Christina Pesoli - Break Free from the Divortex: Power Through Your Divorce and Launch Your New Life

BREAK FREE FROM THE DIVORTEX

Power Through Your Divorce and Launch Your New Life

Copyright 2014 Christina Pesoli

SEAL PRESS

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

1700 Fourth Street

Berkeley, California 94710

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pesoli, Christina

Break free from the divortex : power through your divorce and launch your new life / Christina Pesoli.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-5800-5514-7

1. Divorce--Psychological aspects. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology) I. Title.

HQ814.P467 2014

155.93--dc23

2014009240

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover design by Faceout Studio, Kara Davison

Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

Distributed by Publishers Group West

To Margaret and Aaron Terwey, and to Angela and David Peterman, whose relationships reaffirm my faith in marriage (no pressure!)

To Hannah Brannon, who takes my breath away (in a good way, mostly)

To Clint Harbour, who has no idea how great he is (which totally works in my favor)

To Peter Pesoli Sr., who teaches by example (even still)

Contents

Congratulations!

Thats probably not what you were expecting the opening sentence of this book to be, given that its about divorce recovery. But, trust me, congratulations are in order. Sure, youre facing a divorce and thats about as much fun as running a marathon with two blown knees. Not that Ive ever run a marathon. Or blown a knee. But I have lived through more than my fair share of divorces. Anyway, thats not why Im congratulating you. Im congratulating you because, divorce nightmare notwithstanding, you are loved.

How do I know? Someone cared enough about you to get you this book. Either that, or you got it for yourself, which tells me you are taking good care of yourself and thats equally awesome. However you came to possess Break Free from the Divortex, you now hold the key to reclaiming your power and unlocking your future. So keep this book handy because youre going to need it to get from where you are now to where youre going next, which is going to be way better. I promise.

I also know you are lovable. Its easy to forget this when you are at the onset of a divorce. After all, when the very person you thought would love you forever is now hiring a lawyer against you, its hard not to take it as a referendum on your lovability. And that rejection can send you into a tailspin of self-reproach. You go around and around, blaming yourself for everything you did or did not do when you were married, and how all those things may have contributed to where you are now. But this is not the time to get bogged down in blame. (Well sift through your mistakes later and mine them for any lessons they hold before we permanently lay them to rest.) What happened happened. You are where you are. Mistakes dont mean you are not lovable; they mean you are human.

You are also luckymuch luckier than I was at the start of my last divorce. (The fact that Ive had more than one shows how well qualified I am to write this book, not how poorly qualified I am to maintain a romantic relationship.) But before I tell you about what a disaster my last divorce was, I have to fill you in on the one before thatthe one where everything went smoothly.

About fifteen years ago, I finally changed my answer from I do to I just cant anymore. My husband and I had been married for thirteen years, but the last couple of those years included a separation or two and a trial reunion. We had shared some fantastic years together and managed, without even trying, to produce the most amazing son ever born. But we had married young and as the years passed we ended up in two very different places, with conflicting visions of what we wanted the rest of our lives to look like.

I wanted to be on an upwardly mobile track, complete with a bigger house and a car with a functioning air conditioner. He wanted to downsize so he could dedicate more time to training for marathons. I believed in things like establishing retirement accounts and setting up a college fund for our son, Aaronrules that I thought were a mandatory part of responsible adulthood. He rejected many of these rules and also bristled at conventions such as having health insurance and wearing shoes in the grocery store. But our biggest issue was this: I wanted to have another child and he was happy with just one.

After years of butting heads over an ever-growing list of disagreements, I came to realize that these werent matters of right or wrong; they were matters of personal belief and individual choice. Rather than forcing one person to bow to anothers worldviewand the life plan that went with itI came to the conclusion that the kinder and healthier choice was to let each other go.

For the record, the foregoing account is my take on what happened in our relationship. Im pretty sure he has a different view and it goes something like this: After he stuck with me through college and law school, I dumped him. Rather than debating our conflicting accounts of why we divorced, I instead consider this further confirmation of how differently we saw the world.

If we were divided on how to be married, we were surprisingly united on how to get divorced. Neither one of us was out to hurt the other, no one was in a hurry to move on to another relationship, and, most important, we were both determined to shepherd Aaron through the process while protecting his relationship with each of his parents.

We both regularly attended Aarons sporting events and school activities, and occasionally the three of us even went to dinner together afterward. We hardly tangled over the custody schedule and let Aaron split time between our two houses based largely on what worked best for everyone. Im not saying it was a cakewalk. But as far as divorces go, it was as close to nontoxic as you can get and no one benefited from that more than Aaron.

I came away from that experience vigorously patting myself on the back. I was awesome! I knew how to get divorced while protecting my son from all that was negative about the process. Why couldnt everyone handle divorce as brilliantly as I had?

Eventually I remarried, and my then-husband (whom Ill refer to herein as either my ex or That Man) and I had a beautiful baby girl. Hannah was a gift from heaven, but the marriage was straight out of hell. With each passing year, it descended to a lower, darker level, until I finally realized that if we didnt get a divorce, I would not be in the requisite mental and emotional state to take care of myself, let alone parent my daughter.

The marriage was grueling, but the divorce was even worse. My ex did plenty of jerky things while we were together, but once we separated he cranked up the jerkiness to 11. It was brutal from start to finish. And I learned tons of things as a result.

I learned, for example, that I was a credit hog. Much of the praise that I had lavished on myself for how well my last divorce had gone belonged to Aarons dad, not me. I realized that it only took one person to make a divorce toxic, but it took two people to keep things positive. And if youre not the one who wants the divorce but you still manage to be decent about the whole thing, you deserve a far bigger share of the credit.

I learned that I was strong. Not I can lift a car with only my index finger strong, but Girl Power strong. The years I spent in a bad marriage had definitely caused me to forget that. It took me a while to remember I had once possessed that strength and even longer to summon it again. But once I did, I could handle just about anything.