Eat, Pray, Love

In the end, though, I was most guided by something my friend Sheryl said to me that very
night at that very party, when she found me hiding in the bathroom of our friend’s fancy loft,
shaking in fear, splashing water on my face. Sheryl didn’t know then what was going on in my
marriage. Nobody did. And I didn’t tell her that night. All I could say was, “I don’t know what to
do.” I remember her taking me by the shoulders and looking me in the eye with a calm smile
and saying simply, “Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.”
So that’s what I tried to do.
Getting out of a marriage is rough, though, and not just for the legal/ financial complica-
tions or the massive lifestyle upheaval. (As my friend Deborah once advised me wisely:
“Nobody ever died from splitting up furniture.”) It’s the emotional recoil that kills you, the shock
of stepping off the track of a conventional lifestyle and losing all the embracing comforts that
keep so many people on that track forever. To create a family with a spouse is one of the
most fundamental ways a person can find continuity and meaning in American (or any) soci-
ety. I rediscover this truth every time I go to a big reunion of my mother’s family in Minnesota
and I see how everyone is held so reassuringly in their positions over the years. First you are
a child, then you are a teenager, then you are a young married person, then you are a parent,
then you are retired, then you are a grandparent—at every stage you know who you are, you
know what your duty is and you know where to sit at the reunion. You sit with the other chil-
dren, or teenagers, or young parents, or retirees. Until at last you are sitting with the ninety-
year-olds in the shade, watching over your progeny with satisfaction. Who are you? No prob-
lem—you’re the person who created all this. The satisfaction of this knowledge is immediate,
and moreover, it’s universally recognized. How many people have I heard claim their children
as the greatest accomplishment and comfort of their lives? It’s the thing they can always lean
on during a metaphysical crisis, or a moment of doubt about their relevancy—If I have done
nothing else in this life, then at least I have raised my children well.
But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this
comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the re-
union? How do you mark time’s passage without the fear that you’ve just frittered away your
time on earth without being relevant? You’ll need to find another purpose, another measure
by which to judge whether or not you have been a successful human being. I love children,
but what if I don’t have any? What kind of person does that make me?
Virginia Woolf wrote, “Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a
sword.” On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order,
where “all is correct.” But on the other side of that sword, if you’re crazy enough to cross it
and choose a life that does not follow convention, “all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular
course.”Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more