Personal History – A New Life

Becoming a parent, ending a marriage.

- By Leslie Jamison

The baby and I arrived at our sublet with garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet. At a certain point, I’d run out of suitcases.

We had diapers patterned with drawings of scrambled eggs and bacon. Why put breakfast on diapers?, I might have asked, if there had been another adult in the room. There was not.

Outside, it was nineteen degrees in the sun. For the next month, we were renting this railroad one-bedroom beside a firehouse. I’d brought raspberries and a travel crib, white Christmas lights to make the dim space glow. Next door, a fireman strutted toward his engine with a chainsaw in one hand and a box of Cheerios in the other. My baby tracked his every move. What was he doing with her cereal?

It was only when I told my divorce lawyer, “She is thirteen months old,” that my voice finally broke. As it turns out, divorce lawyers keep tissues in their offices just like therapists, only not as ready to hand. “I know we’ve got them somewhere,” she told me warily, rising from her swivel chair to search. As if to say, We aren’t surprised by your tears, but it’s not our job to manage them. If I cried for five minutes, it would cost me fifty dollars.

“Just over thirteen months,” I added, wanting to make it seem like we’d stayed married longer than we actually had.

I was myself a “child of divorce,” as they say, as if divorce were a parent. When I was very young, I thought divorce involved a ceremony, the couple moving backward through the choreography of their wedding, starting at the altar, unclasping their hands, and then walking separately down the aisle.