I thought the longest part of my divorce would be the years leading up to it—the quiet arguments, the paperwork, the waiting for a court date that kept drifting further into the future. Yet, somehow the two years of litigating sped by faster than the last thirty days. How that is possible? Ask a physicist.
On the day the judge signed the decree, I experienced relief, closure, resolution. This chapter of my life -my marriage- was over, and it was time to turn a new page. I was wrong.
The ink of the judge’s signature had barely dried when my ex filed a motion, and then another, and then another. My attorney explained the legal implications and meanings of each claim but it felt like my ex was throwing a temper tantrum in the form of paper and legal words. Each motion screamed “I don’t like losing” and “I want a do over,” and my attorney simply sighed and stated we had to respond.
Every morning I checked my email the way I once checked on my marriage—carefully, anxiously, bracing myself. A motion to reconsider. A motion to clarify. A motion to amend. Little grammatical rearrangements of my future, each one capable of reopening what I thought had been sealed.
With these motions pending, instead of closure, I felt suspended. The ground beneath me had been labeled “final,” yet somehow still unsettled. My divorce wasn’t resolved because of my ex’s stubbornness, the same stubbornness that forced us to a hearing rather than successful mediation.
I wanted off the chaotic ride my ex drove, hence the divorce. Now I felt like a hostage of our marriage, bound up post-adjudication motions and unable to escape. Thirty days is a small number. I’ve waited longer for packages to arrive. But each of those days stretched like a corridor with no doors, just the hum of expectation and the possibility that something, anything, could be challenged.
Friends told me it was over. “You’re divorced now,” they said, smiling like this was a gift I should unwrap. I nodded, because technically they were right. Practically, I was still waiting for the echo to fade.
The paradox was cruel and precise: the law called it post‑adjudication, as if the judgment had already passed into history, while my life remained paused in the present tense. I couldn’t fully move forward, but I wasn’t moving backward either. I existed in the margins—footnotes and fine print.
Thirty days. The shortest month of the year. The longest part of my divorce.
Jess Lill
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