look of disappointment that I knew all too well. The total for everything for the garden fence was $400 and he thought that was way too much.
I had wanted to build that fence so badly. I worked hard for a year prior to that day building up the garden and all the various spaces in our yard. I did it myself, to escape the house during the pandemic that started in March of 2020. March is often quite gray and a roller coaster of weather in West Michigan. So on sunny days, I would go outside and lay bricks and spread wood chips and rake leaves and dig holes until it felt like I had some control over something. The garden fence was the last bit I wanted to put in. I didn’t want the groundhog that lived under the pool deck to eat all of my progress again that year.
When we left the store we stacked all the fence supplies in the garage. He helped me but we didn’t talk. He was giving me the silent treatment again. It was his go to when I wronged him. I could always tell he was mad at me when he stopped talking to me.
After we stacked all the supplies in the garage, I sent him inside to feed the kids lunch as I brought some of the wood to the backyard to make my plans. My mind was swirling. The only plans I could make were related to how I was going to tell him how ridiculous it was that he was mad about the fence when he just saved up $300 to buy a smoker for himself. A smoker that would make meat only he cared about, when the garden would provide all of us healthy food.
My mind swirled and swirled until finally something broke. I was done. I was done spending so much energy worrying about our next fight and giving up what I wanted for his smoked meat.
Everything clicked for me in that moment and I finally worked up the courage to do it. I brought him to the garage after my panic subsided. We sat on some of the fence wood and I told him that I was done. That I couldn’t do it anymore. That we could no longer be married. And that this time I wasn’t going to change my mind.
I didn’t have a full plan of how we were going to do it, but knew that this was the time. That May, one year after the pandemic quarantine, was the end of our marriage. All the fighting and crying, fighting and crying, fighting and crying needed to come to an end.
For years, I struggled to find the right moment to end it. There were so many times that I questioned whether or not we should be married but I always ended up back with him for the kids or because I didn’t think he could survive without me. I continually protected him while thinking I was protecting all of us from a divorce that at the time seemed much harder.
This time was different though.
It was different then the time that I told him that I was too gay for our marriage four years earlier. We were sitting on our deck on a warm summer night when I decided to tell him that I couldn’t bear the weight of my queerness in a relationship that wasn’t supportive of me anymore. I thought at that moment that I was ready to end our marriage, but he threw a tantrum, telling me he couldn’t live without me. He called his mom and told her he wasn’t going to make it if we got divorced. I balled myself up in the middle of the floor and cried, sucking in all the thoughts I had of freedom while the tears of my queerness flowed out of me, and then I went back to him. I couldn’t let him kill himself over my queerness. I could be straight for him a little longer.
This time was different then the time two years earlier when we fought before a friend’s party. He was angry and hurt because I was feeling jealous of his relationship with his long time partner and struggling with spending time with all of our polycule that night. I was struggling with the disconnection in our relationship and wanted to relieve ourselves of the continued stress. I felt done then. We got into a huge argument over it. I left the house screaming and crying in my van as I sped 80 mph down our country road. I parked in the gas station at the end of it, seeking desperately for a breath. I panicked and cried it all out, then finally caught my breath and went back home. We calmed ourselves down the best we could, resolved nothing, then went to hang out with our friends.
Somehow though, the day I bought that fence was different. I had spent the eight months prior wracking my brain for a reason to stay in our marriage. I googled all the ways we could fix it. I tried to get him to go to therapy with me again. I escaped the house with my partner to try and feel something real. I read all the books and articles I could about finding myself and owning my own strength. I started doing my research as to what divorce would look like and gave myself more opportunities to dream about a queer life after marriage.
The pandemic changed my perspective on our marriage. The first three months of the pandemic felt like the best period we had in our relationship since before my husband’s mental health crisis took all the possibility out of our partnership. When he was hospitalized for suicidal ideation five years prior to the pandemic, it was the first time I saw that we were no longer partners. He wasn’t able to support me anymore in the ways I needed him to or at least I stopped trusting he was able to. In 2015, I switched into survival mode, giving birth to our second child, raising our boys, running two businesses, and keeping the house as stress free as I could for my husband.
When the world shut down in 2020, we finally got a chance to take a breath. I was a professional at surviving and despite all the challenges we had to overcome, we had no choice but to focus only on us. The environment we were in had all the ingredients for us to thrive. I thought during those months that our relationship could make it. That was until we were in couples therapy one afternoon.
We had been seeing the same therapist together for a couple years trying to repair our relationship. She knew our story well. She knew about his mental illness, my codependence, our attempts to keep ourselves flourishing romantically by opening up our marriage, and the work we had been doing to build our polyamorous, hippie community together. Everything we did to try and repair our relationship was only adding more challenges to it until we cut all ties with outside relationships during the pandemic and focused on each other.
During that session we discussed opening our family back up to the outside world and I asked my husband if we could stop our polyamorous relationships and continue to only focus on each other for a while. He said, no. He couldn’t live without his partner. So, we opened back up, started dating again, and I went down a path to try and discover myself. I gave myself permission to find myself and what I needed to flourish.
When we opened our relationship back up, I knew that it was never going to be what I needed it to be again, but I didn’t quite know how my life looked after my marriage. I started dating someone new that October as well, working hard to separate myself from the monogamous expectations of our marriage and give myself something. That relationship along with all the research and work I had been doing to figure myself out were the catalyst to the strength I had to finally make a decision the day we bought everything for the fence.
I finally had the information I needed to follow my intuition. I finally learned that I was capable of having a secure queer relationship and that I could set the foundation I needed to trust myself and discover who I really am. The strength of connection and the building of trust for myself gave me the courage to end my marriage.
It took me a couple weeks following that day to build the fence, but I did it. I built that fence as I started to make decisions for how to dismantle my twelve year marriage.
