Something Like Joy
Written by: Jessica Latshaw
I was at a family dinner recently when my oldest brother Josh picked up my new book and started reading.
“Wow, Jess, you get right into it, huh?” He says and I start to squirm.
My dad chimes in, “Oh yeah! The underwear bit? She doesn’t hold back, does she?”
They are both laughing as Josh adds, “First couple sentences and you kick the door down, Jess!”
My book Monochromatic Heart: on grief and love and still being here is available here.
My friends are planning a book release party for me. They are literally like, Hey we are probably four of the busiest people you know, but we are going to make ourselves even busier and plan an event because we love you!
And I am like, Oh my goodness, you don’t have to, you can just sleep and eat snacks for the rest of your life and feel the opposite of burdened because the last thing I want to do is burden anyone (unless you’re my husband, and then I have a list of things I need done, let’s start with recording this essay)!
But my friends are like, We think sleeping and eating snacks is really nice, but probably not to the exclusion of all other things—and one of those things is celebrating the fact that you wrote a whole book!
I do not like being even remotely burdensome to others. I do not enjoy asking for help. For me, the worst part of music directing at a church is regularly asking people to, like, play music. Which is what they signed up for. It’s not crazy that I ask them. It’s not totally out of the blue. It’s not like they are all sous chefs, busily making food day in and day out and I suddenly ask if they can play the keyboard on Friday June 6th. (Although, how wonderful would it be if all the musicians playing for my church were, in fact, sous chefs—potlucks would be next level. We’d sell tickets!) These musicians want to play music. At one point, they asked me if they could do it (well, they auditioned, which is a way of asking to be part of it).
When I was 29, my first husband decided to really shake things up and have an affair and then abruptly leave me one morning. It was not boring. He was committed. He didn’t even answer my call the morning he left and I woke up alone until after I called him twenty times in a row, stalker-style (well, is it fair to say it’s stalking when a wife repeatedly calls her husband who has just left?). Dramatically, he told me he loved someone else and then he said: you will never see me again.
I was devastated. My soul left my body, I think. Or at least it questioned whether my body was a great place to hang, since it was hurting so much. My soul had always kind of assumed my body was good real estate, like a really nice, safe neighborhood where kids could play and nobody locked their doors. But that morning my soul discovered that it was trapped in something akin to the everglades, full of alligators and poisonous snakes and, like, lawless people who murdered before lunch on a Tuesday, and it was like, Whoa—how do I get out of here?But the ribcage. Such a problem, really. A whole CAGE. My soul was trapped in a young healthy body—so, unable to escape, it tried something else entirely: crazy cool rationality. Like, the unfeeling mathematician arrives on the scene, calculator in hand, ready to crunch some numbers and never deigning to take anything personally (what do you take me for: one of those hysterical women 19th century doctors had no patience for?!).
“You will see me again, actually,” I said through the phone to my husband-at-the-time. “We own a house.”
I don’t think Judge Judy herself could have said anything more authoritatively. Drop the mic, who needs a robe and a gavel when you are armed with bedhead, a broken heart, and the sudden discovery that the world you thought was yours is completely fabricated. And when you finally spit the lies out, the first thing that comes up from the deep dark recesses that is actually yours—not false, not his that he’s force fed you and you’ve gobbled up like the trusting little hungry human you were raised to be—but this, finally, is your own. And it’s not sobs and moans (those come later). It’s not a long, acidic, pointed letter written to the other woman (also later). It is, instead, BUSINESS.
I know you’re trying to make a dramatic exit and ride off into the sunset like they do on the silver screen, but this is real life. Here, we have mortgages. Our houses are not just facades. They are fully dimensional, and this one still needs the grout you promised a year ago, actually, and so, yeah, we will see each other again.
Spoiler alert: we did! We still do at our Bible study we have together, just us two, every Wednesday morning. I am kidding, it’s Thursday mornings. Actually, we don’t do that at all. I know, it would be an amazing reel on social media. A picture of the two of us pouring over the Psalms, and then just slide after slide of our story. Affair! Lies! Divorce! Weekly Bible study! I think we’d maybe play something nice in the background. Something encouraging, like DJ Khaled’s All I Do Is Win to remind the world that if you aren’t having a weekly one-on-one Bible study with your ex-husband, do you even believe in God? Let’s table that, because I am feeling convicted, but anyway, we did see each other again—quite a few times, actually.
We also got a divorce. And this is the whole point. I got a divorce, moved back home, and turned thirty all in the space of about six-ish months. At the time, I kept thinking about the game of Chutes and Ladders and how there is that one big chute that spans the whole board, so that if you land on it after you’ve climbed all the way to “the top” (lol what even is the top. In life, I mean. What is the top in life), it lands you in a heap at the very beginning of the game all over again (I added the heap part. It probably more accurately just lands you unchanged, considering you are a plastic figurine, but it feels so demoralizing. Definitely heap-ish). The moving back home, turning thirty, and divorcing trifecta really felt like that chute. The Big One, the Terrible One.
And all my friends were scrambling up ladders. Even my ex-husband called me a few months after our separation, and was like, I just want you to hear it from me that I am dating someone. I was like, Why are you telling me this? And he was like, I don’t want you to be hurt. And I was like, Well, it was upsetting and hurtful when you dated someone while we were MARRIED. This is way less hurtful, just fyi. Almost nice, in comparison.
So from the bottom of my chute, I was like, Hey, nice ladder! *sob* Also, from the bottom of my chute, I asked all these details about her—couldn’t help myself—like what does she look like. He told me she was petite. I was like, How petite? He said not even five feet tall. Now, I am tall—5’8—and I was just like, Wow, she is so short. And he was offended by that, but I didn’t say it was bad to be short, I just made an objective statement, leave me alone, this chute is a little lonely, sorry I wasn’t short enough for you? (This is what happens when someone cheats on you; you mercilessly compare yourself and you decide you probably could have made him stay if you had magically become shorter. Why didn’t you work harder at that? Why are you so lazy, so content to just be the height your bones, all stacked together, make you? And now all these long bones have sent you down a chute and you still aren’t even shorter, now you’re just tall and in a heap at the bottom of a chute. Well, SHOOT.)
Anyway, my friends decided to throw me a thirtieth birthday/divorce/fresh-start party. Only the most trusted, inner-circle people were invited. Nobody under five feet tall. Just kidding, although, looking back, I don’t think there was anybody under five feet tall there (though, there might have been a baby, and if so, she was definitely under five feet tall. And fyi, if I had made the statement, “Wow, that is so short” about the baby, it would have been perfectly acceptable). That night was really special. Isn’t it amazing that in the midst of real pain and grief—actual, suffering—my friends gave me a gift that made me feel something like joy.
And none of it would have happened had it not been that I needed a fresh start. The chute landed me somewhere that I assumed was simply all bad, and I was wrong. There was beauty at the bottom of that chute. And actually it wasn’t even the bottom. It was just…somewhere different. Hellish, sure. But not always and not forever. I met new friends there. I made art there. I encountered God there. I sold all the jewelry my ex had ever given me to a guy in a low V-neck tee shirt at a random pizza shop there. The guy wouldn’t even give me a hundred bucks—told me engagement rings are a dime a dozen, especially used ones—but he did tell me I was young and pretty and I’d be fine, so I left feeling like I’d gained something for my trouble after all.
And now my friends are throwing me a book release party. It is, once again, something beautiful born of grief. A narrative I would not have written—still would choose to have all my children here, if the choice were mine—but this life is a story worth living, I think.
Also, I have some very very good friends. What the low V-necked jewelry buying man should have said is that I seem to have some incredible people who love me, so I’m gonna be just fine.
If my local friends would like to come celebrate my new book release on May 17th, here is an invite. It’s free, you can RSVP here, and I’d love to see you there.