Minutes after we'd been declared husband and ex-wife, Edgar was vigorously berating me, calling me a dumb, stupid woman. I looked up at him and wept.

"I'm giving you what you wanted," he said. "I kept my mouth shut."

I kept crying and trying not to think about the other people in the waiting area. They probably appreciated the entertainment.

It was my turn to keep quiet. I recognized Ed's fury as the typical reaction of alcoholics and addicts when something doesn't go their way: It has to be somebody else's fault. Ed was right, I'd gotten what I wanted. There was no need to remind him of how and why, with the destructive assistance of alcohol, we'd ended up in divorce court.

My ex actually, accidentally, did me some favors as our marriage came to an end. Over a year ago, he was the one who angrily asked if I wanted a divorce, never expecting me to say yes. Had he not asked, I'd probably still be working up the courage to say so.

On the day of the final hearing, he reminded me that he is prone to untruthfulness and to blaming others for his problems.

I felt really bad when I told the judge our marriage was irretrievably broken. Though I'd been over that question and over it and over it countless times, always finding the answer was yes, still I had a small doubt at the moment of truth.

It wasn't big enough to stop me, though.

I never thought I'd get divorced. I meant that business about taking Ed for the rest of my days. When I realized, though, that my days would be fewer if I stayed married to a man who couldn't quit drinking, I was able to break my promise.

I'm sad about it, but I'm not sorry about it.
 

"You know, you can still change your mind." Edgar and I were waiting outside a courtroom for the final hearing in our divorce.

"And waste all the perfectly good money I spent on this?" I asked.

"I've made more expensive mistakes," he replied, and our conversation returned to the relaxed kind of catching-up we'd been doing, talking about work, the election, our parents.

He said he'd told his mother the little dog he brought her from the shelter was one of mine that I couldn't take along on my move out of state, and told me I had to back the story if it ever came up.

"Why did you lie to your mother?" I asked. He shifted and sighed a little before saying that was the only way to get her to take the companion he wanted her to have.

Then my name was called and we took our place in the marriage disassembly line. "Sit at the table to the left," the bailiff instructed, and we watched as a red-haired woman gave monosyllabic answers to questions about a business and her ex-husband. Her proceeding didn't even last long enough for me to figure out what it was about before it was our turn.

We handed over our driver's licenses. Ed glared at me. My heart sank as I gave the monosyllabic answers that ended my marriage of eight years, especially when I said yes, it was irretrievably broken. Never a word to or from Ed, who threw his packet of papers down on the table and stalked out when it was over.

They said we'd be called in a few minutes to go downstairs and get certified copies of our unmarriage certificate. I returned to the nook where we had waited, sat down and cried. Ed joined me.

"Dumb, stupid woman," he said. "Lying to that man that this marriage was irretrievably broken. Dumb, stupid woman!"

(To be continued...) 

So I'm all divorced now. Still not quite ready to discuss the event itself, which was pretty emotional, but I can report on the early aftermath.

Frankly, it feels much the same as the before-math, though I think I'm getting along better with the ex. (I must say it feels good to write that and know it is actually, legally, true.) The worst thing that could happen to our marriage is over, and now we're free to build a new relationship. We communicate frequently and easily via Facebook.

My father, however, is not taking things so well.

"I don't know how I'm going to deal with Sondra as a divorced woman," he said, according to my mom. That's odd. I don't seem to recall any similar uncertainty when my brother got divorced, and that was in the last century.

But I fear my father regards marriage as a form of ownership. I think he was relieved when I finally became somebody else's property, so to speak. And now look: if I'm not legally connected to some other man, guess he feels he must be responsible for me again, even though I am almost 50 years old and a homeowner.

My mother sent me a link to an article on goal-setting for the newly divorced. I thanked her and promised to read it with interest, but also told her honestly that downsizing into this much smaller house has been far more difficult than getting unmarried.

I added, though, that I might view things differently after I'd been divorced for a whole week.

My religious brother called to...touch base, he said in a message. I don't think he'd tell me I'm going to hell for ending my marriage, but I'm not quite ready to find out about that, either.

My divorced brother never mentioned the end of my marriage. "Mom told you the divorce is final, right?" I asked. "Yep," he replied, and that's all he's had to say about it. Not a word of advice, or encouragement, or consternation, or solace.

My life, I have learned, consists of things I can do something about and things I can't.

Sometimes it takes a while to determine which is which. It took some time for me to notice that I really was unhappily married and more time after that to start to do something about it. Many moons passed before Edgar seemed to accept the idea that I would not remain his wife.

I could have battled with him while he worked his way to this conclusion, spending thousands of dollars I didn't actually have on lawyers and forcing him to do the same. Luckily, my circumstances required me to do something different: to wait.

I've read about the sharp difference in perspective between halves of a divorcing couple. The "leaving" spouse, the one who initiates the action, usually has been contemplating the end of the marriage for some time. Often the "left" spouse is blindsided, for many reasons including denial.

Our separation, and the time it took to find the most economical way to divorce, provided a cooling-off period. During that time, I became certain that I wanted our marriage to end and Ed had a chance to get his head around the idea.

Of course, it might have turned out differently — um, happily ever after? — and that would've been okay too. But I'm glad that I had to take the time to find out when and if I should do something final about my marriage.

Marry in haste, repent at leisure? I suspect that's true of divorce as well.

A week or two after I filed the papers for my uncontested divorce, I received notification of the date of my final hearing. This week! Whoa.

The instructions I got at the courthouse said it'd be three to eight weeks before the letter arrived. I was up in North Carolina, trying to get settled in my new place. Suddenly I had to scurry back to Florida.

That meant a long car trip, which gave me plenty of time for rumination. So I went over my situation again.

When I was an active alcoholic, I fell in love with and married and active alcoholic. We both got worse over the following several years until two things happened: I became convinced I needed to quit drinking and I lost hope that my husband, Edgar, would stop.

One of the hardest things I ever did was pitch him out of the house we shared. After that, a year went by, during which I stayed sober and Ed continued his pattern of falling off the wagon and jumping on, falling off and jumping back on... 

I became confident that my decision to divorce was the right one. Watching Ed kill himself on the installment plan would probably kill me, as I might resume drinking in an attempt to cope with it.

It was the right decision, but not a comfortable one. I'm not divorcing Ed because I don't love him. We had some good times together, too; smart conversation, lots of laughs, the best road trips I've ever taken. We weren't able to have children, but we opened our home to countless animals, some of which are still with me.

I guess my marriage was like everybody else's — some good, some bad. Like many other spouses, I decided to pull the plug when the bad overwhelmed the good.

Would I marry Ed all over again? Knowing what I know now, of course not. But I'm not sorry I did it that one time, nor am I sorry to be divorcing him, however sad I may be.  

These days, I judge the state of things by the number of times I ask myself, "What have I done?" Today I have not asked it at all.

It's a brilliant fall day with a cloudless sky in Carolina. I'm sitting at a big picnic table in the sunny backyard of the little house I'm renting, surrounded by my dogs. Today I'm pretty sure that what I've done in moving back home is the right thing.

True, this is a step down from the two-income "wifestyle" I grew accustomed to during my years with Ed. But anything this place may lack in space and amenities is more than made up for by peace of mind.

It is refreshing to just be — be myself rather than Ed's wife or ex-wife, be a new neighbor, be setting up housekeeping again. It's really good to be close to my family.

Having come this far — literally and figuratively — at least for the moment I'm not worried about what's still ahead: the divorce to be finalized, work to be found, health insurance to be secured, and somehow, my beloved Florida home to be sold.

AA cautions about the geographical cure, the notion that shifting locations can fix things. But there is something about a fresh start. Here I have never stepped over my passed-out-drunk husband, never gotten drunk myself to dull the pain of my alcoholic marriage. This place holds no sorrows for me. 

Every day I'll do what I can to keep it that way, and not let "What have I done?" seep in.

Covered in dust, grime, and campaign buttons, I took a break from preparing for tomorrow's move to vote early. While I'm both concerned and excited about the presidential race, there was another issue on which I was eager to cast a ballot: the Florida Marriage Protection Amendment.

This proposal seeks to codify marriage as "the legal union of only one man and one woman."

I remember a conversation with a couple of coworkers shortly before I married Ed eight years ago. They congratulated me, and Osvaldo mentioned that another friend, Ernie, was married. I hadn't known that, so I congratulated him, finally noticing the plain gold band on his finger.

He shrugged, saying "As married as I can be." It was only then that I finally realized it wasn't possible for same-sex couples to marry. "That's bullshit!" I said.

I'd known gay men and lesbians all my life and had never considered their marital options. I guess I thought they just didn't want to marry. But Ernie and Justin had been together for years. They had the rings, but no spousal rights.

I was appalled.

I was raised Baptist, but a lot of church stuff didn't make sense to me, and I grew up to be a Buddhist. Like Sarah Palin, I tolerate a number of world views among those close to me.

I've asked devout Christians why Ernie and Justin can't get married and have yet to get an answer that I understand.

On the other hand, one of my conservative Christian friends surprised me by saying he opposes legal prohibitions against same-sex marriage. He thinks homosexuality is an abomination, but he also believes what happens in the bedrooms of consenting adults is not the business of government. 

I'm pretty sure that "protecting marriage" by forbidding it to Ernie and his boyfriend wouldn't do a thing to save my failed union with Ed or anybody else's. So it gave me great pleasure to vote against the proposal.

I passed my documents across the desk at Family Court Self Help, hoping I had filled in all of the blanks as instructed. After spending the better part of two days slogging through the bureaucratic snafu surrounding what Florida calls a "simple dissolution," my brains were fried.

The lady checked my papers one last time. "Perfect," she said, and gave me a big smile that said, "You are free to go."

At last. Thirteen months, $474, and five (count 'em) trips to the courthouse later, I've actually managed to file for divorce.

I'm not sure yet how I feel. I don't know how I thought I'd feel at this point.

There were times when I never thought I'd get here, that I'd live out my days just pretending not to be married any more. A year after I took off my ring I wasn't finding that so onerous, but the Good Doctor, who knows from several thousand dollars in personal experience, urged me not to be slack about legalities. She cautioned that Ed's creditors, from whom I still ignore the occasional phone call, might eventually get around to his wife.

Who? Oh. Oh yeah. That is still me, at least on paper, for a while. But the end is in sight.

Sometime in the next two months I'll get back my self-addressed, stamped envelope (they aren't kidding about that self-help thing) with a final hearing date. Maybe I'll feel something then.

Right now, though, my dog Lucky reminds me that it's time for a walk. Life goes on.

I'm moving out of the house, out of South Florida, in about 30 seconds. Actually, in about a week. Because, as Tina Turner put it back in the day, I never, ever do nothing nice and easy — I put off packing until shortly after the last possible minute.

Maybe deep down inside I'm still hoping the mortgage fairy will drop by and pay mine off so I don't have to leave my home, but s/he hasn't appeared yet. So I still face the task of compressing my life — as represented by the contents of my house — into living space less than half the size.

A while back I accepted the idea, intellectually, that I'm disassembling not just my marriage but my life. (I have a family court date this week, too.)
Emotionally, I'm still trying to catch up.

Since my therapist the Good Doctor tells me it would be illegal to act on my fantasy of getting a flamethrower, setting it on low, and burning everything in my home as a sort of sacrifice or Viking funeral, I'm having to downsize the old-fashioned way: by hand, a piece or six at a time.

It is going very, very slowly. I find myself staring at a vase that once held roses Ed bought for me. I know it is just a vase. But looking at it brings back a precious memory of one of the good times in my bad marriage.

Still, it is just a vase. I can wipe it off and put it aside for donation, hoping some other romantic will find it in a thrift store and give it a second chance to make someone happy.

I'm going to return my husband, Edgar, but I wouldn't mind keeping his mom. She's always been good to me, and positive about me. She knows that, while her son has many fine qualities, like all the rest of us he's far from perfect — that is, she understands why I'm divorcing him.

She's a survivor, no-nonsense, and we like the same off-price stores. It was my idea, once, to take her on vacation with Ed and me. I miss driving to visit her in Central Florida, seeing her new plants and the stuff in her yard.

And then there's Ed and my family. Last year, I left Ed with the rest of my family while Mom and I stayed at a hotel for her birthday.

Ed was drinking in those days, but largely refrained that weekend and participated fully in the celebration: taking a leading role in assembling the porch swing we got Mom, driving my father around shopping, running errands, hanging out.

"He was just like a real member of the family," my father said when Ed and I had been married almost seven years.

"I have a piece of paper around somewhere that says he is," I answered.

In a recent email, Ed said something about my parents not being his kin. I had to differ.

Every time I visit my family, I'm struck by the number of Ed's gifts on display as part of their daily lives. When I first realized I'd be divorcing him, I reflected that breaking up a marriage is like saying to somebody "Get out! Get out of the family!"

Well, it's not the family I want to rid of Ed, just me.

I think my father is a little wistful about his only son-in-law. "I imagine one day our paths will cross again," he said. "And I'll shake his hand and be glad to see him."

Around the same time, Pop said it might have been a good thing if we had divorced sooner.