If only I had been gifted a brilliant career as a successful, childless writer, I, too, could have jetted off to Italy, India, and Indonesia to eat, pray, and love. But while Elizabeth Gilbert partook of the exotic pleasures of the world, I was an everyday housewife.
In the wake of ending a destructive marriage, I inherited two kids, a dog, and an intimate relationship with creditors. An affordable destination for me was traveling to 7-Eleven for Ben and Jerry’s at midnight.
I realized I had become a participant in “domesticide.” It’s my word. I made it up. It’s this housewife’s word for the mental suicide you commit when, after years of abuse, you dare to depart the marital domicile.
Let me be clear that domesticide doesn’t happen at the time of divorce. The actual moment you split up is simply when you find out what you’ve been doing to yourself for years, most likely ever since childhood. Domesticide denotes the slow death of who you really are by what you have become through endlessly chasing the elusive “happily ever after.”
The signs of big trouble were apparent in my recurring sexual fantasy of my husband being run over by a large lawnmower with rusty blades. It became abundantly clear to me that obsessively fantasizing about the freedom one would gain by redeeming a spouse’s life insurance was not healthy.
My exploration of awakening was a bit different than E.G’s. I did, however, eat. Well, more accurately, binged. Chocolate bars, ice cream, and chips. I do seem to remember one desperate night being curled up on the bathroom floor, quickly gulping an entire pint of gelato. There were many occasions I plucked sauce-laden spaghetti out of my child’s hair or off the walls and floors. At least my path was not entirely without Italian food.
I also prayed. Well, perhaps it was more like swearing:
“Jesus f’ing Christ, what did I do in my last life to deserve this f’ing bulls*it?”
I was not always an ordinary housewife. Before I married so many years ago, I was a spirited girl whose adventurous nature propelled me into exhilarating situations and extraordinary geographical locations.
Among my many adventures, I joined the U.S. Coast Guard, now clear to me it was actually an act of teenage rebellion. I despised the fact my dad was a big-time drug dealer. What better way to rebel than to chase drug boats? Another impetus was that my brother was a professional diver and worshiped the ocean. He spent much of his time swimming, boating, and diving. When a drunk driver killed him at the age of nineteen, he was buried at sea, and I have always felt connected to him when I’m near the ocean. My career choice was a natural fit: Chase drug runners and rescue people from the stormy billows.
I recall a rescue in which a swordfish launched itself right through a seaman’s kneecap. Riding ten-foot to fifteen-foot seas, our little forty-four-foot motor lifeboat was a mere toy as we approached the unforgiving rusty steel walls of the one-hundred-and-forty-foot ship. The plan was to come alongside the vessel, and then for two of us to jump from the bow onto the ladder and climb our way to the top. We would apply first aid and prepare the patient for helicopter medivac.
It was cold, gray, and perilous. One slip of the hand or foot, or the misjudgment of the coxswain, and death would follow. Yet I was charged with excitement, with no fear in me whatever. I was completely in the moment, ruggedly alive.
