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How to survive the Holiday Season – For the Newly Divorced

Date: December 17, 2012
Author: julietjeske
Categories: Depression, Divorce, Relationships, Uncategorized
Comments: 7 Replies

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This is a topic I have written about extensively in the past, but since I consider myself a divorce advocate I wanted to re-visit it.  The holidays are rough…hang in there guys! 🙂 

I wanted to write this piece because I really think a lot of the “Advice for Divorced People” websites, books and other resources might be written by people who have never actually been divorced.  Some of the post-divorce holiday advice is extremely helpful, and some comes across as overly chipper, insensitive and a bit clueless.

My first Christmas without my husband I felt completely numb.  I had made the mistake of having an intense rebound relationship before I was ready.   That brief affair ended dramatically less than a month before Christmas.   On the big day itself, I sat in my aunt’s house surrounded by my family and felt nothing.  Everyone looked at me as if I was a ghost.  It had only been six months since I found out the truth about my marriage.  Nine years of my life that I thought was the strongest relationship I had ever had, was now a fraud.   I found it especially painful that I was sharing the holiday with relatives who were in my wedding party.  It meant so much for me to have them a part of that day.  I wanted to go up to each one of them and apologize for letting them down.  We were all actors in a play that had gotten re-written midway.  Instead of a happy ending, it closed with a surprise twist and tragic finale. My loss overwhelmed me with a deep sense of shame.  None of my relatives blamed me, but I couldn’t escape the guilt.  Ultimately, I had picked the wrong partner. Little did I know things for me were going to have to get much worse for me before they got better.  I was about to spiral out of control into an episode of life-threatening depression.

That was three years ago, and much has happened in my life since then.  I haven’t really had much romance, but I have healed and moved forward.  My marriage had been the center of my happiness.  I had made myself co-dependent on one person and I paid dearly for that mistake.  Now I have this crazy network of unique, creative and astonishingly wonderful friends to whom I am eternally grateful.  I never want to go back to isolating myself emotionally to one person.  The trauma of my divorce also helped heal wounds I had with my family.  I feel healthier and happier than I have in years.  But there is always the holiday season, when the gray clouds loom and I find myself fighting back the demons in my head.

If you are newly divorced and reading this, I am not going to sugarcoat your obstacles. Divorce is hell.  It can cause a slew of emotional problems and even trigger mental illness.  The catastrophe of divorce can also fuel substance abuse and any number of self-destructive behaviors.   Anyone who has gone through a divorce understands the added loss of friendships and family members.  Some friends you thought were lifelong will drift away post-split. You might also be worried about your children, or blame yourself for failing them.  For many divorced people the biggest hurdle is overcoming the feeling of shame.

Don’t listen to those negative voices.  Marriages fall apart for all sorts of reasons.  Many couples just fall out of love, or learn they can’t live with each other in a healthy environment.  Other marriages are frauds from day one with partners victimized in green card scams, serial cheaters, or deceitful spouses.  You have every right to feel angry and to express pain, but at the end of the day, it is better to focus on repairing the damage and moving forward.  Regardless of who ended the marriage, both partners experience damage.  You can succumb and spiral downward or you can fight back.   Get help if you need it, either through therapy, counseling or medication.  Don’t let depression or substance abuse take over your life.  It will get better. Your fairy tale may have fallen apart, but you will have another chapter.  Even though it might feel like it, your life is not over.

There is no substitute for time.  However bad you feel now, know that it won’t always be like this. The holiday season is just hyped up to make a lot of people a lot of money.  In the long run it is just a short time out of the year and it will be over before you know it.  A better day to celebrate might be seeing a movie with your kids, or a football game with your dad, or just having drinks with your best friend.  Don’t let the build up of holiday parties and family obligations get to you.  As I have said many times on this blog, no one is fortunate all of the time.  We all have our ups and downs, and if you are recently divorced, you are going through a lot.  Just remember, things will get better, and you are not alone.  Much Love.

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Life After Divorce – The Holiday Blues

Date: December 26, 2011
Author: julietjeske
Categories: Depression, Divorce, Relationships
Comments: 2 Replies

This is just a message to all of my regular readers.  I don’t intend on trying to get this published anywhere else but on this blog.  The holidays were never a gray area for me growing up.  My family had its issues, as every family has problems, but Christmas was always a joyous time filled with great memories.  From year to year I can never recall what I did for my birthday, or how I spent New Year‘s eve.  Since I work in special events I consider it bad luck if I am not working on nearly every other holiday,  but Christmas is something else entirely, I can tell you exactly where I celebrated it, what I gave and got for presents and what I ate.

I didn’t really understand holiday melancholy until I got divorced.  The first Thanksgiving after I left my husband I tried to keep to the same routine.  A couple that had invited us year after year decided to ask me up and Joel spent the day at the Big Apple circus.  Despite everyone’s best intentions in trying to keep my spirits up I felt like a living ghost.  No one knew what to say to me, so I would get looks of pity and little else.  The hostess tried valiantly to connect with me and try to cheer me up and I will never forget her kind gesture, but to everyone else it was if I wasn’t there.  Conversations would swirl around me and I would pick up phrases here or there but my mind kept drifting to a black void of numbness.  I couldn’t focus for anything but that I had sat in the same room with the same people year after year only this time my husband wasn’t with me.  In the middle of the evening I snuck upstairs to call my brother.  I needed a lifeline out of these frozen memories of past good times.  I just desperately wanted my old life back, even if it was a life based on lies more than anything else.  The host took a photo of everyone around the table and my spirit was so crushed at the time, I actually look gray.  It almost looks like I was photo-shopped into the picture, everyone is smiling and then this odd depressed woman in the corner.

That Christmas I went home to Missouri and stayed with my sister.   I was financially ruined, brokenhearted and alone.  I had no hope that anything was going to get better.  What had happened to my life?  What was going to become of me?  On top of the disaster of my divorce, I had just broken off the relationship that I now call the supernova.  It was a rebound relationship that nearly destroyed me.  I was at the lowest point in my life that I had ever been.  About a month after that Christmas celebration I got into therapy and on antidepressants as I had become out of control and suicidal.

It is now two years later and I feel like a totally different person, but the residual effects still linger.  This year a few days before Thanksgiving I felt dark clouds hovering over me, I had to beat them back with constant reminders of how far I had come and all the good things and people in my life.  The best change is that now, I am no longer dependent on another human being or a marriage for my happiness.

If you are going through a rough time and you stumbled on this blog.  It does get better.  Maybe not in the way you think it will, and it may take a long time for it to happen.  Try as much as you can to surround yourself with people who support and love you, and there are always people who support and love you no matter what you may think now.  Life is just a roller coaster and some of us have to stay near the bottom for a long time before it swings back up, and you may never know what direction that upswing will take you.  If you need professional help with your depression, get the help you need by any means necessary.  The mental illness of depression really can become bigger than you, positive thinking is not going to make it magically float away.  You may need an objective third-party to help you  pull yourself up.  Try to avoid anyone who is not taking your situation seriously or making light of it, they probably mean well but they can do more harm than good.  I know when I was drowning in depression having someone flippantly say

“Other people have bigger problems than you do”

“Go out and get over it”

“You should just get wasted and forget about it”

Comments like these were like pouring salt on my wound.  A major loss takes time, and you should instead surround yourself with people who have genuine sympathy for your situation.  Fellow divorced people, or friends who have experienced a similar loss such as a death are the best people to find for support.  A friend who has been through the same thing will understand you better than anyone.

And if you know someone going through a rough time, sit down with them and just listen.  You don’t have to fix their problems, but sometimes just being a person to hear their pain and their story is more important than anything else.  Try to give them the patience they need, as a person in crisis is bound to be a needy emotional mess.  Give them room and allow them their time to grieve.  There are no magic bullets or overnight successes when dealing with loss.  And remember more than anything, before you know it the holidays will be over and everyone will go back to life as usual.

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Life After Divorce – Kiddie Table Banishment

Date: December 7, 2011
Author: julietjeske
Categories: Divorce, Gay Husband, Relationships, Straight Spouse, Uncategorized
Comments: 2 Replies

English: Saying grace before carving the turke...

No one likes to talk about it.  But I have heard from a few friends that post-divorce this problem is quite common.  There is some real estate that is downright coveted come holiday time.  And sometimes post-divorce you lose your stake at it.  And that real estate would be getting a seat at the adult table during holiday meals.  This doesn’t apply to everyone, as not everyone has a huge extended family.  Or if they do they at least have a big enough table so that everyone can sit together.   But for many families, it is simply not possible to put all the adults together and there comes a point when you just don’t want to sit at the kiddie table anymore.

It usually goes like this, when you are married and you come home for the holidays no one would dream of putting you at the kids table.  Just as it is assumed that you will also be expected to send out Christmas or Chanukah cards now that you are a married adult, it is also assumed that your spouse will not be forced to sit and eat with your nine-year old niece.  So things are done, seating arrangements adjusted so that your new addition to the family will not suffer the fate of being treated like a child.  When you get divorced however, everything can change.  Especially when a new member of your generation gets married that year.  Suddenly you find your status lowered.  Much like a single person with no date at a wedding, you are not going to get prime seating.  You instead end up at the table with misfits, and in this case the misfits have bibs, braces or acne.   Or worse yet, it is all of your fellow divorced adult cousins or siblings.  The table of rejects, the table of shame.

Well I say instead of coveting a seat with the adults, look at it this way.  Sure it is the table where wine is openly served but the conversation can drift to octogenarians complaining about their medications and health problems, or a crazy uncle trying to convert everyone to his conspiracy theory political beliefs so look on the bright side.  You now get to sit with the fun crew.  They might even break out into song or start a food fight.

The holidays are horrible anyway when you are newly divorced because even if you wanted desperately out of the marriage it seems every single thing around you is sending a message that you are somehow broken and sad because you are no longer one half of a couple.  Instead of being defeated by your new status of adult child, just think about the perks.

  • No one will expect a holiday card from you this year or one of those annoying family photo cards
  • You get to hang with children where you can openly mock everything without judgment
  • You can bring your own bottle of wine and drink it all by yourself
  • No one will judge you for what you eat or how fast you eat it
  • You can learn about video games, cartoons and comic books
  • Everyone at the kiddie table will eat pie, so just bask in the joy of eating pie with children!

I never understood why people always dreaded the holidays until I got divorced, and now I understand the holiday dread all too well.  But instead of being defeated by it, I am just going to party with my nine-year old niece and bask in the joys of being a misfit at the table of freaks!

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