Next Course, Please!

Have you ever woken up one day and realized you’re not where you were supposed to be? That your plans got derailed? That’s how I feel right now. I had a plan, but the zigzags of life got in the way, and the schedule deviated. It wasn’t a terribly complicated plan: finish school, find a good job, get married, pop a couple of kids and raise them as best as I can. It sounds like a fairly straight-forward plan, right?

Even the best-laid plans don’t go according to schedule, and in my case it was my marriage. At the time, I really thought I was making the right decision. Now that I’m older and wiser, I realize there were signs I should have recognized, particular actions that should have raised warning bells, feelings my spider senses were registering…but I wasn’t listening.

Despite the signs, I tried very hard to make the marriage work, but in the end, I chose to put my happiness above the social stigma of divorce. Of course, it’s not much of a stigma these days. The divorce rate in Canada is now at about 44% (similar in the United States)... and I know several women who are part of that statistic.

So now I find myself a forty-one year old single mother of two. But I’m not the only one by a long shot. The wave of divorces within my social circle started with my sister who was unfortunate enough to marry a man who couldn’t stay faithful if you paid him. Then there was a friend whose husband functioned on a different wave length as her, one whose husband left her when she was pregnant with their son, yet another whose marriage seemed perfect until he left her for another woman and, very recently, a friend who was simply unhappy because they didn’t have enough in common.

Whenever someone got divorced, I found myself intently focused on their woes. I took mental notes about the painful and unpleasant aspects of divorce: the legal arrangements, the child custody schedules, changing homes and learning to be frugal because you’re down to one income. I never thought I’d be using that knowledge for myself, so I’m grateful to everyone who helped.

Then I found myself giving the same advice to subsequent divorcees. I’m the first to admit you have to take advice with a grain of salt because every situation is different, but I found every divorce, whether it was ugly or amicable, had one thing in common: it didn’t take very long for every single one of us to start looking for someone new. It’s quite challenging to find the time to meet someone new when you have a career to manage, a household to uphold and children whose healthy upbringing is our first priority. And let’s face it, none of us is twenty anymore, so many pre-marital strategies no longer apply.

What I found interesting is each of the divorced women in my circle went about finding love in a different way. So I wrote this book to share these ideas with the rest of you. But how to find love – the mechanics of it - is only one ingredient in the whole recipe.

Sometimes you have to dig deep to find the remaining ingredients. When I reflected on my own life, I realized every experience, every relationship I explored, taught me a valuable lesson that has brought me one step closer from the innocent, naïve woman who got married to the strong independent woman I am today. You’ll notice that I placed a recipe book symbol throughout the stories to help you locate those ingredients more readily.

These memoirs of my relationships are experiences I’d like to share with you now, in the hopes that my stories will inspire you to recognize what you want and to go after it; to grab the bull by the horns, to get your fingers in the pie. Each experience has taught me a lesson that I summarized at the end of the story and further elaborated in the last chapter.

Although the topic of finding love after divorce is a serious one, I wanted to have fun with it…which is why I used food as an analogy. The road to finding love is like a meal plan; each course brings you to the next, and so on…until you find the sweet spot, the icing on the cake, the cherry on top. We should savor each course, appreciate it – that’s how you’ll find out which ingredients work for you.

That’s what I did, so on to…

…the first course.