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As I write this post, I am sitting in Manhattan Bagel in Westfield, NJ. This is the third time in about six days that I’ve found myself here, nibbling a sandwich or sipping tea, taking in a place I’ll likely never see again. Across the street, my old Ford Taurus, the car I call the mommobile, is in the hospital. My mechanic is working on it again so that my adult daughter, my 16-year-old son, the dog, cat, and I can pile in for a drive from Scotch Plains, N.J., to New Orleans, La, the city where I grew up, the city I’ve not lived in for more than 25 years, and the city to which I return.
I’ve been mulling the move over for more than a year, and this spring I determined I had to make this extended stretch of faith because living in New Jersey day to day, struggling alone with no family and not enough money has been an exercise of my faith muscle that I can no longer sustain. I’ve been working the New Jersey faith muscle since I moved to Scotch Plains in 2004 from Branchburg, N.J., the result of the end of a 23-plus year marriage. It’s time to stretch to keep from cramping.
Divorce and technicalities
I say a 23-plus-year marriage, but technically it was a 25-year marriage. Readers who’ve been divorced know how it goes. The marriage goes into a the critical-care unit for about two or three years, then falls into a coma, until you find yourself standing in a courtroom, looking hazily at a judge after a two-year battle with your estranged, soon-to-be ex-spouse. You’re waiting for the judge to pull the plug and state the legal time of death. You want the judge to pull the plug. You’re exhausted from the fight, the one to make the marriage work and the one for your freedom.
Some of you, those who had an amicable divorce and those who are still married don’t know much about what I’ve just said, and I say to you, “Count your blessings.†A “bitter divorce†leaves you and your children beaten and bloodied, crawling toward any sign of healing, hoping that what seems like eternal agony ceases. Whether you wanted the divorce or not, you come to a point where you feel deader than the marriage and you’d welcome burial.
I came to that point in 2003, but when the judge handed down the final divorce degree, I chose to stay in New Jersey because I didn’t want to create a hindrance to my former husband seeing his children. However, from the moment my children and I moved into the small three-bedroom house in Scotch Plains, I began trembling. Why hadn’t I moved back to New Orleans, I asked myself, back to friends and family, back to what was lower rent then, and the familiar soil of my ancestors from which my spirit could draw strength.
A life mirroring the hurricane
Spiritual winds tossed me along back then, the basket case trying to do what was best for the minor child and the grown one who attended Rutgers, and a woman full of rage, pounding it out daily in blog posts and poetry because that was better than facing betrayal. It wasn’t simply that my husband had betrayed me, but it was also that I had betrayed myself. I was not the person I thought I was at 20. At 20, I was young, dumb, and hopeful. I had the energy and dreams you see in the eyes of youth, that fierce faith that contends nothing can harm or stop you.
I wanted to feel that way as I staked my claim on the Jersey town with the best school system I could afford. We had to move to a new town because there was no affordable housing for rent in our old town. Also, I wanted to move to a Jersey city that may have relatively less expensive housing and little else. I didn't want to sacrifice my son to deteriorating school surrounded by gun shots, drugs, and the rottenness of dreams deferred. I didn’t want him to lose another thing simply because his father and I couldn’t get our acts together, neither putting the other ahead of self.
I didn’t want my son to lose anything else, and that’s why I kept the family