Mary Jo Eustace - Divorce Sucks: What to do when irreconcilable differences, lawyer fees, and your exs Hollywood wife make you miserable

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Mary Jo Eustace and Im divorced. I have two children, so I guess technically speaking, Im a single mother, even though that label still catches me off guard. Im forty-six years old, although many tabloids peg me at sixty-two (but more of that fun stuff later).

Im just a nice girl from Canada who came to California with my then six-year-old son and my seemingly adoring husband to fulfill his childhood dream of becoming a big, huge American star. We packed up our lives and relocated to Los Angeles leaving our house, friends, families, and careers (mine at least) behind. We moved into a Leave It to Beaver neighborhood, complete with white picket fences and oranges that spilled off the trees while kids played on the streets all year round. We marched in the Halloween parade and celebrated the Fourth of July with enormous pride and my world famous teriyaki burgers.

And just as we started to settle into our own little version of a Norman Rockwell painting, another bolt of good fortune came our way. We were chosen by a birth mother to be the adoptive parents of her darling little girl, my beautiful (now three-year-old) daughter, Lola. After years of failed fertility treatments and adoption home studies we were now parents again almost seven years after having our son, Jack. Seriously, not to be smug, but at this point, I thought we had it really going on. Plus on top of all that amazing good fortune, my husband finally got an acting gig on a Lifetime movie talk about an aphrodisiac! Its funny as I write about this now. I can still remember sitting in our California cottage, holding my newborn daughter in my arms, thinking to myself, Life cant possibly get any better than this. What I failed to factor in was that it could sure get a hell of a lot worse.

So in the spirit of the whole Hollywood theme, lets cut to seven weeks later, shall we? Once again, Im holding my daughter in my arms, but this time Im on vacation and in a Palm Springs hotel room and not our cozy little house. My husband is there (anyway, I think it is him) and hes telling me hes leaving me for a Hollywood actress. I ask when and he says right now. He tells me that money will never be a problem and that he has met his soul mate. He then rents a car and proceeds to leave. I start to take note of his obvious absence and begin to realize that perhaps Im in store for a completely different type of trip, one that I will refer to many times in this book. I call it the all-you-can-suffer, guaranteed-to-make-you-sick-and-slightly-crazy, Divorce Cruise.

After he left I stayed up all night looking at the desert sky, racking my brains for solutions or signs or an imploding star to help guide me through this very real nightmare that I was about to enter. I was so naive I really had no idea what was to come or where to start. This divorce that was about to take over my life was something that I knew nothing about. The only thing I did know was that it totally and completely sucked and it was not supposed to happen to me. Yet even in my pain and suffering and complete devastation, I did smell a substantial weight loss coming on. Thank God I was right about something.

Cut back to real time and where I am at this very moment. I am stronger, smarter, nicer, and in many ways even happier. I also think I look better or maybe I just look more like myself. Lets face it. If we cant learn something from the implosion of our entire world, then what the hell is the point anyway?

Of course, nobody ever thinks they will end up getting divorced, but if youre reading this book, it appears you may have entered the 51 percent club named for the percentage of marriages that end in a split.

Divorce is the modern plague of our time. From the humiliation of your family being public fodder, to slimy divorce lawyers (sorry legal profession, but you do need to be revamped), to seeing your ex-husband three weeks out engaged to your former best friend divorce is an experience like no other, and in its wake, many a good women has been pulled under.

But isnt it time to rewrite that story? No doubt about it, divorce is a horrendous life-altering experience that will pull you down before it spits you out. But make no mistake. It is not a death sentence! As a matter of fact, it can be one of the most life affirming things you will ever go through if you let it. We as women have to share our stories for so many reasons: to commiserate, to heal, and believe it or not, to laugh. And if you stick with me through this book, I promise you will laugh more than once, and maybe even out loud.