When My Marriage of 16 Years Ended, I Had to Find My Way Back to Myself

Goosy had gone through too much. His dad and I were separating, but it was beautiful, because I knew there was someone out there who was better for my husband than me. And when his tears finally stopped, he said that it was true, and it was time for him to say it out loud—that if he was being honest, the partner who was best for him was not a woman but a man.

So, we held onto each other for dear life, like nothing would ever change, until we couldn’t hold on any longer, and we moved past shame, and we moved past betrayal and into an empty space where neither of us knew who we belonged to anymore.

The camp for Goosy had been my idea. I just wanted him to do something different that summer, to expand his world view, to commune with nature. He needed the breath of new friendships, away from the entanglement of family changes that had characterized his grade five year. And he’d have his cousins and sports and time to think.

It wasn’t until I started packing that I realized how disoriented I was. I held back tears during the art camp drop-off with my youngest, Veda. My oldest, Leila, was going off to college, and I had to take her there, had to unpack her poetry books that she ordered online after she and Mister Lover Boy quit. For a high school crush, god, it was hard on all of us. I wanted love to work—I wanted it to. I didn’t want to teach my daughter that even the strongest links can be broken. Teaching her to lead with skepticism would go against the very operating system I’d put every effort to mother into her: Lead with your heart.

My passport was somewhere in the mix. When I found it, I pushed my fingers slowly over my name on the signature page. In the last six months, everything in my life had changed. I was a different person.

The ponytail, though. I recognized her.

That girl existed. And behind her, there were student IDs, old book reviews, printed-out columns from her very first published articles, and even a memoir, and a hundred old friends, and the people, and the experiences that made her—old canoes, and cottage parties, and The Girl She Was Before—before she was married. And she was whole, and she was beautiful, and she was a complete person, and she needed no one, and she had a plan, and she had a dream, and she was prepared to do it alone—until a blond-haired man came along and distracted her with his surfing, and his road trips, and the look in his longing blue eyes, his duct-taped wallets, and his playlists, and most of all, the way he let her take care of him.

And, my god, I loved him.

The way he let me look at a map, and just say, there. The way he lined up dirt roads for us to drive down, and how we twirled in long grass and lupins and blew dandelions with toddlers, like time was a fiction, and we were suspended in a moment, intertwined in a dream, like it was real. And he could see my vision, and when he measured the angles, he could make it work. And he calculated, and he organized, and I dreamed it, and he built it. And for me, he stacked one dream upon the next, upon the next. Then a baby. Then a house. Then a master’s. Then a business. The way he told me that anything was possible. And for sixteen years, it was.

I shook myself loose. Goose needed his mom right now—and his whistle and his seven pairs of shorts.

By the time I was ready to go, I was dizzy and had to ask Mom to drive us since I really didn’t feel well. And I wondered why I was doing this—why did I always do this?—over-plan and over-arrange and sign people up for things that they didn’t want to do, because they weren’t me, and they didn’t like camping, and they were actually fine to play video games all summer and bike-gang around with the neighbourhood scraps.

But it was all too late now, and we were heading for Toronto. We checked into the fanciest hotel in the city and took pictures of each other at the top of the CN Tower and made peace signs beside the aquarium’s biggest, brightest jellyfish that just floated through space, and I wondered what kind of lessons it could teach me—to be, to just be.

We arrived at the rink with the world’s largest pack and waited for the bus to Algonquin. And we watched the grass grow and a baseball tournament for a while, and Goose entertained himself. But the time grew long, and the sun went high in the sky, and I knew that something was wrong.

Eventually, I called the camp, and the coordinator said the bus would be late. But still, things seemed incongruent, and when I called her back, she said it was the bus to Toronto that was late, not from Toronto, because that bus was not coming until Sunday the thirteenth, of course, not Saturday the twelfth. We were a full twenty-four hours early, with me due to fly home later that afternoon and check-in for my flight just hours away.

It was one of those times where you could just give up on life, you tried so hard to play it cool. We shuttled back to the hotel, ordered fancy pastries and hot chocolate. When I finally got the airline on the phone, they were no help in searching for the answers as to why my life had come to this, why I always got things so wrong, got the camp dates wrong, got the husband wrong.

When my marriage disappeared, for a while, so did I. Family dinners, lemonade stands, kids on bikes with scraped knees. A kiss when he got home from work. What are we doing on Friday? Is Sunday with your folks? Vacations, vaccinations, oil changes. All gone.

I had this recurring image of my life, as if I’d seen it explode with my own eyes. There was nothing left except radiant white light.

There is energy in explosion. Energy is transformed, not removed. Changed, not broken. If my deep dive into quantum mechanics in my twenties had taught me anything, it was that. The Law of Conservation of Energy. As an over-electrical being with epilepsy, it was something that I thought about a lot, on a loop sometimes. When energy explodes, what is left?

Laura was a global health worker and my friend for over twenty years. When she got COVID-19 in March 2021 and almost died, she packed up her family from Geneva and decided it was time to head back to Prince Edward Island. She witnessed the dissolution of the marriage first-hand.

At first, Mitch and I thought that we may be able to live together in a new capacity. Would we still be married if we had new partners? I googled mixed-orientation marriages and dreamed up scenarios where we all lived in the house together. I fought against convention, tradition, against the expectations of cultural norms. I fought against the idea of “being divorced.” We could reinvent the wheel, right?

It sounds crazy now, but at the time, we talked about it like things wouldn’t necessarily change—much. I loved him for being brave enough to live his truth. He loved me for understanding. We loved the kids. Nothing would ever change.

“Jesus fuck, Mo,” said Laura one night as we sat in our snow pants. “You should listen to yourself. It’s like you’re in the middle of a cholera outbreak, in a pandemic, and you won’t wear your mask or put your gloves on. You have to look out for yourself, too, sometimes, you know?”

Nothing made sense anymore. When he travelled for work, and in this space apart, new questions circulated. I began to ask myself, What do you want this new life to look like? And I waited for the answers.

Something was keeping me up at night. The separation agreement. First of all, I wrote it alone, which he didn’t like. “It’s just a draft,” I said. “I’m just getting it started.” And then, “It’s a Google doc,” I added. “It’s live.”

It made promises neither of us knew how to keep. We promised to be fair, to share, to mediate with help if need be. We would swing back and forth through Christmas and birthdays, host open discussion forums around special events. On paper, it was all very diplomatic.

There was no Who will clean out the garage when you move? How will one of us feel to see the art on the other’s walls? The gears of unoiled machinery and sticky things.

The proceedings were growing long, and I was tired. I coped with my parents’ disappointment. The marriage was over, and I tried my best to keep them uninvolved. I heard myself saying things like “The separation is moving along” and “We’ve got some really good people on it,” like we were producing a film with actors and timelines. Sometimes I was the director, and sometimes he was.

I asked for more, then he asked for more—a process of scathing indifference. A cutting, difficult process of grief, of finding light under darkness. My philosophy of finding tolerance was tested in new, absurd ways. Repulsed by a world where my marriage was adding up to numbers and dollar signs, I felt exposed, minimized.

The divorce literature tells you, Never cut what you can untie. We were never dollars and cents, and we knew that. We were still in shock together, in love, not knowing how to leave each other, planning a divorce party. Wouldn’t it be fun to get the old gang together again? Like nothing had really changed.

But through the spring, working with the lawyers and the accountants, we waited for revelation to come, our lives simply reduced to words like “asset mix,” our homes, where our children learned to walk, lines on a balance sheet.

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In late summer, we failed out of mediation. There’s no we, anymore, Maureen, there’s just you and there’s him. I heard the words, but everything that came out of my mouth was still we. I know, but we decided . . . I know, but when we talked about it . . . Yes, but we thought you should know. Practise saying I, she said. She had me slowly mouth the word. It was like teaching me a new language.

Yes, our lives were moving in different directions. Yes, he was going to be better. Yes, I was going to be better. Yes, he was going to find someone new. Yes, I was going to find someone new. We were going to become new constellations.

But after sixteen years, we certainly weren’t going to let someone sitting in an office downtown tell us that there was no we anymore. We left her office. We went for lunch. He texted me later. I called. We wanted to hold our children in our shared community, values, and dreams.

Turbulence in the marriage made us rethink the nuptials, but we never second-guessed wanting to do right by each other. We would separate, we said, even if we had to do it together.

The teenager was off to college, the littlest ones finishing elementary school. They understood what was happening was for the greater good. At my house, they got mini muffins in an extra-high cupboard. At his house, they got TVs in their rooms.

That fall, I practised saying I. The days he kept the kids stretched long. I went to the grocery store, bought raspberries and baby carrots, that mozzarella that the little one really liked. I couldn’t remember what an adult female’s diet consisted of, living alone in the wild without her kin.

The more I talked to people, the more I started to encounter ruptures in the marital system. Stories poured of the fractured love of women who had aged out of the matrix. And in a stage of my life where I was supposed to be focusing on self-care, it was like vultures out there. The girls were furious. Who’s taking the house? Have you signed the papers yet?

I repeated the story on an auto-loop. We had taught three children how to walk, and now we were going to teach each other how to fly. We had a brilliant marriage. We were going to be brilliant co-parents. The future seemed bright, even as we—in his words—had blown up our lives.

But as the community mourned the passing of our coupledom, I was left with a misplaced sense of grief. I’m so sorry, they said. That’s terrible, they said. Friends scattered furiously to take sides. There are no sides, I argued, it’s just what’s best for everyone. But the rumour mill cranked out the stories, and people just lapped it up. And it began to hurt like it hadn’t before.

And I have to admit, that first Christmas, things stung a little. We argued over the Christmas card. The kids picked the photos, I added a glittery trim, and it arrived in the mail. “The picture of us together is misleading,” he said. “You can’t send it out.” Furthermore, he asked me to trim my list—leave his family out of it and take “his friends” off.

I wrote a holiday letter that was brilliant, honest, and raw, and didn’t send it. The theme that was developing was that people needed a curated, presentable version of the truth. A casual dispatch. I knew I had to hit the Christmas card reset button, but I just didn’t know how.

I felt lost in this new post-marriage relationship. Even though we had chosen this upper path of clarity and respect, it’s like our culture wasn’t ready for it. The responses were sharp-witted, pointed. Everyone had an angle. She really messed that up, didn’t she? He couldn’t have known, could he? Culture swarmed on the hot mess that was left, bees swarming to the hive. This caused heartbreak, caused division.

We broke down the holiday hour by hour, making sure each of our families had a share. It was the opposite of bringing families together; it was the systematic plan to tear a family apart. Checks and balances were installed at every stage of the way. Santa became a spreadsheet. The family traditions were hijacked by both of us. Blood pressure went up. I would be wrong if I didn’t admit that I made mistakes along the way. My hot temper got me into trouble more than a few times.

The impatience of transition clouded the paperwork, and the finite details of our separation agreement kept me awake at night. Sixteen years times three children, times many wonderful memories, times houses and businesses, minus arguments, minus power, and minus control, divided by two.

It would take time, but eventually, we had to school our lawyers too. Dear lawyers, here’s what we would like to do. This season, always remember that you can keep the peace, and that there’s always magic in the air for all those who can see it.

Reinvention is really something, isn’t it?

I made some decisions. As much as I wanted to see myself as a progressive thinker, I didn’t want to live in a sexually fluid household, with my husband and his new partner, as much as the kids thought that was a great idea. I wanted a romantic relationship between one woman and one man. I didn’t want swingers. I didn’t want an open marriage. I didn’t want mixed orientation. I didn’t want change. And that was all okay.

I wanted flowers in the backyard, a barbecue. I wanted hockey nets downstairs where the boys could play all winter, even if they wrecked the walls. I wanted hotel pools in March. I wanted endless summers with camping and firepits. I wanted stars.

When I realized I didn’t have to be more than I was, more than I was ready for, or more than I was capable of, the shift began. The equilibrium set me free. There was no timeline to complete “the work,” the deep dives into how to build boundaries, the emotional fallout when you failed to keep them. There was no waiting for an answer. There was no one even listening.

Yes, we were going to get divorced, and no, we were not the first people on the planet to do it.

Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from Radiant White Light: A Divorce Memoir in Poems and Stories by Mo Duffy, published by Pownal Street Press, 2026.