Journal Entry 9.13.23

One of the greatest losses I have endured is the loss of my identity as “a family”.  In 2019, I had a parent, a husband, a son, a nuclear family, and an extended family.  In 2020, I had a son. 

My identity was always tied to “family”, both the big, extended Appell family who were “a thing” identifiable by our history and legacy, creating an uncomfortable edifice on which I could lean, even though it was cold and impersonal.  I then created a family identity with my husbands and son.  I found comfort in the word “we”.  So much so that after my divorce, my son scolded me for using it so often.  “Don’t say ‘we’” he would say “when it is ‘you’ doing the work”.  I felt safety in “we” as if “I” was not big enough.  I wanted our little family (a smaller “we” than I had hoped for, reduced by miscarriage) to be a thing of its own, separate and different but connected to the larger family.  I already felt so alone, not having family to attach to scared me.  I felt I might fall off the planet earth if I wasn’t connected to other people even by the most tenuous of threads.  My identity as a family was based on commonality—the things we all shared.  Autonomy was secondary to inclusion.  “We” skied.  “We” traveled.  “We” were artists.  “We” had these traditions.

December 2020 my son and I sat in my new house in Maine.  My father was newly dead, my husband living two states away, my new house, dingy and grey, devoid of my belongings.  We had been banned from the family home in Phillips by my niece who felt that we were COVID carriers and so her anxiety overwhelmed our losses.  We had none of our holiday trappings.  My son had just graduated college without any ceremony or notice.  We tried not to feel the absence and inadequacy.  My son and I each gave each other small symbolic gifts.  I felt tears when he handed me a shawl pin he had made from silver.  I think I gave him a sketchbook and a few small things like a box of salt I had bought at the grocery store.  We had a sad, small Christmas tree with dusty, glass ornaments I had discovered in the barn.  We had no celebratory meal.  We decided to take a walk around the point to mark the significance of the day.  That is when the abusive texts began.

Christmas 2020—the Christmas of the abusive texts.

December 16, 2021 I was declared divorced from my second husband.  I was divorced over Zoom, the effects of COVID still felt in the court system in Maine.  My husband tried to act competent and superior, newly shaved, looking down his nose at legal papers I knew he hadn’t read.  My lawyer and I led the entire proceedings, his lawyer lost shuffling papers she clearly hadn’t paid much attention to either.  The absurdity of divorcing over Zoom almost otherworldly.

I couldn’t bear to spend celebrate Christmas with my larger family celebrating when I had just had such a significant loss.  My son, having lost not just one family, but two, with each successive father leaving his life, taking their extended families with them, could not bear to miss Christmas at the family seat with his larger family.  So, I spent Christmas alone in a family cabin with a pile of buoys as my Christmas tree.  The following spring my sister took the buoys to the dump.  The day after Christmas, I joined my son at the family seat.  No one mentioned my divorce. 

Christmas 2021—Christmas alone, newly divorced.

In 2022, my son and I completed our first trip to Asia to get my work back on track after the years of lockdowns.  We traveled to Bhutan, Nepal, and Borneo.  We had intended to spend Christmas in Prague, but Putin’s war on Ukraine and the high cost of oil had caused our friend to close up her glass shop and return to her apartment in Manhattan.  On a whim, we contact new friends of ours from Vinalhaven who rented out apartments in France.  We were invited to stay with them for Christmas in Provence.  We had a very quiet week with our friends, taking walks in the countryside, eating good food, and resting after our trip to the top of the Himalayas and the tropics.  Our friends bought and sold antiques and took us to their favorite flea markets.  My son and I quickly bought each other small meaningful gifts.  I gave him two silver drawing implements; he brought me a copper pan.  We got the obligatory abusive texts.

Christmas 2022—Christmas in Provence with new friends.

This year, who knows what will transpire.  Hawk, still worried about losing family connections, wants to attend Christmas with his cousins at the family seat.  I do not.  The falseness and emptiness of the relationships hurts too much.  The niece who banned me the year I was first alone will be there.  She will not apologize.  The sister who ignored my divorce will be there.  She will not acknowledge the pain.  I will poach someone else’s family Christmas most likely.  Squatting on someone else’s family identity and tradition.  My own completely erased.

Christmas 2023--???

I am still so clearly in a state of loss.  I can only see what is not.  I want to be ready to take the next step, but I am not yet done with the experiencing what I have lost.  Will this entire endeavor on this trip be symbolic, but not true?  Will I be able to force transformation if I am not ready to transform.  A monarch butterfly cannot grow wings and fly away from its chrysalis simply because we want it to.  Transformation takes time.  And something more…magic?

I must release and unbind myself from the past, but the gathering up of a new identity is also going to be important.  How will I do that?  How will I take the threads of my identity and create something new and wonderful?