Starting Over

By December

Prologue: Reboot

At a point sometime in the past….

A redheaded woman walked out of a Canadian courtroom and took a deep breath. Not because she was relieved, as the less than charitable would assume. Not because she was nervous, at least, not as she understood nervousness. No, she took a deep breath because she wasn't sure what to do next.

It was an odd feeling, she conceded as she walked to her car, her heels clicking on the steps down to the parking lot. It was like she had finished a big project or climbed some big mountain…without a plan of what to do afterwards. At least some of the guilt she felt at moments like this stemmed from not having a plan. She didn't think she should have been expected to have a plan at this point; however, this wasn't her dissertation proposal, after all. That was still a long way off, thankfully.

All that musing had brought her to her car, but she found she didn't want to drive away yet. She wasn't sure exactly where she would drive to, anyway. The short and relatively friendly court proceedings had triggered a restart button on her life. When she thought about it, she had just been administered a massive life reboot, because this change actually affected her very identity. It is a little hard to know where you are going if you are no longer sure who you are.

Before she walked into the courtroom that day she was Abigail Marie Lawson Venturi, Abby to her friends. She was a wife, a mother, a graduate student, but, in spite of how active she was, she was not as happy as she wanted to be. Before signing that last piece of paperwork, she was a starter and co-captain for Team Venturi; now she felt like a new-hire adjunct professor without an office. And, yes, she felt so lost that the odd comparison aptly described her situation. Who was she now?

There were a few things she did know. In many circles, she would still be Abigail Venturi. As she had three children with that last name, she still wanted to maintain some tie to them. Especially since she and her now ex-husband had decided that the children were best served living with him. She was afraid if she changed her name that she'd lose that much more of her children, whom she adored.

When she got that PhD in Biology, however, the degree was going to say Abgail Marie Lawson. The degree was her achievement, not her husband's. Some might say her Venturi identity was a causality of her pursuit of the graduate degree, although she thought that was a very simplistic summary of what happened to her marriage. That meant some people would (eventually) call her Dr. Lawson. The idea was strange because she had never expected to be called "doctor" anything in her life.

But her uncertainty about her identity was bigger than what last name she would put on forms or sign on documents. It was about how she fit into the larger world. No one talked about this before people got married. Even with the high divorce rate, everyone just assumed that the couple they knew would be the couple to make it. Friends and family spent a lot of time talking about how to merge two "I"s into a "We." No one ever talked about how one takes a "We" apart to find her "I" again.

When people did talk about divorce to women, the only identity they focused on was the parental one. Along with every expression of sympathy she had received when she began to tell people about the coming end of her marriage, Abby had always been asked the question, "How in the world are you going to manage three kids on your own?" People were quick to recommend support groups, magazines, and on-line resources. Everyone assumed that she would still be parent in chief. Most of them couldn't hide their surprise – and often censure – when she shared that her children's father would retain custody.

Some days she wasn't sure if she was still allowed to use the title of "mother". There were some who would probably say she wasn't. But, if fathers who didn't get custody in divorces still got to be some version of "father," she figured she got to be some version of "mother." Although what that title meant would probably have to be re-defined. No one had thought to warn her about that either.

In essence, no one ever talked about how to start over. She took the deep breath, Abby realized, because that was what she was doing. Starting over. After years of having identity A, she needed to deconstruct, reconstruct, and find identity B. She sighed. The idea just made her head hurt.

Just as she had convinced herself to walk somewhere so that she could sit and think, her watch beeped. It was one-thirty. She had a graduate seminar in an hour at Western, the University of Western Ontario, where she was working on her degree. The reminder was a relief. She could do the work of starting over later. For now, she could lose herself in lots of information about other living things besides herself.

At another point, in another past, in another country….

He hung up the phone. It was official. His marriage was now a statistic.

It was an amicable process, all told. So many of his colleagues had shared horror stories about how their first (or second, or third) marriage ended that he had briefly been nervous. He should have known better. After that huge blow-up that led to him moving out, Nora had been nothing but mature and responsible about the whole thing. Although he was sure if he asked his new ex, she would probably say that the process didn't seem so bad because he had been missing in action for years.

The occasional underhanded catty comments actually made him feel better, in a perverse sense. He must have mattered for Nora to even be a little wounded. It was nice to know he wasn't alone in this whole strange hurt-but-relieved feeling.

Everyone around him seemed to be jazzed about this "exciting stage" in his life. His co-workers were encouraging him to throw everything he had into becoming a partner. They would say things like, "It's not like you have family responsibilities anymore, right?" His friends were all excited about this "new page" he was turning. He had heard much more about the nightlife in New York and in Toronto in the past week than he ever wanted to know. Whether he wanted to or not, he was encouraged to embrace this reboot.

This enthusiasm actually annoyed Dennis a lot. Starting over wasn't as easy as everyone seemed to think. He had been married to Nora for years. It was hard to think of what it meant not to have a Nora, even if ending it had been the best thing. Sure, his name didn't change. He was still Dennis Tristan McDonald. Yet, he didn't feel that was fair. If Nora had to have a debate about what name she should use, shouldn't he have to have a similar debate as well? It wasn't like the title of "ex" was solely hers, after all.

And then there were his little girls. They still called him Daddy and he did miss them. Sure, he still saw them when he could and Nora was nothing if willing to work with him on visitation. In fact, her biggest demand was that he stayed involved in the girls' lives. Yet, he wasn't sure if he was allowed to be "Daddy" in the same ways he was Daddy all those years ago in Toronto. He wouldn't be around to celebrate Family Day in February. He wouldn't struggle to put up the tree that Christmas (although it had been a few years since he had). His life of being a father was starting over as well.

This was so different than any case he had to prepare for and nothing like any scenario for which his training would have prepared him. Everyone seemed to think that ending a marriage for a male wasn't a big deal, that it was a minor starting over when compared to what the women went through. For the first time, Dennis realized how unfair that was. He was just as unsure about what to do next as (he would bet money) Nora was. Nora, however, was allowed a support network by virtue of being female; one that didn't seem to extend to the male half of the divorce.

Already, friends they had as a couple were choosing sides. Most of them either chose Nora or chose to dump them both. In the end, he had a few unmarried college buddies, a female or two whose intentions might not be so pure, and lawyers at the firm.

Dennis sighed. It wasn't surprising that men carved out a work identity after a divorce. When starting over after you legally reneged on your wedding vows, you weren't really allowed to start rebuilding your identity anywhere else.