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Falling Apart in One Piece

One Optimist's Journey Through the Hell of Divorce

About The Book

The emotionally charged story of a divorce that brought the surprising gift of grace

Just when Stacy Morrison thought everything in her life had come together, her husband of ten years announced that he wanted a divorce. She was left alone with a new house that needed a lot of work, a new baby who needed a lot of attention, and a new job in the high-pressure world of New York magazine publishing.

Morrison had never been one to believe in fairy tales. As far as she was concerned, happy endings were the product of the kind of ambition and hard work that had propelled her to the top of her profession. But she had always considered her relationship with her husband a safe place in her often stressful life. All of her assumptions about how life works crumbled, though, when she discovered that no amount of will and determination was going to save her marriage.

For Stacy, the only solution was to keep on living, and to listen—as deeply and openly as possible—to what this experience was teaching her.

Told with humor and heart, her honest and intimate account of the stress of being a working mother while trying to make sense of her unraveling marriage offers unexpected lessons of love, forgiveness, and dignity that will resonate with women everywhere.

Excerpt

Chapter 1
We Begin at the End

I suppose I should start where it all started. Or, more specifically, started ending. The night Chris told me he was done with our marriage.

I can recall exactly what I was doing on the June evening this one-way conversation started: I was standing at the sink in the kitchen area of our one-room first floor, washing a bunch of arugula, my favorite salad green, pushing my hands through the cold water in the salad spinner to shake the dirt loose. I was looking out the window over the sink, marveling at the beautiful backyard of our Brooklyn home: an actual lawn, its bright green grass thick as a carpet; a wood deck; and a pergola with grapevines climbing over it in curlicue abandon. The yard was my favorite thing about our house, a house that we’d bought and moved into just five months before on a freezing-cold January day, when our son, Zack, was just five months old. Stationed in his bouncy seat on the floor in the empty living room, he’d watched with wide eyes as everything we owned was marched through the front door in big cardboard boxes.

I felt lucky to live in this house every single day, especially now that the backyard had come to verdant life. Every evening after I took the subway home to Brooklyn from my job in Manhattan, I’d pick up Zack as I walked in the door and nuzzle his soft, sweet skin, say my goodbyes to his nanny, and head out the back door and lie down in the grass while Zack crawled around. I’d stare up at the soft blue sky, drink in the smell of the green all around me, and think, I can’t believe how lucky we are. I cherished that skyward view: a simple pleasure that made me feel small in the best way, as if I were being cupped in the hands of the universe. Simple and small were antidotes to the way I had been living my life for so long, with a complicated, jam-packed schedule, forging a career in the larger-than-life world of magazine publishing. For me, small was new, and small was good. I finally felt ready to stop going at a dead run, as I had been for so long, to slow down and settle into being happy.

Making dinner every night was a new pleasure for me after years of takeout meals at home or at my desk. I looked forward to putting in the half hour of calming busywork that getting dinner on the table entails, once Chris had come home and was able to take Zack off my hands. I’d stand in the kitchen and feel my brain slowly empty of the zillions of details and to-dos that make up a day in the office as my hands took over, chopping peppers and onions into just-right dice, whisking a vinaigrette, and washing salad greens.

As I poured the water from the salad spinner down the drain that night, I was feeling grateful for everything in my life, but I couldn’t ignore Chris’s silence pressing against my back. Sometimes people are quiet in a room in a way that feels like company, but today, as with a lot of days in the last few years, and especially since Zack was born, Chris was quiet in a way that felt like an absence. I started to turn around from the sink, wanting to find a way to pull Chris back into the room. I was sure that when I faced the sofa my eyes would find Chris staring blankly into middle distance, ignoring our tiny son, who was playing at his feet. And that was exactly the domestic tableau I beheld. Chris didn’t turn to meet my gaze. Instead, as he felt my eyes come to rest on him, he let out a slow, pointed exhale. I bristled, disappointed and annoyed. “Want to tell me what you hate so much about your life today?” I said, wincing inward slightly as the harsh words came out.

And so, still not turning his face, with its long, aquiline nose, huge blue-green eyes, and those full, pink lips I was delirious to call mine when we were first married, he said, simple as pie, “I’m done.” Then he sighed again, and turned slowly to look at me with a flat, empty gaze. “I’m done with this,” he said, gesturing with his hand to encompass our living room, our kitchen, our home, our son, our future, our dreams, every single memory we’d ever made together in our thirteen years as a couple, and me, suddenly meaningless me.

I felt my face go slack in shock as my vision narrowed to a tunnel centered on Chris’s blank face, and everything else went dark. Done. Just like that.

*  *  *
 

From the day Chris made this pronouncement, I felt my whole life click into slow motion as the last moments of my marriage started to slip through the hourglass. Suddenly there was a time bomb ticking loudly in the middle of the house, threatening to smash my life—my family, my security, my entire identity—into unrecognizable bits.

I entered a kind of split-screen crisis mode, shuttling between a panicked search for solutions and the velvety comfort of hiding in denial as I tried to figure out how to defuse the bomb. My mind became a Japanese teahouse: orderly, quiet, with delicate sliding shoji screens to separate my conflicting needs, to make it possible for me to keep on keeping on when it seemed that my husband had just brought everything in our life to a dead stop. As I started to ponder the impossible whys of how he and I had found ourselves here, and the impossible questions of how I would begin again, I slid open and shut the shoji screens in my mind to hide or reveal, a little at a time, what I was feeling—the anger, the fear, the bottomless grief—so that I could keep myself from being overwhelmed by my emotions. In a hush, I tiptoed around Chris and I tiptoed around myself, afraid to glimpse my reflection in the mirror and see the fear in my eyes.

This talk of divorce was coming at a spectacularly bad time. I was the primary breadwinner in our family, and I had recently been fired from a job I loved. Chris and I were still learning how to be parents; our cherubic son was still an infant. We owned this lovely, but needy, house, and the big mortgage that went along with it. And I was interviewing for a big new job, the job of my dreams: taking the helm of Redbook, a huge national magazine that was all about women living their grown-up lives—and in no small part, their married lives.

The irony was as rich as buttercream frosting on a wedding cake.

In the end, I got the job. But I lost the guy. The life we’d built together over thirteen years began disassembling itself without my permission as Chris and I started the slow, hard work of breaking up. Then our house began falling apart, too, revealing breaches in the foundation and the roof that the house inspector, my husband, and I had all missed before Chris and I bought it—and, we would find out later, that the couple who sold us the house had maybe intended to hide. On my very first day as editor in chief of Redbook, torrents of water poured into the basement of the house. And the floods continued as September-hurricane rains worked their way up the coast and pounded the Northeast, forcing me to undertake a months-long renovation that led to the house’s foundation being jackhammered into bits. A few weeks later, the roof and walls of the house started to leak in three or four or five different places, depending on how the wind was blowing.

The symbolism of it all was undeniable: water flooded my house for months, as pain was flooding my life. The foundation of my existence was being rocked, as was the foundation of my house. Water followed me everywhere, and so did the tears. I was running a magazine about love and marriage just when everything I thought I knew about either was being put to the test. And I was reinventing that magazine at the same time that I was going through the incredibly painful process of reinventing myself.

And it got worse. I had to fire two full-time nannies in a row and so found myself scrambling to patch together child-care arrangements for Zack. And then there would be a beach house fire and the two emergency room visits, and all the heartbreaking ways in which my family and friends couldn’t give me what I asked for despite their best intentions, because they had to live their own lives, too.

I kept my best game face on at work, desperate not to show weakness either to my staff or to upper management as I spearheaded the magazine’s transformation. My friends marveled at how I was able to handle the pressure of the big job while I had such a young son. But the job was, in many ways, the easy part, even though it absorbed so much of my concentration and time: I knew that I knew how to run a magazine, and I trusted my skills and instincts at work. But I was just learning how to trust myself as a mother. And I had absolutely no idea how to handle the crisis in my marriage.

Had someone sent me a short story with a heroine living the events that were unfolding in my life, I would have rejected it for being facile and unbelievable. But this wasn’t a story, it was my life. And there was no way to get to the other side—of the divorce, of the house’s flaws, of my own weaknesses, which I’d spent a lifetime trying to ignore or exorcise—except to live through it all.

I know that on many days I watched my divorce unfurl from a safe distance, as if I were perched somewhere over my own shoulder, or standing just behind one of my mental shoji screens, my eyes peeled for the flashes of wisdom that would help me to begin to make sense of the end of everything I thought I knew about myself. Friends and family commented on my calm, wondering why I wasn’t angrier. But I didn’t want the heated blur that comes from anger. I wanted clarity. I wanted answers. And eventually I realized that anger—at my ex, at life, at God, at the house that leaked, the dishes that were dirty, the fate that would seemingly send me plague after plague until I started wondering if maybe I had been cursed—would keep me from feeling everything I needed to feel to be able to let go and be free.

That is just one of the lessons I learned on my journey through divorce. I stumbled across these lessons like so many river stones tossed on the shore, quieting thoughts coughed up out of the endless roil and thunder that filled my head in those two dark years. I picked them up and played with them in my mind, the way a hand will worry coins in a pocket. They gave me comfort, even though they weren’t the answers I thought I wanted, and the lessons weren’t always easy. Like the time I found myself lying on my kitchen floor for the fourth or fifth time, crying away another night, and I realized that even though I had so many people in my life who wanted to help me, no army of friends was going to be able to meet me here in my alone.

But as the weeks, and then, the months unfolded, it slowly dawned on me that I didn’t need an army, even though I often felt my friends and strangers and our whole entire culture urging me to make divorce the ultimate battle. What I wanted on the other side of all this pain wasn’t to win, to be “right,” or even just to be able to claim the cruddy consolation prize of being the one who was “wronged.”

What I wanted was peace.

I decided the only way to rebuild was to start to understand who I really was, to love and forgive myself my failures, to move beyond all the dashed dreams to trust myself again. To dare to imagine who I might be on the other side of all this. To hold my best idea of myself in my mind’s eye and walk toward her, instead of being distracted by the anger and hurt that threatened to take root in my soul and scar it forever.

And that has been the journey of a lifetime: to decide who I am and who I’ve been and who I want to be, and to do all of that with compassion, both for myself and for my ex.

Five years later, I can honestly say that my divorce is the best thing that ever happened to me. Because I am at peace, and not just with my divorce. With myself.

Who but an optimist would propose that this is what divorce has to offer?

Copyright © 2010 by Stacy Morrison

 

 

Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide for Falling Apart in One Piece includes discussion questions and a Q&A with author Stacy Morrison. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.



Discussion Questions


1. Throughout the book, Stacy uses the metaphor of a shoji screen to describe her ability to compartmentalize and deal with the shock of her husband’s sudden decision to leave, the ill-timed flooding of her brand new basement, the challenges of caring for a toddler, and the first stressful weeks at the helm of a major national magazine.  Have you ever used this strategy to cope with difficult aspects of your own life? Were there ever times when you shut off certain thoughts or feelings for too long? Do you think Stacy ever fell into this trap of denial?

2. What are some of the other strategies Stacy develops by the end of the narrative that help her rebuild her family and stay sane without completely cutting Chris off from her life?  How do you think her outlook has changed since she was an ambitious young adult trying to land her dream job?

3. Stacy has a strong but complicated relationship with her mother. How did it inform Stacy’s career decisions? What lessons did it teach her about marriage? 

4. How does Stacy use what she’s learned in the high-pressure, tight-deadline environment of magazine publishing to deal with her problems at home? To what extent is she effective?

5. Social situations seem to put additional stress on Stacy and Chris’s relationship: The trip to the Hamptons and the trip to the wedding in Maine highlight some of the differences in the outlooks and personalities. Why do you think this might be? What has changed since the early days of their relationship?

6. Amazed at Stacy’s composure, her friend Melissa says, “Stacy, where is your anger? I mean come on, I know you’re a big thinker and you can explain anything, but are you even human?” (112) Why do you think Stacy remains so calm for so long? Can you think of times in your own life when your emotional response to a difficult event took you by surprise?

7. Stacy eventually does get angry after she and Chris are fully separated.  Do you think the outburst triggered by Chris’s request for compassion is a necessary step in the healing process, or does it represent a setback in Stacy’s quest to rebuild a life free of the bitterness she sees among her divorced friends?

8. Stacy gets a great deal of advice from her friends throughout the book. If she had come to you for advice, what would you have told her?

 

 
A Conversation with Stacy Morrison

1. What made you decide to write this book? Did your understanding of the events you describe change as you wrote?

I want to change how we talk about divorce, what we expect from it. I’ve been a relationship and marriage “expert” for twenty years now and I was completely surprised by the insights and lessons my divorce brought me. How could I not have known that I would have to rebuild my entire sense of self after my marriage ended? It’s not about anger; it’s about loss and grief and relearning everything you think about life. And I was also shocked to see what others—strangers and friends alike—wanted to bring me as I was going through my divorce: people wanted me to be angry; they wanted Chris to have cheated on me. I was just amazed and surprised by the whole experience. And, the great thing? I’m a much better person now for having lived through it all and thought about it all. The book is a resilience roadmap.

The lessons I wrote about in the book are the lessons as I lived them; and the gifts and learning they brought me are as true now as they ever were. I continue to live by them.

 

2. Did you always know you wanted to publish your story? What was Chris’s reaction to his portrayal?

I tried not to write this book for more than a year, but I kept ending up at parties with a ring of people standing around me, listening to me share my insights and diatribes. I’d get embarrassed about going on, and stop and joke that I was going to become a talk-show host or a Buddhist, but at one party an agent (who became my agent) suggested maybe I should write a book instead.

Chris hasn’t read the book yet! I gave it to him months ago, but since he lived it already once, I guess there’s not that burning desire to read it to find out how it all turns out.

 

3. What are some of the key lessons you can learn about yourself when going through a divorce or any major life change?

You have this incredible opportunity to discover who you really are. And to learn what you believe is true about life, too. For me, this was an incredibly calming transformation—that is, after I got through the many layers of fear. But one of the first ones you discover? You can handle more than you think you can. Because you don’t have a choice! But accepting that allows you to stop fighting the things you are afraid of, and start just moving through them.

 

4. What’s gained by focusing on divorce as an event of grief rather than anger?  Isn’t anger sometimes warranted?  Is it ever therapeutic?

I’m not saying anger isn’t in divorce; it very much is! And in this book I felt the responsibility to show what it all really looked like, so you see me yelling, raging at Chris and the heavens on more than one occasion. But I think we, as a culture, talk about divorce as if it’s a fight—who’s right? Who’s wronged?—as if the anger and the blame is the primary experience of divorce. And it is not. It’s not. Grief and loss and heartbreak, and emptiness, the death of a dream: that’s where you live most of the time in the years you’re moving through divorce. Plus, I truly believe that if you stay angry, you won’t learn from your loss what you need to know to move past it, to be whole again. I wanted people to help me grieve and honor my marriage; and what everyone wanted to do was help me with the anger. No, thanks. That wasn’t the help that would help me.

 

5. Can you share any co-parenting strategies that have worked in your family?

Everyone has to find their own path, but for Chris and me it was about how to keep Zack in one place. He was so young when Chris moved out—16 months old—that it just made sense for Zack to stay in one place, with me. Which meant that Chris and I were the ones who were inconvenienced by the separation, not Zack. We had weeks of exchanging uncomfortable, unfriendly hellos and goodbyes in my apartment after Chris had been there to take care of Zack. But it was totally worth the months of hard, hard, hard for the reward of Zack’s always knowing where home base was.

 

6. There are so many challenges to being a single parent. Have you discovered any benefits?

Oh boy, that’s a tough one for me to admit out loud. Because the fact is that it is very hard to raise children in America right now; everyone’s stretched so tight for time and money, and that’s a focus of what we do at Redbook every single month, helping women manage that crunch. But because of my arrangement with Chris, I have time to myself in every week; I can actually make it to the gym occasionally. And I joke—and it is not at all funny—that being amicably divorced is the only sane way to raise children these days! But I’m not a single parent; I’m a mom who’s not married to her child’s father anymore. Chris and I are definitely doing parenting together.

 

7. Do you have any dating advice for single moms?

Dare to do it, that’s my advice. But treat it as an entertainment. Don’t go into it looking for a partner—that sets the stakes too high, it makes it too hard. Start out because you want someone to go to the movies with once in a while, or whatever it is you like to do. Claim the time as something you’re doing for you. When I was finally ready, it was an intensely magical relief just to think about me for two hours, even if the guy wasn’t ultimately “a match.”

 

8. Your career is obviously very important to you, but it’s also clear that your family is a priority. Do you have any advice for women looking to find balance? Was there ever a time when you felt you put too much emphasis on either aspect of your life?

Balance is an impossible dream, and the ten million Redbook readers and I know it. What we shoot for instead is good days, to have more good days than bad days. And for me, the fastest way to get to more good days has been to truly, 100 percent accept that I can’t be in two places at a time. So when I’m at work, I’m a worker; and when I’m home, I’m a mom, and I try not to feel the tension and pull of the Other Place, wherever I am. It’s taken years of practice to get here, though! Practice is a great word I use a lot about life: I am practicing how to balance, and if I have a bad day, no big deal. I get to practice again tomorrow, always learning. I practiced my way through my divorce, too; the days I was so angry at Chris, I would forgive myself, and then practice having compassion for him the next day. And eventually, I practiced myself right into the good, happy, solid, peaceful, whole place I am today.

About The Author

Photograph © Anna Wolf

Stacy Morrison is the editor in chief of Redbook magazine. Under her guidance, the magazine has found new vibrancy and relevance for today’s generations, winning a Folio award for General Excellence (2005), a Clarion award for General Excellence (2007), and a National Magazine Award nomination for Personal Service (2006). She has appeared as an expert on women, love, sex, money and more on the Today Show, CNN Headline News, CNN Moneyline, and The Early Show, among many other TV programs.
 
Before becoming editor in chief of Redbook magazine, she was Executive Editor at Marie Claire, working on the international advocacy projects, and had previously been the editor in chief of Modern Bride magazine and the venture-funded dot.com/magazine about design, One (which won three Ozzie awards in its short lifespan). She was also a part of the launches of Conde Nast Sports for Women, Time Out New York, and Mirabella magazine.

She lives in Brooklyn with her 4-year-old son, Zack, whose father is at the house many, many times a week.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster (March 15, 2011)
  • Length: 256 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781416595571

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