Editing My Life

There will be no copying and pasting!

Pictured above is the farmhouse table that has been with me since the summer of 2001—the summer my ex-husband and I decided to divorce. Getting both of us to this decision (at the same time) took years. Once the decision was finally made, what came next (putting our four-bedroom split-level home up for sale, the division of our personal property) seemed simple. Not easy, but simple.

After our house was sold, but before we’d moved out and before we bifurcated our finances, I purchased this farmhouse table from a sale held in the parking lot of the small Restoration Hardware once located on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. This was the 2001 version of Restoration Hardware, which was simpler than the 2026 version of the furniture chain, with its imposing, gray, unaffordable furniture. A RH salesperson informed me the table top was constructed from the sides of dismantled English pubs that had not been properly treated to prevent warping. In spite of the slightly warped top, I purchased it for $200.00.

This would be the last major purchase paid for out of our joint marital funds.

Beyond the recycled pub boards, the other major selling point of this table was that its legs screw off without tools, so I could move it on my own. And move it, I have.

Since those last few tension-filled weeks the table sat in the dining room I shared with my ex, the table has anchored thirteen dining areas. Yes, I have moved more times than most military families. I want to write the story of the moves, the houses, the whys behind those moves. Someday. But not today. Today, I will only say that we’re moving again in a month. This time, it’s ALL about the financials. Job loss has graced our family this year and economics are propelling us out of this current house. The decision to move was neither simple nor easy, but we hope it proves a wise one when we look back at it from the future.

With this move, we are downsizing by half. It’s the kind of downsizing people do when they divorce or when their last child leaves the nest. But we’re not divorcing and our son is a sophomore in high school, with two and a half years left at home.

I’ve spent the last few months intensely focused on what to release and what to bring with us into the next phase of this life. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been selling furniture and household goods through an online marketplace. This is not a process I enjoy, but I’ve been meeting some kind and understanding buyers along the way. The people who come inside to get larger pieces of furniture, and see our lovely house dismantled, want to know the why. I’ve opened up to a few, to those I sense have their own whys.

The woman who bought our Room and Board swivel glider yesterday was going through a divorce and moving into a rented apartment. After hearing my story, she asked if she could give me a hug. I gratefully accepted her offering (empathy has been in short supply this year). Before she drove away with my old/her new chair, I recommended Belle Burden’s divorce memoir, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, which I read earlier in the week. I love a good divorce memoir. And this one was VERY GOOD. Once begun, I could not put it down until I finished it at 3:48 AM (and had to get up two hours later). THAT hasn’t happened since I read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I read in the third of the thirteen houses when my 16-year-old was still a baby and my husband (second, not first) was overseas on business. I pulled an “all nighter” to finish the book before I was back at intensive solo parenting duties the next morning.

About a third of the way into Burden’s memoir, I experienced the kind of inner knowing compelling memoirs sometimes evoke. I was going to begin writing my own divorce memoir once again. I was going to release the musty, stretched-out memoir I’d been revising, or rewriting in slightly different forms (the last version, autofiction), on and off for the past fourteen years. Those versions are not following me into the next phase of my life.

There will be no copying and pasting!

I’m going to begin anew because I’ve gained a much better understanding of writing structure. Because the two children of my prior marriage are fully formed adults. Because last fall, my daughter told me the autofiction version didn’t sound like me. I had to stew on this a long while. More than all the highly-qualified beta readers the autofiction version had (thank you all!), my daughter’s opinion was the one I couldn’t shake off. Because my ex-husband’s death is six years in the rearview mirror. Because I’ve spent the past few years engaged in Internal Family Systems therapy and feel empowered to claim my own story, to allow myself to be seen in all my gory.

But first, I need to get moved and rehome many more objects, large and small. This will require many more decisions, large and small. It’s not unlike editing a memoir or any large piece of writing.

My farmhouse table is a part of my story. It will always be a part of my story, but I’m not sure it will fit into house number fourteen. I wonder if, like the thirteen or so prior versions of my memoir, I can let it go?

How have you been editing your life, and/or your memoir, this winter? How have you been making space for those new stories waiting to decorate your life? Could you make a list of objects, people, and/or paragraphs you’re ready to release? Perhaps even entire chapters?

Thank you for reading. I invite you to subscribe to receive monthly writing prompts and rituals. New rituals appear on the solstice and equinox months. Find more of my writing at www.heidifettigparton.com.

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