Collage by Carlie Burton
I am a child of divorce. You might not agree, as I was almost 30 when my mother and father broke up. Yet their marriage was mostly over before I was born. Among the revelations my parents shared with me during their grand finale of finger pointing and secret spilling was this: I exist because my mother seduced my father into pregnancy so he wouldn’t leave her. A third child (me) further solidified the ball and chain.
This was back when divorce was still uncommon and shameful. A divorced woman was damaged goods, and a divorced man could stall on a corporate ladder, like the one my father was climbing. My parents stayed together “for the children” but also to maintain their social status. It certainly wasn’t because they still cared about each other. So even though I’m not a literal “child” of divorce, I might as well have been one.
I am also an adult of divorce. Carolyn and I broke up in 1988, about 12 years into our marriage. But unlike my parents (and hers, who also divorced venomously), we had no outbursts of emotions and lawyers. We grew up on the high-strung East Coast, but I think our years in Cincinnati helped us become quieter and saner. Our two kids, aged 9 and 11 at the time, were never forced to become go-between messengers. Or to endure one-sided parental propaganda. Or, worst of all, to be used as ammunition.
We also avoided the most typical disruption that parents make their children suffer after a breakup: Having to boomerang between homes every few weeks. Instead, we awarded joint custody of our house—a fixer-upper near O’Bryonville we’d purchased in October 1981—to the kids. They stayed there while Carolyn and I rotated every two weeks from a small apartment in Oakley. It was not only the least expensive option, but it made moving days a lot simpler. One adult having to pack up and trade neighborhoods instead of two pre-teens? A no-brainer. It also resolved all questions over what to do with the cat.
By the way, ask your favorite search engine or chatbot when U.S. mortgage rates were the highest in the entire history of real estate. You’ll get “October 1981.” The interest on our loan was 17.5 percent, so please shut up about today’s mortgage rates. This was the Gilbert home until 1997. Carolyn had eventually gotten her own real place by then and the kids had graduated and left, so I was the only resident at the end.
Every time that place goes back on the market, I sneak into a Sunday open house and check to see if our family’s name and dates are still scratched on the wall of the attic closet. As of last spring, they are.
I started dating within my first year of new singlehood. That nightmare became the first article I ever wrote for Cincinnati Magazine, back when the publication ran a whole section of personal dating ads in those pre-swipe days. It’s only mid-level cringe-worthy to look at now.
Life did get slowly better. At one point I was seeing a very well-off woman who lived at a higher level of Cincinnati society than I’d heretofore known. I found myself at numerous functions and parties in this rarified Blue Book world. Many of these events were formal, which for me presented a bigger problem than simply knowing which fork to use. I’d been accustomed to renting a tuxedo every three years or so, but now the guys at Gentry Shop knew my measurements when they saw me coming.
This relationship was getting expensive. My now-regular girlfriend reached into her trust fund and bought me my own tux! Bless her generous little heart! Now I was just like Carl Lindner Jr., my new buddy! Carolyn, of course, knew none of this. That changed one day when we made our bi-weekly switch and she phoned to let me know that I’d left a tuxedo in the apartment closet. She even offered to return it to Gentry. Bless her generous little heart!
I had to tell Carolyn about my new life among the Queen City Glitterati and that I hadn’t raided our kids’ college fund to pay for it. It went over about as well as you’d expect. I wore the tux a few weeks later to yet another black-tie gala, where the local rich get to donate large tax write-offs for a charitable cause while rubbing elbows. Somewhere around 9:30, the butt of my tux’s pants suddenly split open from crotch to waistline. As long as I shuffled stiffly upright, my jacket mostly covered my ass, in more ways than one. Carolyn later confessed that she had carefully popped every fourth stitch along the rear seam of the pants. Bless her shriveled little heart. (She repaired them herself afterwards.)
Let’s stop here and acknowledge something: On the infinitely long list of vengeful atrocities that ex-spouses have ever committed against one another, setting a time bomb on a pair of pants ranks very close to the bottom. Possibly even the bottom. Unfortunately, this was on my bottom, but I had to admit it was pretty damn funny.
The inevitable day of our actual divorce proceeding arrived. It was a December morning after a heavy snowstorm and also the final court day of the year—resulting in a mad crush of people in bad moods desperate to get their divorce into that year’s 1040. Everyone was dragged in and out of the courtroom like sheep getting sheared. After waiting for hours, Carolyn and I stood before the judge for perhaps two minutes. It was done: We were now divorced. We went out to lunch afterward. It was my birthday.
If you’ve read this far, you have now arrived at the place where my story turns dark. It’s time to fill in some spaces where I acknowledge blame, chief among them that I was addicted to drugs. It was all of the very respectable and high-functioning kind—never lost my job, caused an accident, got arrested, embarrassed myself in public, etc. All I did was lose my marriage, which could happen to anybody, right?
I wasn’t the only one in denial: Carolyn was a fool to separate us when she did. She rightly blamed my drug use but also believed me when I’d said I had enough control to not indulge when I was in charge of the kids. Really? Did she think I would indulge even less when it was my turn to be the parent and she wasn’t around at all? I’d already been breaking my own rules, driving the kids around when stoned. When they were smaller and still took afternoon naps, I sometimes left them alone in the house to go and renew my supply.
Fortunately, I never caused any tragic results outside of the emotional ones. Some months after my marriage failed, I entered rehab and have been clean and sober since. Every life can benefit from a good failure. In the 1990s I met and married Mary (a story I also turned into a magazine article) and have enjoyed a marriage more than twice as long as my first. Mary and I and the kids and Carolyn get together often. It’s fun at social events to sometimes introduce my wife and ex-wife at the same time.
I can’t guess how many divorced people in the world observe the 50th anniversary of their long-defunct marriage by going out to a nice dinner, especially with their current partner along. But if you dined at Alara in Madisonville one night last summer and noticed a lot of laughter at a nearby table, that was us. No tuxedos.
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