11 years married, 1 month divorced

A few days ago marked eleven years since Sadi and I got married in the Mesa temple. It also marked exactly one month since the day we told our kids we were getting divorced. While our divorce isn’t legally finalized yet, it became emotionally real that day.

The kids were the last ones to know. We talked it over endlessly with each other, with friends, with family - I even talked it over with the internet, on this same blog. I am grateful for that. When we first decided to get divorced, I wanted to tell the kids right away because I hate keeping things secret from people I care about. But I am grateful for every minute I had to metabolize the decision before bringing it to my children. I am grateful that I was able to give them the clearest possible picture of why I would be moving out.

They knew right away that something big was coming when we invited them over to the dinner table for a serious family talk. We began to talk about our best-friend kind of love, and how important it is to be with someone who loves you in a romantic way. Kate covered the lower half of her face and said, “Don’t say it, don’t say it.”

I honestly thought the whole thing would go over Sam’s head. He’s five, and I didn’t think he had a concept of divorce. But even before we said the word he blurted out, “Are you going to leave us?” 

We told him that we weren’t. He started to cry. Sadi held him on her lap and I stroked his arm as we continued to talk. Toward the end he asked us if we could stop being divorced when the coronavirus stopped being dangerous. We said we couldn’t, but we promised to love him and keep him safe. We told the big kids that this was a big moment, and it was ok to have big feelings about it like the ones Sam was having. Kate asked us if we would be taking off our wedding rings. When we said yes, a single tear rolled down her cheek.

Henry listened closely as we talked about all the ways we would still be together, and how I would still be a frequent, regular part of their lives. About how we were still a family, and we still loved each other. He had immediately jumped to the worst-case scenario, which for him was that I would be completely gone. With each statement that made it clear that wasn’t going to be the case, he let out a deep breath and blinked back tears. “Ok,” he said over and over. “Ok.”

We hugged them, and promised them that we would take care of them. We moved to the couch for a while and talked about how I grew up with divorced parents and I was ok. We talked about how our family would look different from other families, but that what really makes a family is love.

Then we went to the beach. We wanted to show them that we were still together, even if it was in a different way.

The beach was a balm on all our hearts. It was a quiet, sweet day, and our kids played together in the sand and in the surf, and we watched them and silently loved them.

When we got in the car to go home, Kate asked us, “What’s the reason for the divorce again?”

The reason is simple, and we gave her the simple answer. “Mom and dad can’t love each other in a romantic way, and we both want to find someone who we can love in that way.”

Maybe when they’re older I’ll be able to explain some of the nuances to that answer, nuances that I’m still trying to tease out for myself. I think most people assume that Sadi is the driver of our decision to get divorced. But while we’re both at peace with it, I’m the one who asked for it.

All I can say for sure about why I asked for the divorce is that it felt right to me, and staying married felt wrong. That feeling came in November of last year, and has been constant since then. All along I’ve struggled to articulate why it does feel right. It’s hard to express. I didn’t feel trapped in my marriage with Sadi. And I could see that there was a part of her that would be fulfilled by staying with me. It was the part of her that had watched her grandparents stand by each other decade after decade until the very end. 

I wanted to honor that part of her, but I’m not as strong as she is. Sadi was ready to bear an enormous weight for the rest of her life, and I believe she had the capacity to follow through. But I didn’t have the capacity to watch. Sadi believed in marriage so strongly that she was willing to sacrifice more than I could really comprehend. And simply watching her prepare to make that sacrifice was just too much for me.

That doesn’t capture the whole story. Sadi and I both went to the temple and found peace with divorce. We both prayed. We went back and forth on being the one most ready to end it now as opposed to later. But I do think it captures some of it.

A little less than a week after telling the kids, I moved out. Chad had been my housemate in college, and he and his wife Sarah have a place up in Altadena with a couple of spare rooms. It is a quiet, peaceful place. Chad and Sarah are quiet, peaceful people, and it has been a blessing to be around them.

That first week of living somewhere apart from my children was the darkest week of my life so far. I saw them every day, but then I would drive back to Altadena and feel the loss in a way that felt like a great stone weight crushing me into the ground.  I would lay by myself in bed at the end of the night and weep and struggle to breathe.

I kept breathing. And eventually I slept. And I woke up each morning, and did my work from home, and then drove back to be with my kids, to eat dinner with them and to tuck them in and to sing them lullabies. The weekend came and I took custody of the kids. We’ve arranged it so that they always stay in the same house, so me taking custody just means I come over and sleep on the air mattress downstairs. 

That first Friday night, Sadi went out to talk with a friend. The kids and I were sitting at the dinner table and I had my hands folded in front of me while they ate pizza.

Sam said, “Dad, can I see both of your hands?”

I spread them out. 

“Are you not wearing your ring because you and mom aren’t married anymore but we’re still a family?” he asked, the words coming out in a single breath.

“Yes,” I said.

“But we’re still a family?”

“Yep.”

Things got a little better. I saw my kids every day over the next three weeks, until it was time for their annual summer trip - first to a place by the beach, and then to Arizona.

Seeing the kids every day was probably good for them, but it was lifesaving for me. 

Every time I showed up and they were still there, I felt that weight lighten a little. When we spent a weekend binge-watching Avatar together, I felt like I could breathe.

Sadi and I weren’t going to see each other on our anniversary, but she forgot a few things that she needed for the Arizona trip, so I drove down that night and met her at a Wendy’s halfway between here and the beach. We got Frostys and talked for a couple of minutes, then I hugged her and drove home.

She looked good. The hair at her temples has some early gray in it, and the silver against the brown makes her look both wise and beautiful. 

She doesn’t belong to me anymore, but she belongs to herself. She looked at home in her own skin. She looked like she could breathe.

I guess that makes two of us.

Tabernacles of Clay

I found out something about myself last week that made me feel more comfortable in my own skin.

The insight came from a book written by a friend and delivered into my life by God.

The book is called Tabernacles of Clay. It's by Dr. Taylor Petrey, who I attended church with for a few months fifteen years ago. In his book, he collects what the leaders of my church have said about gender and sexuality. Then he carefully and compassionately does his very best to figure out something. He tries to figure out what those leaders really believed about what it means to be a boy or to be a girl, and to be in love.

The part that hit home for me was that, in my church and my culture, being a boy is a task. And it’s a task at which, in many ways, I have failed.

I kind of missed this, in part because the attributes of an ideal boy are often implied instead of plainly listed. What I am surprised I missed, though, is the message that being a boy is something I can fail at.

Now that I see it, it's obvious. Time after time I have heard my leaders say that the differences between men and women are eroding, and that this is contrary to God’s plan. I have constantly been told that the world is becoming less gendered, that this is a bad thing, and that it is going to take great effort on my part to stop it from happening. But somehow it still didn't occur to me that the thing I was supposed to do was try harder to be more of a boy.

One reason it was easy for me to miss the call to be more masculine was the actual behavior of the leaders I knew and looked up to. Most of the ones I admired were sensitive, kind, emotional men. The classically masculine men - aggressive, abrasive, emotionally stunted - never seemed like role models to me. Despite the messaging, it was clear to me that masculinity did not correlate with morality. In fact, it kind of seemed like the opposite was true.

But what I realized in reading Taylor’s book is that even though I don’t think it is morally better to be more of a boy, how much of a boy I actually am is something I do have to take responsibility for and make decisions about. 

Intellectually I am aware that gender is socially constructed, and that it has to be performed. But it was hard to see that because of another idea about gender that I had internalized in its place.

The idea was that gender is fixed and binary, and it got talked about a lot at church. One oft-quoted statement was that “gender is an essential characteristic of individual … identity and purpose.” The way I naively interpreted it, being a boy was something that was assigned to me by biology, and so it wasn’t something I had to do anything about. Nothing I did could possibly make me anything other than a boy, so how “boyish” I was seemed irrelevant. If I wear pink, and I’m a boy, then by definition wearing pink is a thing that boys do. It’s just as “boyish” as fixing cars and having trouble talking about feelings. I didn’t dislike my body, so I had to find a way to be at peace with my gender.

But Taylor’s book made me realize that this isn’t really what was meant by that “gender is … essential” phrase. Now that I see it in the context of everything else church leaders say about gender, I can see that it’s not descriptive, it’s aspirational. Gender should be something that’s essential to my identity and purpose. But I have to work at it. I have to preside, protect, and provide. I have to live up to some standard of gendered behavior that the rest of the world is abandoning. I have to choose how much of a boy I’m going to be.

And when I realized that even my conservative church leaders believe that gender is something we choose to perform, or not to perform, it suddenly gave me permission to believe it too. And when I started to believe it, something shifted inside my chest. Some new space opened up in my lungs, and I took a breath that was deeper than any of the ones I’d taken before.

I like my body, and I like being attracted to women. But being a boy has often made me really uncomfortable. It made me feel trapped in a club with a lot of people that I didn’t identify with. It made me feel like all my complexity and humanity were constrained by my biology. It took away choice. It made me feel limited.

Whenever I wanted to develop one of my feminine traits, I felt like I had to petition the world to expand the definition of what makes a boy. Just like feminists called on the definition of womanhood to be expanded to include ambition, aggression, and pleasure, I wanted the definition of manhood to be expanded to include nurturing, surrender, and intuition. I thought that I was stuck being either a boy or a girl. Since I didn't want to become a girl, I had to ask for feminine traits to be made accessible to me.

I have a clear biological sex, and I feel comfortable with that biology. It feels like me. But I now realize that has only a secondary relationship to my actual gender. I don't have to ask for feminine traits to be part of boyhood. Sometimes, I can just be a girl. It's a move that takes away the need for me to fight cultural battles in order to be my authentic self.

Before, I would argue that "true" masculinity includes changing diapers. What I meant by that is that I wanted the stereotype to change, so that the masculine trait would trade places with the feminine trait, or just disappear altogether. And I still think that's a righteous cause. If people step up and change diapers, independent of their gender, someday soon that stereotype will evaporate. And that will be a cause for celebration.

But in the meantime, I can just be more of a girl when it comes to changing diapers. Being a girl is a more moral choice for me, because the way boys deal with diapers feels sub-human.

I can't change what society expects of a girl or a boy. But I can choose which gender I perform in any given part of my life. That's a human right that can't be taken away from me.

I am not constrained to be only a boy. And I am also not constrained to be only a girl. The whole array of feminine and masculine traits are laid out for me to take up. I can choose to develop feminine traits, I can choose to develop masculine traits, or I can choose to develop both. And if I develop both masculine and feminine traits, I will be less of a boy than I could be. I will fail at what my culture expects me to accomplish in terms of my gender.

And that is a wonderful thought.

Now that I acknowledge that gender is a set of choices, I reject the idea that my moral task is to push myself towards the masculine. I think my moral task is to discover the gender identities that allow me to be the most authentic version of myself. And choosing to act as a more authentic me is the way I feel touched by the divine.

So that’s what I meant when I said that this book was delivered to me by God. It came into my life with a timing that was cosmically perfect, and it tapped me on the soul and invited me to open up. It made me feel like a more complete human being at a time when I desperately needed to feel that way.

I recommend the book, and I also recommend embracing your god-given ability to perform your own gender.

Love to all.

PS: I use “Taylor” instead of “Dr. Petrey” when I talk about the author of Tabernacles of Clay. I mean no disrespect by this. In fact, my intention is quite the opposite. I admire the hard work and effort that it takes for someone to get a PhD, but I have even greater admiration for someone who used their graduate training to develop relevant skills that make them able to help out the world in a unique way. The power of Taylor’s work doesn’t come from the institution that granted him a doctorate - it comes from his brilliant mind and his generous soul. And that’s what I wanted to emphasize with the (lack of) honorifics.