What’s the best investment you’ve ever made?
Mine is a paddleboard.
Grab a cup of coffee (or a glass of wine) and get comfy while I tell you the story.
When my ex and I were starting down the road of divorcing, money was tight. Legal bills were mounting and we were paying a hefty mortgage, plus rent, and everything that comes along with that. It was frustrating because it was a financial tightness that I hadn’t felt in a long time.
Money was tight, but I coveted the paddleboard a friend of mine had.
It was a fancy paddleboard – custom-made for her uncle, who decided he wanted a better one. It was a race board – made of high-tech materials and aerodynamically perfected to slice through the water at record speed.
I dreamed of having a paddleboard like that.
I grew up in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes. (It’s actually 10,000+, but you get the idea). You don’t have to go far to find water.
When I was growing up, we had a boat. Every weekend in the summer, when the days were hot and stifling, we’d head to the river after we got our weekend chores done. It was such a drag to toil through cleaning bathrooms and vacuuming, but then we’d get to spend the entire weekend basking in the sun, tubing, waterskiing, cooking out and swimming, so it was worth it. The warm sun on my skin contrasted with the cool splash of the river water was heaven, and there really aren’t many places I’d rather be than on the water.
Fast forward a bunch of years.
After being married for 17 years, I discovered my husband is gay.
The divorce was not pretty. When he left me, he turned into a person I never knew – I had never seen this side of him before.
The relief he felt now that he was able to express himself fully as a gay man after suppressing it for so many years, was probably a much-welcomed reprieve for him. I get that. But often, the “straight spouse”, as we are called, gets left in the wake of this feeling of relief. What we go through is equally as difficult, yet our struggle is often brushed aside as the spouse that has come out is celebrated for being so brave.
One spouse is experiencing the birth of a new life. The other is experiencing the death of an old one.
That was the case for me.
He expected me to fall into line and accept it on his timeline. He expected me to move on with my life as if this was just a normal occurrence. He couldn’t understand that I needed my own timeline, and my own process, however messy it was, to grieve.
Bear with me. I’m still getting to the paddleboard.
I made the discovery on a hot July day while he was fixing the refrigerator when I found some emails that disclosed an 8-month affair with a married gay man. I was devastated, scared, angry, sad… ALL of the feels.
He said he wasn’t sure if he was really gay, but he was sure he was unhappy in our marriage and that was what led him to “experiment”.
In the vast black hole of fear I was living in after I found out, I convinced myself that the things he was unhappy with in our marriage were very fixable problems. I still loved him, and we had two beautiful children together. I was willing to do what it took, at all costs to make this work.
It probably goes without saying that this was really hard for me. But, I felt an obligation to work this out for my kids. At the time, I told myself that they deserved better than divorced parents. They deserved a “normal” family.
Looking back, I can see that it was noble to want to save my family, but I was also scared out of my mind. I had been a stay-at-home mom with a photography side-gig for 12 years, and I had been completely financially dependent on my husband for that long. He’s an attorney, and we had a very comfortable life.
I was scared to death of how I was going to make a living if this didn’t work out.
Even though I’m an intelligent person with an aerospace engineering degree, I wasn’t exactly in a position to land a corporate job that would pay me 6-figures right out of the gate.
After 5 months in therapy trying to figure out how to make him happy, he knew. He knew he did not belong in a heterosexual relationship.
As we navigated the process of separating, he turned into a person that I had never seen or known before. He was unkind and controlling. He was emotionally volatile. He was, in all honesty, a complete asshole.
It was unfathomable to me that someone who married me and who supposedly loved me at one point, would treat me this way – like yesterday’s trash. After all, he was the one who begged me to stay after I found out he was having sex with another man. I couldn’t understand why this couldn’t be a simpler and kinder process.
When he finally moved out of the house, it was a relief, but it was still hard. Despite everything, I still loved him, so it was a bittersweet goodbye. On one hand, I didn’t have to deal with him being there all the time, reminding me daily about the shambles my life was in.
On the other hand, this seemed so final.
I felt like a failure.
We tried mediation before hiring attorneys. He’s an attorney himself, and a bully by nature, so I felt at a disadvantage in mediation. I felt controlled, manipulated and bullied and as such, decided I didn’t feel comfortable with mediation.
I hired my own attorney, and throughout the rest of the negotiation was blamed for the whole thing costing us so much. He made very clear that it was my fault we were having to spend thousands of dollars on attorneys.
I’ll never forget the first Christmas we were technically “separated”, yet living in the same house, I mentioned that I put the retainer for my attorney on our Amex.
He flipped. Seriously flipped.
Once he moved out, I was having a hard time coping, so I made the mistake of starting to date to distract myself.
I went out on a few dates, and one guy I met was charming and flirty. We dated for a little less than two months and he ghosted me. Totally went dark.
At the time, I was grasping for anything that would fill the giant hole in my heart left from my failed marriage, and dating was one of those things. So when ghosting-guy went dark, I made it mean everything about me – I wasn’t thin enough or pretty enough or fun enough. I was obsessed with it.
I was obsessed with the why and I fell deeper into a depression.
I needed a glimmer of hope somewhere.
Back to that paddleboard.
If only. If only. If only I could have that paddleboard.
Given that money was tight due to the divorce negotiations, and the fact that my husband was never going to allow me to spend money on something like a paddleboard, I sold some photography equipment that I didn’t use anymore to pay for it.
My daughter, 5 at the time, and I went to the closest Hudson Outfitters store and I purchased my first paddleboard. It wasn’t anywhere near as fancy as my friend’s, but I could not wait to get it out on the water.
My kids were with their dad that weekend, so I took my paddleboard on her maiden voyage. It was heavenly. Heavenly. I was completely blissed out and it felt like I was home again. Just like the old days when my family spent our summer days on the water. I paddled around the lake and always took some time at the end of my paddle to lay on my board, close my eyes and just be.
It became my sanctuary.
It was the place I went when I needed to put all of my worries and fears aside and feel human again.
That weekend, my daughter happened to mention to her dad something about she and I being at Hudson Outfitters. My ex started asking questions and she spilled the beans about the paddleboard.
He went ballistic.
I am not exaggerating.
In his mind, I should have put that money toward our legal bills. Maybe he was right, but what wasn’t right is that he pulled my access to our funds, which were still joint, immediately. I had no way to access any money whatsoever.
None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
I was now a single mom living in a really big house with and I hardly had a cent to my name.
But I had the paddleboard.
That paddleboard symbolized calm, relief and peace. It symbolized freedom. It reminded me that I stood up for myself.
I was out on my board this morning, 5 years later – almost to the day – and I am still reminded of the entire story I just told you. Every single time I’m on my board I think about it and reflect on how far I’ve come since that day.
Sometimes, I am saddened by what I lost when I discovered his infidelity and how he hid the truth about his sexuality for the entire time I knew him. Sometimes I am angry that the life I knew was taken away from me. Sometimes I am afraid of what the future holds.
But also sometimes, I think about “paddlegate” and I think about what a turning point that was in my life. I think about how I gained a sanctuary that I still love and need to this day.
I gained a reminder that I am worthy, I am enough, I am strong and capable.
I gained a reminder that I am on my way to achieving my dreams and that I am so proud of how far I have come.
All that from a paddleboard.
Pretty great, huh?
