You will be fine. You are taking care of business,” the stranger said to me. The stranger, a middle aged woman, stood in my living room, deciding whether she wanted to purchase my desk.

The woman had walked in and immediately inquired why I was selling my furniture. My newly renovated house was in upheaval. Many rooms were empty. Others filled with packed boxes. As I told her I was getting divorced, my small children flanked my sides.

She ran an appraising glance over me. “You will be fine,” she pronounced again. 

Many times over the past four years, I have thought back to the moment a complete stranger’s words instilled causeless confidence in me. And she was right; I have been fine because, despite heartbreak and tumult, I do always manage to take care of business. 

I am a collector of stories. A believer in humanity. The invisible strength of mothers. There is beauty and resilience to be found in the moments of pain that threaten to destroy us. That words have power. Talk is therapy. In second chances, for people and, in an odd, recent twist, furniture. 

I never envisioned myself as an DIYer, but last summer, when I waited for a court decision that might destroy the lives of my children and me, I started refurbishing old wood furniture. And so on weekends without my children, I scour FB marketplace and purchase unwanted pieces. Finding the beauty in discarded pieces is difficult but gratifying. Taking an old, broken piece and reworking it until it is beautiful is magical. 

I have come to realize that women are the main sellers of old furniture. And these women all have stories to tell as they divest their belongings. Stories which they readily share with the stranger at their door, the stranger who will now possess what they once owned. 

One seller in her sixties was downsizing her sizable house to move out of state. I came to purchase a cabinet, but she took me through her house showing me the other pieces for sale. The woman was gregarious, and it was easy to imagine her large group of friends. She told me that she has come to realize her generation sold mine a bill of goods in the form of feminism. “Women are now expected to have two jobs instead of one.”  Who could disagree with that truth?

Finding new pieces to refurbish has become much more fulfilling than I could have ever imagined. I purchase used furniture, but, more importantly, I collect stories. 

And so today, I stepped into the home of a stranger selling an old sewing table, and I looked around her newly renovated home.  It was in upheaval. The empty rooms, the packed boxes. I had been there before. I asked her if she was selling her home.  

I stood in her kitchen as her story tumbled out. She is a teacher with three children, her husband cheated, and her marriage collapsed. As a divorcee, people often come to me with their sad or sordid stories, so I am no longer shocked with the pain spouses inflict on the people they once publicly promised to love.

I hugged this stranger and told her she was going to be fine. She was taking care of business. 

But it was also the former version of me I embraced. The one who didn’t know what lay before her. And so I told this woman all the wisdom I now knew was true. 

Life is calmer, less chaotic, happier on the other side. 

Starting over is hard but better. 

When you have to get rid of everything, you no longer care about material objects. 

As long as I have my children, I could leave everything behind. I wouldn’t want to, but I could. And that’s freeing. 

This was her moment to share. She is still in the middle of it. So I didn’t share my own story.

A year and a half after my divorce settlement was signed, my ex took me back to court. Fueled by rage and his parents’ funds, he accused me of violating the settlement and sought a 50/50 custody schedule. For two years, this threat hung over my head. Last spring, I spent ten days on trial in family court. Singlehandedly, the worst ten days of my life.  In all that time, I was unable to write. Barely able to speak. I couldn’t put the unknowable and unimaginable into words. The stability I had found post-divorce threatening to shift beneath me. Some days, it was hard to breathe, but I always took care of business. 

Then there was the wait. The world as my children and I knew it could be pulled from us at the whim of the legal system. For six months after the trial ended, I awaited the judge’s decision. Still I couldn’t tell my story not when I didn’t know the ending. Even after I found out the judge ruled in my favor, I couldn’t write, silently processing the traumatic experience.

It has been eight months. In that time, I have often tried to write but found I could say nothing. However, today, as I attempted to help this stranger with her pain to bear, it changed. 

“You will be fine,” I repeated. She and I hugged again.  She was heading to put her old life behind her and to embrace her new one. I was returning to the life I have created with my children. 

I sat in my car with my new piece to redo, and the words that had been invisible for almost three years swirled jarringly in my head. I arrived home, sat at my computer, and the ideas tumbled onto the screen too fast to channel. Because that’s what we do, we take care of business and share our stories. It is magical.

Several Sundays ago, I went out for a jog in a heavy mist. Usually, I listen to a podcast or music when I run. For some reason, unclear to myself, I decided to leave my phone behind, even though, given the current situation, never has there been such a need for distraction as now. Yet, my phone had mockingly informed me that my usage had increased tremendously the past week.

Of course, it had. Between trying to monitor my school email and google classrooms, oversee my own children’s school assignments, and exchanging texts with friends to help me keep my sanity, I felt like I hadn’t put my phone down since our quarantine began.

At first, it was uncomfortable to run without external noise upon which to focus. The run seemed more tedious. But I soon fell into my natural rhythm. The only sounds were my footsteps pounding the pavement enveloped in the muffled sound of the mist, and the occasional car. It can be unnerving to be left with your internal thoughts, especially now when so much is unknown, and fear and anxiety pervade.

I love distractions; I need them. On the weekends my children are with their father, I fill every moment with activities: exercise classes, yoga classes, visits to nail salons and the hairdresser, brunches, lunches and dinners with friends. I am always on the go because if I stop, I fear being overwhelmed with uncomfortable emotions.

One of my very good friends always advises me to just be. “You are such a doer; sometimes you just need to be.” But I fear just being. And so I avoid it.

Yet, that day during my run, I set my intentions for the upcoming week. I was going to just be. I was going to appreciate all the comforts I had despite Covid-19 and really try to enjoy being with my children in this rather strange situation. Quarantine feels like a suspension of time so removed is it from our normal daily scheduled life. I wake up every morning questioning the day; there is nothing to differentiate one day from another, except for a self-imposed schedule.

Several evenings later, I learned of the death of a college friend. It was a person with whom I was once close. We had lost touch. I saw his success on Facebook. We liked each other’s photos.

I walked into the grocery store the next morning to face our new normal. People were social distancing; some wore masks. Everyone looked scared or worried. There were long lines to check out, and even longer lines to get into the store. I felt a distressing pressure on my chest; I could only take shallow breaths. Was it a reaction to the apocalyptic scene before me, Covid-19, or grief?

I thought about my college friend. He was smart, silly, and charismatic. I thought about the ridiculous fun and risky adventures we had had at a time I was completely unaware of life’s fragility. Through the years, I had thought of reaching out; I never did. Liking his photos on Facebook seemed like enough.

In June, several of my college friends and I had reunited in Buffalo for our twentieth year college reunion. We were supposed to meet him out; our paths crossed but never met. I remember thinking, I will see him next time I am in Buffalo. Because there is always a next time. Except when there isn’t.

It turns out my friend had fallen prey to something darker than the virus. He had relapsed and died of a drug overdose.

Despite the images we usually see on social media, the perfect images of people’s lives on Fakebook and Instagram, what I have come to realize in my 40s is that everyone struggles. Everyone faces his or her personal darkness. This is something that should connect us, but we spend so much time looking at the surface rather than delving deeper that we miss significant commonalities.

One common thread holding many of us together is dealing with life in quarantine. I read one expert who advised that as with any trauma, people need to find the lesson. The ability to extract a lesson makes people feel more in control of an uncontrollable situation. So I need to extract my own lessons.

I need to stop living my life always thinking there is going to be another opportunity. If anything, our current situation shows us, sometimes there won’t be. I intend to be less judgmental, less competitive, less concerned with appearances, results, and perfection. I want to allow myself room to just be. Sometimes that might be awkward. Sometimes that might be messy and imperfect. Always kinder. More grateful. Hopefully, regretless.

Years ago, I used to do a lesson with my seventh grade students about objects we had lost. Students would begin to generate a list. They would initially record concrete items, socks, keys, earrings. As the class started to share their items, they delved into the figurative sense of loss and added pets, grandparents, patience, one’s mind, and weight to their lists. It was always an engaging and rewarding lesson.

Eventually, the students would use their lists to write their own poems, and, sometimes, I would share Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “One Art,” which introduces the loss of items as “no disaster.” Initially, the speaker discusses losing keys and the time spent looking for them as relatively inconsequential, but throughout the poem, the losses become more significant. Ultimately, by the poem’s end, the speaker has lost a person.

The losses sustained in divorce are substantial. My own had been, and, at different moments in the process, I found myself sobbing for my marital residence, my dog, a husband, money, sleep, and most significant, time with my children. Each loss was heartbreaking. For so long, I felt the emptiness of the raw gaping holes in my heart.

Sometimes loss paves the way for a more rewarding future. It is a difficult realization to reach, especially when in the midst of a funeral for the life you had carefully and lovingly built, the life that had burnt to the ground. But the process of grieving is a circuitous one, and even in my darkest moments as I thought about my tremendous losses, I began to appreciate my gains. And I started to generate my own lists.

I lost conflict and strife, pervasive sadness, a rancorous house, nightmarish in laws, and an abusive husband.

I truly was 1000 pounds lighter.

I had lost a marriage, but I had begun to gain peace and a sense of contentment.

In my twenties, I felt like a charcoal sketch with an indistinct outline. Marriage and a husband gave me substance. And then, within the confines of my acrimonious marriage, even that charcoal sketch faded and the indistinct outline grew blurrier. But now years later, after two children and a divorce, I felt myself stepping off the page – strong, substantial, and vibrant.

A pink bike with a pink and white floral print banana seat. I hold a wavery memory of my first bike as if viewed through a hazy flashback scene. Yet I remember with clarity the thrill of independence and pride associated with learning to ride it. A bicycle symbolizes newfound independence for young children, and I loved mine and the sense of adventure and freedom it gave me. Now that I am a parent, my children’s bicycles hold a different significance.

Because as a parent, loss is your biggest fear. My friend recently recounted a situation where her three year old daughter was lost behind the stage during a dance recital. My friend became emotional as she talked about her fear and inability to speak in the moment, and the amount of time it took her to recover, even after finding her daughter. Not being able to locate your child, even for a few seconds, feels like what I imagine drowning does. An immense pressure on your chest, an inability to speak or even breathe. Time slows and your vision narrows. You imagine the worst case scenario; calling for help or even forming a sentence becomes an impossibility. When faced with such loss, as parents, we hold on tightly to our children and resist their demands to let go.

In other situations, most people do the same, steeling ourselves against loss. Clutching our purse, locking our car and house, guarding ourselves, our family, and our possessions. Cruelly, sometimes, the people guilty of stealing the most from us are the ones closest to us, betraying our trust, our love, our friendship.

Throughout my divorce, acquaintances would talk about how divorce was so traumatic because it signified “the loss of hopes and dreams” and that captures the essence of divorce; my grief was not a result of saying goodbye to an imperfect partner, but the collapse of all I had built, the dissolution of all I had accumulated, and, far worse, the destruction of all my future plans for my family and me. Loss during divorce is inescapable, overarching, and momentous.

At every stage, as I continued to part ways with pieces of my life, I underwent the same heartbreaking process of grief and loss. My house, my furniture, my dog, and most recently, a 15 year friendship. At first, I railed against the loss, then I grieved it usually with lots of hot, sad tears, and, ultimately, I shed that old form of me, which had held the item close, like a second skin. Each time, faced with the threat of loss, I thought I wouldn’t be able to do it, I wouldn’t recover, and, inevitably, I did. I emerged, often scarred, sometimes lighter. Always altered.

With the implosion of a roadmap for my life, there were certain ideas that troubled me more than others. One was that my children would not be with me when they experienced milestones. Ironically, my ex-husband had missed multiple milestones for our children when we were together; as the only constant in my children’s lives, I vow to always be there for them, and so my fears are unfounded. While I realize I have the annoying habit of worrying irrationally at times, an unusual source of recent distress became who would teach my children to ride their bikes without training wheels.

It was more than fortuitous then that in the midst of a particularly troubling month when my ex was threatening to take me to court regarding his misunderstanding of his visitation schedule, my daughter turned six and requested I remove her training wheels from her bicycle. My mother and I both took her out several times to practice with little success.

Two weeks later, as my ex’s threats increased, I took my daughter out again, and she practiced balancing and gliding on the bicycle. Then I held on and balanced the bike as she pedaled. Holding a child up is difficult work, both in that moment and all others. Every once in a while, she would tell me to let go and proceed to fall into a bush or onto a front lawn. She grew frustrated and cranky as we all do when our expectations of ourselves exceed our abilities. I tried to express how difficult and time consuming acquiring a new skill is. She did not care. She was determined.

That afternoon, after multiple attempts, when she finally instructed me to let go again, and I hesitantly did, my beautiful, tenacious daughter took off. Her long red hair streamed out from under her pink helmet as she rode away. I could see the pride she felt in her accomplishment in the set of her back, the way she sat upright in her seat and continued to ride away from me.

My heart was being squeezed. I felt simultaneously proud and nostalgic. As a mother, I cannot measure the pride I feel at my children’s accomplishments. At every one of my children’s milestones, I have cried with the weight and significance of the moment. This one was no different. I started to cry. I ran to catch up. When she finally came to a stop, I enthusiastically praised her, but she questioned my tears. I explained they were tears of joy.

The next day, my daughter came home with an even more valuable gift, a story she had written about learning to ride her bike. She is in kindergarten and an emergent writer, yet the story was very perspicuous. “I told my mom to let go. I told her to let go again. She let go, I could feel the fresh air and it was fun and my mom was crying joy.”

And so the student inevitably becomes the teacher. I had taught my daughter to ride a bike, and in turn, she gifted me a treasure. Sometimes, in life, we must let go. Letting go is scary and intimidating, but, often, it is necessary. In the process, we might be knocked around; we might fail at first. We definitely will fall. But it is in the act of letting go, difficult though it may be, that we find our way. Letting go is a freeing choice. We gain freedom and independence. We begin to fly. And we learn to write our own stories.

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Several weeks ago, in mid April, I went for a run. It was the first genuinely spring day of the season. The bleakness of the winter landscape had been replaced by a scene awash in color: delicate cherry blossoms stood out against a cerulean sky, grass was lushly green, and yellow daffodils and brightly colored tulips bloomed. Easter would arrive in two weeks. The day held the essence of rebirth.

The weather was perfect for a run. I shed my winter layers, and a light sheen of sweat formed early in my jog. I felt the calories and toxins being expelled.

It had been three months since I had signed my divorce settlement.

For years, leaving my marriage had been an insurmountable obstacle. Making the decision to end it was so harrowing that I wrongfully assumed the divorce process would be easier. I was poorly prepared for the laborious paperwork, the mudslinging, and the convoluted legal process. A bad marriage seemed simple and sane by comparison.

Throughout the darkest days of my divorce, people gave me advice. Mainly, they spoke in cliches. As a writer, I had always been warned to avoid cliches at any cost. As a drowning person, I embraced cliches as a lifeline.

You can do it.

You got this.

You will survive.

You have been through the worst of it.

Pace yourself. Divorce is a marathon not a sprint. You are closer rather than further.

(However, the finish line for my divorce kept moving farther away.)

Just breathe.

It is always darkest before the dawn, my hairdresser, of 18 years, told me. This should become your mantra, she advised.

And it did. There were moments so dark, I was rendered blind and paralyzed. I couldn’t see an inch in front of me. Or, separate reality from my worst fears, namely, that my estranged husband would get custody of my two small children. There were moments where I tripped and the earth opened up and promised to swallow me whole in a bottomless abyss. I continued to stumble along.

There were moments laughable now, but not when I was in the midst of a personal hell I didn’t think would end. One day, my estranged husband almost drove me off the sidewalk, screaming at me to get home because he had called the police. My infraction: I had put a post-it over the Ring doorbell and interrupted his surveillance of me.

I stood there, frightened. As he continued to berate me, I finally asked when the police would be arriving. I didn’t call the police was the response; I wanted to scare you. And that became a running theme over the next year as he made threats, filed motions, and blindsided me with his rage and vengeance. The children became pawns in his twisted game.

Then there were the moments that shocked me. Friends and acquaintances reached out to me to share my estranged husband’s profile on dating apps. Often, he didn’t admit he had children, but he did wish to have them in the future. He would tell his children, the ones who actually did exist, he was going to work as he packed overnight bags for his dates. They inquired why he needed underwear and a toothbrush.

There were moments that broke my heart. I spent Christmas Eve in court as he fought me for overnight visitation despite his continued abuse of alcohol and his inability to put the needs of our children above his own or his parents’.

I had lived in such a heightened state of chaos and strife for so many years, it was hard to foresee worse moments, but divorce exacerbated an already tense and stressful situation.

My friend who had survived a starter marriage told me an allegory about being in a boat in the middle of a squall. Ultimately, she said, you will row to the other side. Throughout my divorce, I felt as if my boat had capsized, and I was going down for the last time. Even though I always managed to pull my head above water to gasp for a breath and find the strength to keep treading water, I feared I would drowned.

My children love to gather pebbles and place them in a glass vase. They take the pebbles out frequently, stack and examine them and discuss their favorites. In the midst of my storm, I collected people’s divorce stories and treated them like my children do their pebbles. The stories became my worry stones. I examined them closely for a sign of guidance or hope. If this person had emerged intact, I could, too.

And then one day, I did, with no fanfare at all. The lawyers called a meeting, suddenly. It was their last ditch attempt to resolve our issues before we began the trial process. Five tense hours later, I emerged divorced. It had all happened so quickly that when I texted my friends, they couldn’t piece the puzzle together. Either could I. After a contentious 11 months, my ex and I were able to agree enough on a final settlement.

The biggest obstacle still to be overcome was the new visitation schedule. My children would now have overnights with my ex, a man who was irresponsible, disorganized, and self-aggrandizing on his best day.

There are still dark moments, but on this perfect early spring day, I chose to embrace the light. My hairdresser was right. Darkest before the dawn was the perfect mantra. I had walked straight through the most excruciating moments of my life. I faltered many times, but I never gave into the dark. And here I was on the other side. Dawn beckons welcomingly.

A couple of weeks later, on the eve of my daughter’s sixth birthday, I went for another run on an atypically pleasant spring day in a rainy and cool season; signs are everywhere if we look. Again, I reflected on how far I had come. My daughter wasn’t even five years old when I began divorce proceedings. So much had improved since then. I prayed that both my daughter and my son were too young to remember my darkness.

And if they do remember the darkness or ever face their own terrible moments, I want them to realize darkness is ultimately extinguished by light. Winter cycles into spring. And storms give way to calm. The strength of the human spirit cannot wholly be captured by cliches, but it is in the dark that our essence truly starts to shine. And it is in the winter when the seeds of rebirth are sown. And after the darkness always comes the dawn.