Fifteen months ago, I was standing on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison for Kid 1’s new student orientation. His mom and I were walking around together, helping him take his first steps into college life.
Standing there, a sudden, surreal weight hit me right in the chest: She and I met at our own college orientation.
To be standing on another campus decades later, watching our son step into the exact same threshold of adulthood—together as parents, but entirely separate as people—was the ultimate “circle of life” moment. It’s the kind of moment where time bends, and you realize just how far you’ve traveled from the origin point.
Today marks what would have been our 26th wedding anniversary.
If I’m being completely honest, I’m not mourning the marriage. Not by a long shot. The idea of us being together feels as ancient and obsolete as smoking on airplanes. If anything, what gets me is the sheer, mind-bending math of it all.
I find myself perpetually perplexed by how relationships change and morph over a lifetime. Twenty-six years ago, I stood in a church before my family, my friends, and my God, making a promise to stay through thick and thin for the rest of our lives. Today, I look at the calendar and realize something even wilder: X1 has been a fixture in my life for over thirty years now. And the math gets crazier still—I have now been divorced from her for more than half of the entire time I’ve known her. I’ve been divorced longer than I was married.
To wrap your head around the fact that there is someone out there who has been orbiting your life for three decades, yet belongs entirely to a version of yourself you barely recognize anymore? That’s the part that makes you feel old. Not grief. Just the sheer, staggering weight of time moving forward.
And yet, if I’m being completely honest, the idea of us being married feels as ancient as smoking on airplanes. The marriage itself lasted 11½ years, but the concept of us as a couple feels so foreign now that even my oldest son told me last Christmas he can barely conceptualize us ever being together. To him, it’s just a factual detail from a distant chapter.
And yet, as the calendar date rolls around, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t on my mind. It’s like 9/11—not something I dwell on daily, but an anchor point in my history that split my life into “before” and “after.”
If I look back to October 21st, 2000, the memory of the day itself is actually pretty great. It was an unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon—probably pushin’ 65 degrees or higher. I remember sweating in a heavy tuxedo and long sleeves, but nobody was complaining. The weather was damn near perfect.
My buddy Tobasco, who was one of my ushers, came up to me during the party and said, “This is the best wedding reception I’ve ever been to.” It meant a lot to me then, and it still does. At 25 years old, it was one of the very last heavy, full-tilt parties my entire college crew had all together in one room.
That night, X1 and I were so completely exhausted after the marathon of the day that we just crashed out the second we hit the pillow. Meanwhile, my buddy The Reverend ended up hooking up with one of the bridesmaids.
It was a great day. And for a long time after a divorce, you feel like you aren’t allowed to say that. But you can separate a great day from what the marriage eventually became.
Looking back with the perspective of time, the warning signs were quietly there. We waited seven years after getting married to have our son, and deep down, I think that was an unspoken sign that we both knew on some level we weren’t built for the long haul. We were fooling ourselves for a while near the end.
And when it collapsed, it collapsed hard.
Those first few years after the divorce were brutal. Everything was a fight—custody schedules, logistics, figuring out when I was going to get my son. I remember flying down to South Carolina about a year after the split because her lawyer had filed an injunction. I checked into a cold hotel room, having been told I might not even get to see my kid while I was in town.
I sat on that hotel bed, made frantic phone calls between my lawyer and hers, feeling lower than low. Then, in a matter of hours, the phone rang. She was calling to set up a pickup time, and by the end of the day, a settlement was signed in court.
For years, I carried a lot of anger about that period. I think about that Chris Rock line: “Only women, children, and dogs are loved unconditionally. Men are loved for what they can provide.”
When our marriage ended, I was at a particularly low point. I was underemployed, struggling heavily with my anxiety, and just trying to get my life under control so I could provide again. It’s hard to shake the feeling that I was dropped when I was down. For a long time, I blamed her for that. But with time and grace, you realize something else: if I didn’t even understand the anxiety I was dealing with at the time, how the hell could she?
Eventually, the storms ran out of rain.
When Kid 1 got COVID years later, it was like an unwritten ceasefire was declared. Whatever animosity, lingering anger, or unspoken bullshit remained between us just squashed overnight. We never even talked about it; we just stepped up to take care of our kid.
It led to moments I never could have predicted during the dark years. Like a couple of summers ago in Illinois, when we were out visiting colleges. Kid 2 (from my second long-term relationship) and I met up with Kid 1 and X1. They were camping to save money on the road trip, so I invited them both to stay in our hotel room for the night.
The next afternoon, the four of us sat down at a lunch counter together. I looked around the table—my ex-wife, my two boys from two different failed long-term relationships, and me. It felt like stepping into a bizarre alternate reality, but it was peaceful. We laughed, we talked, and we were just parents supporting our kids.
Processing a 26-year timeline brings up old ghosts, and it brings up hard lessons.
When my second long-term relationship ended, I realized how much that dynamic had strained my relationship with my Kid 1 during those years. I made a solemn promise to myself then: I will never allow anything or anyone to come between me and my boys ever again. Kid 2 will never have to go through what Kid 1 went through. My sons are my absolute priority, period.
I’m in a good place now. I sincerely believe with all my heart that Sierra would never make Kid 2 feel pushed aside. But if I’m being completely honest, there’s always that quiet voice in the back of your head that says: I thought I knew certain women before, too, and I was wrong. That armor doesn’t disappear overnight.
If you’re a divorced man or woman sitting out there today, dreading a milestone calendar date or feeling guilty because an anniversary still registers on your radar, hear me out: it’s okay.
Acknowledging the day doesn’t mean you want the relationship back. It doesn’t mean you haven’t moved on. It just means you’re human, and you respect your own history.
Divorce leaves scars. They don’t magically vanish, and pretending they aren’t there is bullshit. But you learn to live with them. You learn to look back at a 65-degree October afternoon in a heavy tuxedo, appreciate the good party with your friends, acknowledge the painful chapters that followed, and still sit down at a lunch counter years later knowing you survived it all.
The scars don’t go away—but life moves forward anyway.
P.S. — Speaking of breaking walls and moving forward: Season 3, Episode 9 of Rebuilding Rob: The Podcast (“No More Glaciers”) is officially live! Grab your headphones, catch the full seven-and-a-half minutes of momentum, and stay tuned until the very, very end for a special post-credits dispatch. Stick around right here on the blog at 10:00 AM Eastern for the Director’s Notes breakdown!
Rebuilding a life takes grit, consistency, and a lot of ‘Option C’ thinking. Having crossed the 1,000-day milestone, I’m now charting the territory beyond. The mission remains the same: No glitz. Just the work. New to the blog? Start your journey here to see the blueprint and the ‘Tricorder’ perspective behind the rebuild.
Today’s post is inspired by the WordPress Daily Prompt. While I’ve taken the topic in my own direction for the Road beyond 1,000 Days, you can find more responses to today’s prompt HERE.
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The article “The 26-Year Circle: On Anniversaries, Ghosts, and Learning to Live with the Scars” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob
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