Counseling for women after divorce in arlington, Virginia

Therapy for divorce grief

You made it through the divorce in one piece. You handled the custody schedule, divided the assets, found a new place to live, kept your kid in his school. Your friends say they don’t know how you did it. Your boss never noticed a dip. You said most of the right things when your kid asked questions. From the outside, you handled the hardest year of your life with the same competence you bring to everything else.

You did all of that, and now you’re crying in the car in the Trader Joe’s parking lot because a song came on the radio that was playing at your wedding. You don’t even remember liking that song. You were the one who picked it.

You’re not used to this. You’re used to handling things. You graduated at the top of your class, made partner three years ahead of schedule, raised a kid who’s mostly thriving. When things go wrong, you handle them. That’s who you are.

The handling you brought to every other problem doesn’t work on this. It shows up in the car at the grocery store, in the elevator at work, in the kitchen on Tuesday morning when you reach for the second mug and remember it’s just you now. It shows up in the way your kid’s questions hit harder than they used to, in the way your boss has started leaving you out of meetings you used to lead. Saturday morning stretches in front of you like something you’re supposed to be enjoying and you can’t figure out what to do with it.

You drop him off at your ex’s on Sunday evening. The handoff goes fine. You say the things you practiced, you smile, you walk back to the car. You don’t cry at the curb. You don’t cry on the drive home. By the time you walk in the door you’ve convinced yourself you’re getting good at this.

Then the door clicks shut behind you and the apartment is so quiet it makes a sound of its own. The lights are off. Your kid’s room has a heavy kind of empty, the kind you can feel from the hallway. You stand in the entryway with your keys for what feels like a long time.

You text a friend who doesn’t text back. You open the fridge and close it. You eat a granola bar over the sink. You start a show and don’t watch it. At some point you’re scrolling Instagram and you see a photo of your ex’s mother at a wedding, smiling next to someone you used to be close to, and the cry you’d been holding in since the curb finally comes out, hard enough that you cough through it.

Then there’s the phone. The phone buzzes with your ex’s name on it and your stomach drops before you’ve even read the message. By the time you open it your chest is already tight. The message is about your kid’s pediatrician appointment, which is fine, but your body has already braced for impact and now the rest of the day has a low hum of anxiety beneath everything else.

By Monday morning you’ve put yourself back together. You blow-dry your hair, you put on lipstick, you make it to the meeting on time. Halfway through, someone asks for your input on something you should know, and you don’t. You haven’t been listening. You haven’t been listening for weeks. Your mind has been at the curb on Sunday, and at the Trader Joe’s parking lot, and in the bathroom stall at work where you cried for ten minutes and put your lipstick back on and walked out like nothing happened.