The Pink Elephant in the Room

I used to love waking up somewhere new, experiencing that feeling of disorientation while your brain figures out where you are, slowly coming around by noting all of the unusual particulars around you. Lately, I find myself startling out of dreams with that same feeling of displacement. I can hear the refrigerator in the kitchen humming out its repetitive drone, the darkness fades to adjusted eyes, revealing my desk along the wall, and if I strain my ears, I can hear Fred softly snoring one room away at the foot of my daughter’s bed. But that feeling of waking up in unfamiliar territory clings to me like smoky hair after an evening in a very popular pub.

It’s gotten as bad as it has been. Which is not to say that it won’t get worse. I stumble along in feeble parenting attempts to shield my daughter from it all, and fail quite spectacularly. I touch her hair at random moments, rub her back as she passes me in the kitchen, and kneel in front of her, looking into her eyes and holding onto them for a moment longer than normal to try to gauge what thoughts are passing beyond what I am seeing.

When I say I know it can get worse, I speak on good authority. A year ago, I struck up a friendship with a mother at my daughter’s preschool based solely on our daughters’ passion for each other. We would meet and exchange small talk pleasantries while the two of them would tear up whichever house was available to them that week. She is also going through a divorce now, so when we meet, we don’t waste our breath with the trivial complaints of lazy teachers at their preschool, or how things are progressing at our jobs. We settle the girls in one of their pink bedrooms, ensuring that a mess will be made, and hole up on a sofa, trading war stories and examining each other’s battle scars. Hers are worse. So much, much worse. Police at four in the morning worse, so I take my unfamiliar road and put it into perspective.

Divorce is a new car without the reassuring new car smell (actually, this would be the new car that smells astounding like my flatulent dog). You make your purchase, and then notice suddenly everyone else has that exact same car. Two years ago, I knew one woman who was getting a divorce, but everyone I meet now is walking a similar path. Some are still trudging through the murkier aspects of it, while others have managed to clean themselves up and stand a bit away from it all.

I don’t think you ever put it completely behind you. Even without the memories, you walk away from something like this marked, the toilet paper stuck to your shoe that you never notice flipping along in your wake. But someday, or so I’m told, you wake up feeling familiar displacement only to realize that you are, in fact, somewhere relatively different, and as you take inventory of all that surrounds you, it’s not necessarily a bad place to be.