When I am asked by friends how I knew divorce was the right thing to do, I usually say, "Slowly, then suddenly, you just know."
Its the kind of answer that would have thoroughly annoyed me while I was at that stage, but its the truth.
Mike Cosgrove wrote a series of books in the 70s that were progressively moral and magical. One tells the tale of a lonely catepillar who observes the transformation of his peers into butterflies, only to watch them float away majestically while he shouts from the branch "what does it feel like to be a butterfly?" One after the other they smile; smugly, knowingly, compassionately and say "Someday you'll know little catepillar, someday you'll know."
I got to such a desperate point of indecision about my marriage that I would have and probably did ask the cashier at the grocery store what I should do. Many times, after lengthy exhausting conversations with friends, who, probably wanted to bathe in acid when they saw this topic coming, I would go home with a renewed purpose and determination to make this thing work.
Letting go of it was such a far off, foreign concept. Bombarded by fears of regret, failure and driving alone in the rain, I clung to my vision of the married life I had started with, unable to even imagine a different one, much like my daughter clings to my leg trying to hitch a ride. She wraps her entire body around it and presses her face in fiercely, her little fists tightly wound and certain. And then other times, during a particularly painful interaction, when my stomach hurt from the naseau that is contempt, I would just know that this was not what I wanted to model as an example of love and intimacy for my children or myself.
I would hear the little truths sprinkled here and there that resonated, and collect them like hansel and gretel finding there way out of the forest. Until one day, over a frozen pizza fight, I just knew.