I wasn't prepared for the loneliness I felt when my ex and I separated. When my son isn't here, the silence in my house is overwhelming.
My soon-to-be ex-husband and I separated last year, and adjusting to an empty house has been hard.
When my son isn't with me, the silence in the house is nearly unbearable.
I'm learning to cope with the silence and the loneliness that comes along with it.
No one warns you about the silence. The kind that seeps into the spaces you didn't expect — between the couch cushions, in the scattered toys left on the floor, in the glass of wine you poured because it felt like something you should do. The one that's still there the next morning, stale and untouched — a quiet reminder that you don't even know what you want, what you need.
It's there because your 3-year-old is at his dad's, his half-empty juice still sitting on the table like he'll be right back for it. But it's not just the absence of noise — it's the unbearable weight of it. A relentless, invisible kind of torture that makes you hear things you'd rather ignore — doubts, regrets, and the debilitating ache of wondering who the hell you are now.
I didn't know what to expect when my ex and I separated
When my soon-to-be ex-husband and I separated in June of last year, I expected challenges, of course, but nothing prepared me for the deafening quiet of a half-empty home. In the beginning, I tried to avoid it. I made plans on the nights I didn't have Joey, surrounding myself with the friends who stuck around — the ones who didn't scatter when my life got messy. The others? They didn't just disappear — they turned my painful reality into a high school drama, piecing together their version of my situation without ever asking me for mine. Their absence had a weight of its own.
When no one was around, likely busy with their spouses or less-depressing lives, I'd ask my best friend, who lives in Maine, for binge-worthy show recommendations. Whether it was Yellowjackets or a true-crime documentary, I appreciated the opportunity to get lost in someone else's misery because mine was too much to bear.
When Joey is with his dad, his things become both a source of comfort and a sharp reminder of his absence. I say the names of his monster trucks aloud as I tidy up — Boneshaker, Mega Wrex, Gravedigger, El Toro Loco, Tiger Shark — hearing Joey's voice in my mind, the way he announces each one with wild enthusiasm.
I pick up his Batman cape, crusted with who-knows-what, and toss it in the laundry so it'll be clean when he comes back. I throw out hardened Play-Doh blobs, disassemble the Magna Tiles castle he built for me, fold his Paw Patrol underwear, make his bed. But these tasks — they aren't chores. They're how I hold onto him when he's not here.
The silence is difficult to deal with, but it's getting easier
Sometimes, the silence feels like my worst enemy. I run the dishwasher with barely a few plates inside, just to fill the quiet. I do laundry, not because it's piling up, but because the sound offers a strange comfort. Or, I write — pouring my pain onto the page because it feels like the only productive thing I can possibly do. I write about regret, about the choices that led me here, about loneliness and its many forms. But I also write about hope — for Joey, for myself.
In therapy, I once confessed that I didn't know what to do with myself when I was alone. My therapist, Meaghan, said, "No one ever taught you how to be sad." And she was right. My life was filled with distractions, solutions to sadness rather than space for it. If I felt pain, I fled. If discomfort crept in, I'd find a way to replace it. But now, avoidance isn't an option. I know I must learn to sit with my sadness — not as an enemy to defeat, but as a reality to accept.
And I seem to be getting closer.
One night recently, I was alone in the kitchen when Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" came on, and before I knew it, I was twirling. I spun in circles, arms outstretched, belting, "But listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness… in the stillness of remembering what you had…and what you lost..." And there I was — singing, swaying, smiling — in a space of my own. A space I could fill with whatever the hell I wanted. And I wasn't scared.
The silence isn't nearly as suffocating as it was. It feels different now — less like an empty void and more like a new territory I'm slowly learning to fill with my own voice — a voice I'm finally listening to — without someone telling me it's too dramatic, too needy, too much. And in this quiet, I'm discovering not just how to be alone, but how to be me. And maybe, for the first time in my life, I'm starting to understand who that really is.
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