Does Your Divorce Need a Pacifier?
I could feel that my marriage was leaning toward divorce.
At the same time, I could feel that my youngest daughter was reaching the age where she needed to be weaned from her pacifier. But if she didn’t have the pacifier, she would cry. And given my own fragile emotional state with my marriage teeter-tottering, I feared that if she cried then so would I. Nevertheless, we needed to make it happen.
This girl loved her pacifier with an intensity that was admirable. Leading up to this moment, I made many attempts to get her to voluntarily release her hold on it. I even tried the old parent trick where I offered her a visit from the enchantingly generous Pacifier Fairy.
“We can gather all of your pacifiers and leave them for the Pacifier Fairy. When she takes your pacifiers with her to give to the other little babies who need them, she will leave you a gift! You can ask for anything. What would you want the Pacifier Fairy to leave for you?”
Her answer? MORE PACIFIERS.
I knew this would be a tough road.
That first evening that I put her to bed without her pacifier was painful for both of us. Wailing, then soothing. Begging, then calming. It was a back and forth effort as we both wondered why we were even bothering. She didn’t have the thing she had come to rely on for comfort. And I was similarly losing the thing that I had come to rely on for comfort. We were both facing big losses without what we felt we needed most.
I was crying while she was crying. I rubbed her back, and I said this phrase out loud to her:
The thing you think you need is already inside of you.
It was a line that hit me hard then and still hits me today.
We search everywhere for security and for proof that we are going to be ok, especially in divorce. We look for it in our family structure, our marital settlement, our social status, our bank account, our physical appearance, and our reputation.
We long for external pacifiers to calm us, when what we really need is to access the internal pacifier that is already deep inside of us.
There is a strength and a calm in you. You’ve tapped into it before. You’ve enjoyed the power of its comfort. That pacifier is the one that you most need now.
How do you find it? It starts with a deep breath with closed eyes. And it finishes with a question that only you can answer:
What do I really need from myself right now?
Not what do I need my former partner to do, not what do I need my settlement to look like, and not what do I need others to stop saying to me.
What do I really need from myself right now? You may find you answer it any number of different ways in different moments. You may need from yourself:
Permission to grieve
A nap
The reminder that you always figure it out
A walk
To understand that this passes
An encouragement from yourself that you’re pulling through the hardest of times
What matters most is that you listen to yourself.
Start building the confidence that you actually can pacify, give comfort, and calm yourself during this upheaval. That quiet voice inside of you is instructive, compassionate, and gently reminds you that the thing you think you need is already inside of you.
