The Joy of Your First Home after Divorce
LOTS HAPPENING: Basel Art Summer Camp (June 19); a retreat; A WRITING RESIDENCY
Hi friends! Lots happening these days! Quick updates and then down to the story!
1. Basel Art Summer Camp
I’m on a panel at Basel Art Summer Camp during Art Basel week speaking about Why I Collect Art. Furnishing my apartment was a big deal when I moved to Switzerland. I’m preparing for the panel and thinking back to what it was like to create a home for myself. So today’s story after the updates is related to that.
2. Field trip to Art Basel Week
Anyone going to Basel this week? If not, wanna play hooky from responsibilities and go on a field trip with me to look at art on Thursday the 19th? Then head to Basel Art Summer Camp for a tour of the art, my panel, and we stay for The Dirty Thirty performance show.
3. Retreat!
Calling all divorcées who need a weekend away – I’m hosting Dispatched Divorcée’s first retreat in the Alps this summer. Just Be: A Yoga & Reading Retreat. All of the details here. Substack subscribers get a CHF 100 discount (use code SUBSTACK).
4. UPDATE FOR PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS
Big news! In September, I’m going to a creative residency to finish the manuscript of my book! This is a self-funded residency, meaning that I am my own benefactor.1 Would you like to be a benefactor of my book as well?
I’m raising funds to pay for the residency. If you upgrade to a paid subscription (I’m currently running a special of 20% off!) or contribute an amount above 50 CHF (or equivalent in your local currency) through this payment link, I will include you in the acknowledgements of my book.
Paid subscribers will receive:
Monthly updates on how I’m preparing for the residency
Updates after the residency on how it went (maybe with a chapter I worked on?)
A postcard mailed from the residency
Annual subscribers and those who contribute above 50 CHF will be included in the acknowledgements of my book.
The Joy of Your First Home after Divorce
I was at IKEA by myself. On one of those runs to get all the small things I’d previously forgotten. I was pushing my cart through the bathroom linens section to get a second bath mat when I heard a couple having the same argument that led me to this trip back to IKEA.
Growing up in the suburbs of Seattle, going to IKEA was an event. The kind that my family would dedicate an entire day to. We’d take the pickup truck. It had a canopy and an extended bed. We could fit so much in there. No need to pile the furniture on top of the sedan like in the commercials.
I loved looking at the staged rooms. I’d take the print catalog2 home. And imagine which rooms might be in the house I’d have in the future.
Little did I know that when I was 30, I’d be living in an apartment in Europe and I’d be able to buy two of those stand-alone wardrobes that I got to design to fit exactly what I needed.
When I was going through my divorce, I remember having this really strong visual of the ground beneath me crumbling out from under me. But somehow, I was still standing. My sense of home was gone but the things were still there. I needed my sister to stand with me in my 10-foot walk-in closet and ask me if I really needed this set of black platform heels or these other ones.
“I might need them in Switzerland,” I said. Not realizing I’d be moving to a medieval vertical city, where heels—platform with an ankle strap or not—would not be the shoes I’d be wearing.
I moved to Switzerland a month after my divorce was finalized. After a summer of waiting. Traveling. Visiting friends. Trying to savor all of the final moments in the US and appreciate the place I called home. This was the playlist.
It was August 31st, I arrived in Lausanne and checked into the same hotel that Coco Chanel lived in. I had too much luggage and was holding the teddy bear that I got when I was 5 years old, too precious to risk in checked luggage.
Before my initial departure from SEA-TAC, I went into the Sub Pop store in the airport. There, I bought a onesie for 6 to 9-month-olds that had an outline of Seattle on it. My city. To remind me of who caught me when I fell. I dressed my bear on the sales counter. Trying to make jokes to a really understanding clerk who didn’t laugh or tease me, a 30-year-old woman who was moving to Europe and bringing her teddy bear. I cried during takeoff. Happy to have my bear to catch the tears.
On my first Friday night in my new country, I watched a festival happening down in the square. Live music. Or maybe it was just a DJ. I thought about going down, but I was too overwhelmed. Too nervous to leave my hotel room. Not ready to explore my new city.
I found an apartment and went to a place I knew, IKEA. I went with a new colleague on what would have been my ninth wedding anniversary. I didn’t tell anyone this.
I took a print catalog home. I earmarked pages. I started building a mood board on Pinterest. Found the folder on my computer where I saved photos of the dream bedroom I once hoped to have with my husband, but could never afford. This project was different. This time, I had a budget.
I moved to PowerPoint. I planned each room down to a theme. One was more baroque, 1920s style. Another would be more mid-century modern. I wanted the furniture that I was having shipped across the world in a container to match. I wanted to surround myself with beautiful objects that held stories. The IKEA IVAR bookshelves I’d had since I was a teenager. The curtains that I bought in college with my sister’s Pier 1 employee discount, that hung in my 300-square-foot one-bedroom just off campus when I went to Portland State University. The curtains that my husband wouldn’t let me hang in our house. “Because they’re pink,” he said.
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Now, as a newly divorced woman, I purchased new pink dishes from IKEA, a plush pink headboard for my bed, and hung the curtains my husband said were pink, not realizing that embracing pink is something divorced women do.
Now I was back in the bathroom section of IKEA. On what I hoped would be the final trip for awhile. My apartment was almost finished. I grabbed what would be the second bathmat. The one that goes under the sink. That I didn’t know I needed and would be the place that my cat finds refuge under during the last years of her life.
I passed a male/female couple speaking to each other in English. This is a very important detail, as I only spoke English at the time. I was so homesick for connection. Anytime I heard English, I listened in.
They were arguing. She wanted to buy a second bathmat; he did not.
“You’ll need two,” I wanted to say. But I didn’t. Because I didn’t have to have those kind of conversations anymore.
I visualize myself as a rich, Victorian-era divorcée whenever I transfer money to pay my bills.
Remember when they used to give out paper catalogs?