An American Ex-Wife Gets the Flu

A review of This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz

I finished This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life by Lyz Lenz at midnight when I was sick with Influenza A. It was sort of perfect, kind of like when I read

Maggie Smith

’s You Can Make This Place Beautiful on my final family vacation before filing for divorce. The poetry of being debilitatingly ill with two children and no partner to care for me—or them—was not lost on me. 

When you are a woman who has chosen to exit the safety and structure of the traditional nuclear family, you quickly become nobody’s business. I never felt this more acutely than when my children and I were terribly sick and trying to scrape by for one of the loneliest weeks of my life. There were moments when I was bitter; there were moments when I was scared. But there were also moments when I was possessed by an absolute calm, a certainty that I was enough to guide us through on my own. And throughout it all, whether crying or raging or napping or pushing meds on children who didn’t want to take them, I was acutely aware that I belonged to myself. 

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lyz

, I was raised in the Midwest, raised in the church. The “nice girl” stock of Midwestern, Scandinavian, Lutheran Gen Xers is legendary. To be a girl in the 80s and 90s, especially one in the buttoned up states of Iowa and South Dakota, thoroughly indoctrinated by the sublimation culture of the church, is what my therapist would refer to as a Legacy Burden. And what a burden it was. As I got divorced not once, but twice, I was never more tuned in to how my decisions flew in the face of my upbringing. 

And while I hold my head up high and guide my girls through what is admittedly the worst divorce I have ever personally witnessed, it would be hubris to say that I don’t feel the sting of rejection, judgment, and shame. This book, at this exact moment in my life, was the definition of a lighthouse. If a book was capable of holding my hand and guiding me through an angry mob, it would be This American Ex-Wife. 

Lenz intimately understands the impact of being a “good Midwest girl” turned “selfish” feminist. She writes, “I truly believed that if I could do everything correctly, get good grades, marry a good man, that I could fix this.” I feel that in my bones. I tried so hard to be good, to do the right thing. 

Before my first marriage at the young age of 25, I was following a very clear script: Graduate college, launch career in related field, start dating, move in together, get married, buy a house, get a dog, get pregnant. Lenz describes: “Together we were quickly checking off the boxes of functional American adulthood.” I understand that not all women grow up with that particular invisible dragon breathing down their neck, but I sure as hell did. And to choose that model over one’s own happiness, pleasure, and desire was the mark of success. She wrote, “I wasn't being raised to be happy. I was being raised to be good. Those are lessons that are hard to unlearn.”

They are nearly impossible lessons to unlearn. And it takes fearlessly and tirelessly swimming upstream to accomplish it. It also means being subjected to the word “selfish” being hurled at you repeatedly, which, if you were a good Midwestern Lutheran, is the button to push. I have spent decades grappling with a belief that I am selfish, for reasons both external and internalized. To be a woman, a wife, especially a mother, and to be labeled selfish is one of the cruelest brands. I for one am so tired of the word “selfless” being lauded as the most noble of characteristics. What’s so impressive about being devoid of self? Why would anyone aspire to that? 

On the topic of selfishness, Lenz writes, “I'd spent over 12 years asking for someone to give me my happiness. Finally, I stopped asking. I just took it. This is what people call being selfish. After all, I am a mother. I was a wife. It is my duty to think of others over myself.” She starkly pinpoints the question that so many of us ask ourselves: “Who was I to think that I was better than this life, this very good life?”

One of my rallying cries as the mother of girls has always been that my desperate attempts to preserve an identity and sense of personal fulfillment are actually beneficial to my daughters. Lenz describes this beautifully: “Maybe I would show my children that life is not misery and their happiness belongs to them, that their freedom is worth fighting for.” 

And for many of us, this selfishness, this choice to leave our marriages, is framed through the tired trope of “staying together for the children.” A premise that I defy you to find an expert to endorse. And yet while I don’t believe it at all, it’s a persistent guilt to shake off. When I need reminding, I will read these passages over and over until I remember:

“American society has its own religion of not quitting, of sticktoitiveness, of branding divorcees as selfish, and that religion is the religion of “do what's best for the children.” It's an insidious faith that rests on the fundamental belief that parents (specifically mothers), must sacrifice themselves for their children.”

Single mothers spend countless dark nights of the soul worrying about the impact our divorces will have on our children. There is no fear quite like it. And Lenz has a beautiful, comforting answer to that as well. I want to paint it on the walls of my foyer in lieu of the trite “Live Laugh Love” mural. 

“Divorce disabused me of the myth that I could protect my kids from the heartbreak of life. I wanted them to know that they don't have to live in fear. I wanted them to know that they could make mistakes and burn down their world, and that they could grieve and learn, and that it is never too late to fight for their happiness.”

That is a family motto worth celebrating, in my opinion. (I don’t actually have a Live Laugh Love mural, for what it’s worth.)

When you are a divorced woman, you are painfully aware that your choice makes other people uneasy. If your marriage was that breakable, what of theirs? Divorce feels contagious.

I remember an afternoon I spent with my brother years ago, in which we both unloaded our deep disappointments in our relationships. It was beyond a gripe session; this was insidious, dysfunctional stuff. The next week, he left his partner and I stayed. 

This scene is played out over and over during brunches with girlfriends where the disclaimers about how great everyone’s husbands are flow more freely than the bottomless mimosas. Everyone wants to vent, to share, to confess, and yet: “Of course I love my husband and I would never trade this life for anything.” Cue nervous glances thrown at the divorced women at the table. 

Lenz writes, “It happened almost by accident. . . ‘Should I get divorced?’ they ask in whispers, in DMs, in Facebook messages, in coffee shops. ‘How do you know when it’s time to go?’ They all want to know.”

Like Lenz, during the first months of my separation, women (and sometimes men) found me almost like magic. They were magnetically drawn to me. They weren’t going to leave, per se, but they had questions. They had things to get off their chest. As I turned to a fellow warrior divorcee for support, she messaged me with these words I will never forget: “I am like a lantern for women leaving shit marriages.” 

I quickly began to feel the same way about myself. Because nobody is guiding us here; we have to do it all on our own. She jokingly talked about being a divorce doula; I wholeheartedly, non-ironically endorse the idea that we need people to perform this role for families. Leaving is hard; leaving is awful. Sit at my kitchen table with me, and please bring a lantern and a map. 

Because this book is so much more than a memoir, Lenz deftly unravels the systems that got us into this mess, because surely, it is no accident. If our marriages fail, it is our fault, and it says something terrible about us. 

“There is a million dollar self-help industry dedicated to helping women cobble together the broken pieces of their marriage as if it's our fault. As if the system of marriage wasn't built to break us from the beginning. As if it wasn't created to erase us and our ambitions and hopes.”

She tackles everything from country music lyrics to messages from the church to government policies that send clear messages to women about what their job is: to stay. The circumstances that cause us to leave marriages are unique and specific to our own relationship dynamics, but that’s only half the issue. 

Lenz writes, “We've been making it an individual rather than systemic issue, a “What's wrong with me?” or “I'm a good man” rather than looking at how the structure of heterosexual relationships is oppressive, how we celebrate the martyr mother archetype and denigrate the selfish woman who blows it all up so she can live free.”

Is it worth it? All this struggle and isolation and swimming against the tide? Lenz writes, “Is being happy worth it? And the answer is absolutely, unequivocally, yes.” 

The price is high, so very high, but the payoff is freedom, the payoff is yourself. She weighs the cost and the reward so clearly: “And we are prepared to endure the shame and self-criticism, the judgment of others, the painful separations, the clunky custody, and the loss of stability and income, if only to be free.” 

She goes on to acknowledge, “Of course, not all women want to get divorced. They love their husbands. They simply want the scale to slide just a little in their favor. They want Hawaii but will settle for Florida. This book is for them, too. To convince them to ask for everything they want and more, to raise the bar, and to show them if it breaks, there is a better life.” 

On the days when I wonder if it is worth it, when I feel that surely, we could be doing this post-divorce life so much better than we are, I am bolstered by her words: “It takes a radical imagination to see a different way of loving and living. Outside of the one so well worn into the landscape of society. We are told we cannot have it all. Kids, career, home, and love. Telling us this makes women feel defeated. Makes us give up on trying, on pushing, on asking for more. But we can have it all. So many women have. We just have to find another pathway to get there.”

I was lamenting this nuclear family model and how badly it serves divorced women during a phone call with my best friend. My girls and I were almost a week into Flu A, and I felt helpless and defeated and angry. I have so many friends who are single mothers; why are we so isolated? Why aren’t we helping each other more? We could be doing this so much better, but like Lenz says, it takes a radical imagination, and whose imagination is radical when they are out of NyQuil and their kitchen looks like it threw itself up? 

“I guess if I want something different, I’m going to have to build it myself,” I told my friend over the phone. I had plans to create a forward-thinking women’s circle of mothers who were both divorced and married; women who acknowledged that regardless of our partnership status, we needed each other and we needed to do better. I texted my other best friend, another single mom, “When the girls and I are better, how about we start a weekly dinner with our two families?”

Nobody has yet given me assembly instructions for the life I want. So I’ll build it myself. Fuck it, I have ADHD and I can’t follow directions anyway. I can’t overturn an entire system, but I can create rituals and community and plan non-traditional vacations and holidays, and I will write myself into the life I want. 

And I will do so buoyed by the fearless words of Lyz Lenz: “You do not have to settle for the life you were told you should want. You do not have to settle for good enough, if good enough requires you to sacrifice your hopes and dreams. You do not have to be a martyr. You can fight for your happiness through whatever means necessary. It will not always involve breaking your life apart. But if it does, you do not have to be afraid.”

Steph Sprenger

is co-editor of Midstory Magazine and The HerStories Project. She produces Listen To Your Mother Boulder, co-hosts the Mother Plus Podcast, and is working on a memoir.