Your New Life is Going to Cost You Your Old One

I came upon the title of this essay the other day and I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about it. Most likely because it encapsulates the last two years of my life wherein I have been working simultaneously as both midwife and undertaker. I know, I know. That sounds terribly and embarrassingly dramatic. Like I spooned it from the pages of one of the journals I kept as a teenager when I was well-versed in overstating absolutely everything. Yet that doesn’t make it any less true.

            A midwife is someone who assists a mother-to-be in the process of birthing a child. An undertaker is someone whose business is preparing dead bodies for burial or cremation and making arrangements for funerals. There is also something called a death doula and, in retrospect, that might be the more appropriate term for this particular piece of writing. A death doula is someone who assists others in the process of dying, much like a midwife assists in the process of birthing. Essentially, midwives and death doulas differ only in stage of life. They make preparations, support physical function, coach family members and oversee ceremony or ritual in perhaps our two most intimate life events: birth and death. For those of us who are lucky in love and circumstance, both moments are also accompanied by the ringing of bells. One peal of bells celebrates new life and opportunity while the second celebrates a life lived and experiences had.

            During the course of life, however, there are also other kinds of deaths besides the literal, end-of-life death. Sometimes our lives are interrupted by small, figurative deaths. A change in career, a sudden shift in circumstances (positive or negative), a move, a loss, an injury, a divorce. The kinds of changes that require such seismic shifts within ourselves that, when we cast backwards to look at who we once had been, we hardly recognize our former selves. We find it rather remarkable that we used to look/feel/work/express/create/speak/do in such a way. These are the moments when we might say something like “back in another life time” or “it seems that such and such happened to someone else entirely.”  

            In a sense, these new lives that we are living literally cost us our old lives. Sometimes this life change was involuntary – something that we didn’t want or will or manipulate into being. This would be the life-altering injury, the sudden plummet into poverty or the experience or series of experiences wherein we believe ourselves victimized. But other times these new lives are self-willed: an intentional choice to become parent or spouse, a change in career, the decision to move or divorce or somehow dramatically alter how we live our daily lives. Sometimes this new life is the result of gradually shifting our perspective over time through daily exercise, practice or meditation.  Regardless, the results are the same. We shift, we morph. How we used to be is no longer how we are.

In order to coax such change, we literally go through the motions of putting to death a former life or identity in order to birth the new life or identity. We act, essentially, as both death doula and midwife to ourselves. Only this time the order is reversed: death first, birth last. Sometimes the border between the two bleeds and it can be hard to tell when the death ended and the birth began. But, in time, there is a definitive new way of being and you can look backwards and see, in the rearview, the former self. He or she might even be someone you no longer recognize. He or she might have experienced something that you no longer even remember as having been your own experience and it is then that you might say something like did that even happen to me? Kind of cool -  exhilarating even - especially when the change results in a better you.

But what about the people who are inadvertently pulled into the tide of your change or, worse, actively resist the tide of your change? Most of us don’t live in a vacuum and have people who depend on us and might even prefer that we remain in the identity or way of being that they are accustomed to. Say, for instance, those children who are caught in the tide of divorce. My circumstances exactly.

After several years of tension, strain and disappointment, I finally worked up the courage to leave my ex-husband. And, in hindsight, I believe that I didn’t quite understand the scope of how this decision would impact my children. My parents divorced when I was five and, along with my mother and sisters, I moved a five hour’s distance from my father and former home. I remember it being a big change, certainly, but not an especially painful one. Perhaps that was because this new life felt exciting – a new house, a new school, new friends. And, we had moved from a small town in Vermont to Maine’s biggest city – Portland. Sweeping changes! So it’s possible that the transition was not especially painful because of all the distraction. But, in all likelihood, the transition was not particularly painful simply by virtue of my age. I was five years old.

If I sift through my childhood memories before my parents split, I only have one wherein my parents were actually together, occupying the same space. Instead, most of my first memories are of seemingly insignificant moments or of exclusively sensory things: a melting ice cream sandwich or an itchy, smocked sundress; my big brother wrapping up in a blanket and jumping out to frighten me or my mother warning me not to wander down to the creek behind the house. The only memory I actually have of my parents together was at dinner time one evening in Vermont – my father had called us to the table, we had taken our seats and my mother was passing out plates. I remember admiring a pin she had stuck to her turtle neck shirt. And that’s it. That’s the extent of how I remember my parents together as a couple. Not much to grieve there.

This is not the case, however, for my three children. They were 15, 13 and 10 years old when my ex and I separated. Very much old enough to have many waking memories of what it was like to have married parents and an intact family all living beneath the same roof. They remember the family, in its nuclear form, celebrating holidays, going on ski trips, flying to Mexico, cleaning the house on a Sunday afternoon or making school lunches on a Wednesday morning. In essence, they easily remember the family living together as one entity, as one unit. Our family was, in truth, their only point of reference and their life compass. Of course they would not want nor welcome a divorce; a divorce could only serve to upend their lives and sever what had once been whole and quite comfortable.

As children, they had no quarrel with their father, no beef with their mother. They likely sensed that there was some difficulty or tension between my ex and me, but not enough to leave them feeling strained within the family construct. Although my ex and I had moments wherein we were unable to contain an argument, or days wherein my kids likely noted his absence and my sadness, I think for the most part we shielded our discomfort from them at least to the extent that the kids continued to feel safe and comfortable in the home. They knew there were rumblings of thunderstorms brewing, but they probably felt that those rumbles were distant enough to not actually come raining and thrashing down on their heads.

But the storm did come raining down on them that evening in late November of 2019 when we announced our separation. Truthfully speaking, I alone had decided to end the life the five of us shared as a unified family, with mother, father and children intact. In other words, it was me who lay it down, who put it to rest, who acted, dramatically speaking, as the grim reaper or the death doula. Of course my children were the hapless victims swept up in the current of life change that I was heaping on all of them – how could they be otherwise? Of course they resisted the tide of my change. Their lives were good, safe, secure, predictable, easy.

So my question is this: yes, my new life cost me my old life and yes, I have paid a price – we ALL have paid the price, including my ex and my children; but when, if ever, will I have paid my dues? And does the person who administers change so that she can improve her own life forever have a debt to those who were inadvertently swept in the tide of that change? Especially when those swept into the tide of change are her very own children.

Let me be clear. I am not trying to sidestep obligation. I am not trying to avoid consequences. I am not afraid to stand still and stare responsibility in the face. But I am not at all convinced that my decision to leave my children’s father is the ultimate indicator of their happiness or lack thereof. First, it takes two. My husband contributed at least as much as I did to the erosion of our marriage; I was simply the one who finally decided to call a spade a spade. Secondly, at some point in time everyone has to accept responsibility for their own happiness. Because, as painful as it is, shit happens to absolutely everyone, regardless of gender, race, creed, class or nationality. Parents divorce, someone dies, money is lost, friends disappoint, someone quits, another is fired. But as much as shit happens, so, too, does beauty happen. Someone marries, a child is born, money is earned, friends deliver, someone is hired, another one is promoted. In life, there is always both loss and celebration, love and grief, gaining and losing. And this pendulum swing between holding and letting go is as inevitable as the tide, as the sun rising or the moon setting.

In the end, change is our only constant and children, at some point, must learn that this is so. And in the learning of this undeniable truth should also come the realization that only we – the individual, the soul and spirit inside the body – are ultimately responsible for our own happiness. Sometimes we can lean on others, yes. Sometimes, we can depend on others, certainly. And we can lean and depend on others because community is as much a fact as is the individual. But if change is constant, then the community may also, at some point, change. And when community alters and not everyone moves in the movement of the alteration, what is left? The individual.

Every single one of us is an individual. Every single one of us has to get comfortable with ourselves and learn how to sit with ourselves, to ferret out happiness, to take, as it were, a slice of the pie.

And so I am left with the dawning realization that my ultimate responsibility to my children - despite the fact that I acted as their grim reaper, their death doula – is to continue to love them as best I can. To guide them as best I can. To provide them with as much opportunity as I can. But to also leave them the space to take ownership of their own happiness and of the trajectory of their own futures because, in the end, that responsibility will inevitably be their own to bear.