The wheel of life takes one up and down by turn.

—KALIDASA

I am perched on the edge of my bed and my husband is sitting on the floor in front of me, his legs crossed, his voice low and calm. I cannot feel my body, and my face feels numb. “I have feelings for someone else,” he tells me. “We want to explore being together.” I am shocked, reeling, as I struggle to process what he is saying. My mind feels—well, it feels drunk. Drunk and clumsy. Like I am underwater, moving in slow motion, trying to fit pieces into a puzzle, but the pieces keep floating away and I am too slow to grasp them and put them where they belong.

Too soon, the warning not to make big life decisions feels quaint. Life has outpaced me. Just days after moving back into my apartment, my husband told me he wanted a divorce. Weeks after unpacking my cheerful cards from my housemates and my books of daily reflections, I learned Marc had been sharing holidays and intimate dinners with another woman… a woman I had introduced him to, a woman I had thought was my friend. While I was away in Tennessee, Marc had hired a divorce lawyer and started legal proceedings.

I sit there in my nightgown, unable to say a word, even as the pieces finally thud into place—his refusal to come to any family weekend, his fury when I asked where he was going New Year’s Eve—and still, I cannot believe it. I look down at my hands and I realize they are shaking. Our children are asleep in the next room, and it is all coming to an end. This. Our life together. Our marriage. I had thought when he first mentioned a divorce that he was just angry. He had every right to be. I had hurt him so very much. But hearing him talk about this other woman and their feelings for each other left no doubt in my mind: Marc had moved on.

In the days, weeks, and months that followed, I seesawed between disbelief and fury. Without alcohol, the pain was brittle, sharp-edged. While I didn’t yearn for the hazy soft-edged fog of wine, I needed something to escape the pain, or at least dull it. I spent hours cleaning closets, organizing cabinets, cooking, baking—anything to try to divert and distract me from the cyclone of questions: How could this really be happening? How can I fix this? I kept banging into the same wall, the one that has “you’re not in control anymore” spray-painted on it.

I clung to my new sobriety like a life raft. I went to meetings with other alcoholics and raged about my crumbling life, sharing how seared I felt by the rejection, but nothing could blunt it or alter the course of events. By May, Marc had found a new apartment and bought himself new furniture, and at the end of the month he moved out and on to his new life. Left behind were closets crammed with his clothes and guitar cases, shelves filled with photos of birthdays and beach vacations… all no longer wanted or needed, shed like an old skin. He had a clean slate, with no reminders of the past. I was confronted with the memories and the wreckage every time I opened a drawer.

We all learned to navigate our new reality and the painful new routines: the walks with Zachary and Sam to Daddy’s new house, the awkward pickups after school with other parents’ pitying smiles, the dropoffs on the nights the boys were sleeping with him—their empty beds and the screaming silence in my home. I didn’t know what to do with myself those nights. I would wander around the apartment, straightening photographs, picking up toys and socks they had left lying on the floor. It was physical, this ache I had for them. I still could not believe this was how life was going to be.

It was summer when it all began to fall apart for me. I don’t know exactly what it was that pushed me over the edge, sent me tumbling back into the swamp of addiction. Was it another long weekend without the boys? News from my divorce lawyer that as the “moneyed spouse” I would have to pay for Marc’s lawyer, too? Someone thoughtlessly tattling that they had seen Marc strolling up Broadway holding hands with another brunette?

Maybe it was just everything—the fighting, the worry, the financial strain of supporting two households—it was all pressing down, too hard. At some point the misery of those months in Tennessee and the memory of what drinking had done to me was eclipsed by my daily distress. I forgot to meditate and pray—they seemed like flimsy weapons in this battle. I forgot what I had told George in that GMA interview—that my feelings couldn’t kill me. I felt like I was dying of grief. I would do anything not to feel that. And I did. A few times that summer, I did what I swore I would never again do: I drank. It was just a handful of times, but it was enough to set me on a terrible course as August, and my first vacation as a single parent with my boys, loomed.