This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life by Lyz Lenz

Author:Lyz Lenz [Lenz, Lyz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Revenge Dress

Two days after I asked for a divorce, I had to go to the wedding of my little brother Caleb and his fiancée Michelle. He was twenty-four. So young. Too young. In a phone call with my mother, I told her that Caleb was just a baby. Never mind that he was a grown man and, at six foot seven, taller than any of us. A man in the army. She reminded me I was twenty-two when I got married.

No one in my family knew that my life was falling apart. No one except my brother Zach. Zach and I have always been close, both in age and in friendship. We were born sixteen months apart, and most of our childhood people thought we were twins, with me looking like the boy. So, I told Zach I was getting divorced when I got high for the first time.

Five months before Caleb’s wedding, right after I had found the box of my things hidden in the basement, I’d gone alone to Denver for my father’s sixtieth birthday. There, six of my father’s eight children crammed into my parents’ suburban home to celebrate. It was April and the weather plummeted from 60 degrees and sunny to 20 degrees with snow flurries.

It’s always hard for all of us children to be back together. We revert to our old patterns, we pick old wounds that have never really healed, our laughter is too loud, the tension palpable. In my family, I am the scold, the do-gooder, the child concerned with getting it right and holding it together. But I was not holding it together. I was not getting it right. And that weekend, I wanted to run into the mountains and scream. But weed had recently become legal in Colorado, so I decided that instead of screaming, I was going to get high.

My plan was a bad one. I decided that under the pretense of going for a run, I’d run to a dispensary and buy weed. But I did absolutely no research. This isn’t like me. I am the person who studies the menu three days before going to a new restaurant. I can find your ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend on Instagram in five seconds. These are skills useful for a journalist, but they are also skills honed by an oldest daughter who believes that if you do everything right, if you do all your homework, if you do all the reading, you will get an A, you will succeed.

But I had done everything right and I was failing. And I was failing in the most important way: in my personal life. All I could hear in my mind is What about your children? What about your sacred vows? I would hold my marriage together for five more months. But I could feel it ending. And all I knew then was that I wanted to fuck up.

I was thirty-five and goddammit, I just wanted to rebel. But I was also the mother of two children, both of whom were back in Iowa with their father.

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