‘We Found Our Groove in Splitting Up’

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Statistics indicate that marriages have about a 50 percent success rate, but I didn’t think that applied to us. My plan for the next five decades was too important to allow for doubt. A character in one of my plays says to his partner, “I don’t ever want to prove that gay marriages are just like straight ones because they end in divorce” — a line that haunted me the last years my husband and I were together, especially once it proved true.

But a funny thing happened on the way to divorce court: We found our groove in splitting up. We agreed as much as possible to keep marriage and parenting in separate lanes. We may have whisper-screamed our hurt feelings at each other, but we kept our voices low enough that our daughter had no idea. Every bit of news about our family’s future was delivered to our daughter by both of us, face to face and side by side, replete with assurances: We love you, we care about each other, we are still family.

Our friends heard the worst stories we could tell about each other, but our daughter? We fiercely protected her ability to love us both. It didn’t matter if the contract had been broken between her dads; we honored the contract we had made as parents to safeguard her life. The fact that this remained true even when we felt wounded and angry is nothing short of a miracle.

All the concrete details — who was cooking her dinner on which nights, how she was getting to cheer practice, what paperwork we needed for summer camp — provided the safest language for communication. Treating each other as antagonists wouldn’t help her pass math class or raise money to go to nationals with her squad, so we didn’t, and she quickly learned our primary rule: no playing us against each other to get her way. Our personal interactions are not always effortless, but time and a shared focus on parenting helped diminish the rawness of our break from open wounds to tender spots.

After graduating from divorcing parents’ class, we moved on to mediation, our state’s favorite mode of divorce. By then it had been more than three years since my husband moved out, so we were overdue to pull this legal trigger. Our mediator was lovely, if a bit scattered. Above her desk hung a creepy marionette of a blank-faced boy, looking like a child who had lost the will to live. She never explained why it was there.

By the end of our first session, neither my husband nor I were capable of words. It wasn’t just the math or list of practical considerations; the reality of divorce was itself sobering. I remembered my proposal on a hot September day in a new apartment with Chinese food on the table and Tuck and Patti on the CD player. I saw the smiling faces of our loved ones at our wedding as we said our simple vows: “I choose you for all my life.”

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