Having A Friendship with Your Ex-Spouse After Divorce

When I was married to my children's father I did all the grocery shopping. Groceries, to him, seemed pretty much like something that just magically showed up in the house (at least as far as I can guess). Before we got married, when he lived alone in his apartment, his refrigerator was generally stocked with a quart of milk and an empty ice-cube tray. His kitchenette cabinets were stocked with a single dinner plate, a cereal bowl, and two mugs, which, of course, wasn't awfully "stocked". He always had a loaf of bread on his counter - that, and regularly replenished supply of fudge from the candy store. In other words, this was a fellow who didn't set foot in too many grocery stores.

After our divorce he moved to another part of the state, and for a quite awhile I had no idea what he was doing when it came to his groceries. Eventually, he moved back to the area where we had called "home base", and that's when he and I began frequently having coffee outside a local coffee shop. It's also when he started to see the need to come up with some version of groceries, and so - years after we had gotten married, and after years of my toting three little kids and a family's worth of groceries almost as regularly as I brushed my teeth, I introduced my ex-husband to the grocery store that had been my "home" for years.

That's when I learned that he'd dabbled a little in grocery shopping after our divorce (and before we became friends). Having been introduced to the inside of "my" grocery store, my children's father (I hate the term, "ex".) began to marvel at the prices is this wonderful store, which has attached "More for Your Dollar" to its name. I filled my new friend in on which store-brand products were OK, and which he should stay away from.

I don't know if he was like the proverbial kid in a candy store, Dorothy in Oz, or Alice in Wonderland; but he was like one of those (if not all of them); and thus two grocery-shopping companions were born. If I stop and think about it, I suppose it's kind of weird; but there's also something kind of right about the fact that he shops for himself, I shop for myself and our daughter (youngest child and only one remaining at home) and sometimes he shops for what he thinks our daughter or her cats may like. So, maybe it's kind of weird, but it's also nice.

We joke that we spend way too much time in the store (and we do). The thing is, he's quite the label-reader. Also, even though he's been doing his own shopping for years now, he still approaches shopping for food as if it's an adventure. As for me, as always, I approach it as "business". On the other hand, whether it's my sister, a friend, or my ex-husband with whom I'm shopping, I have a tendency to turn things into a social situation too. I'm convinced that the manager, assistant manager, and at least a few cashiers must think of me as "that lady who's always laughing hysterically with someone". I don't know.... there's just something hilarious about the mundane nature of it all, coupled with the frequency with which I'm always in there. It's just hard to explain why whoever I'm with and I seem to find so many things to laugh at.

A few years ago, my ex-husband/shopping buddy and I noticed how long we linger in the coffee and tea aisle. It was he who observed that this was "the best aisle in the store", but once he did I readily agreed. We love that aisle.

First, because the coffee-bean grinder is there, the aisle smells like fresh coffee (always a welcoming scent). Second, that aisle is free of all food except for cake and goody mixes (I don't buy them, but they're a pleasant thing) and some pudding cups (again, I don't buy them, but they're pleasant in their own way - not like the dairy aisle, canned vegetables aisle, the pasta aisle (nothing but boxes of pasta with a bunch of jars of sauce at the end of it), or the produce section (a wonderful part of the store but often too crowded to hang around in everyone else's way for too long). On top of all the other "wonderful-ness" of the coffee-and-tea aisle, at the end there's also all the spices (always more appealing than canned goods or boxes of Noodle-Roni, or whatever those pre-packaged things are).

Now, the coffee and tea aisle is a whole other thing. For some reason, that aisle is never very crowded. I don't know - I suppose people just go there, pick up their can of Folgers, and leave. These days, for my children's father and me, a big part of our socializing time is about coffee. We go out for coffee, we buy coffee, and when we're through doing either of those things go back to my house, where I make a pot of coffee to make up for any bad coffee we got while we were out. Although, of course, we talk about all kinds of other things, we often also talk about coffee.
In any case, coffee is something my ex-husband and I have in common. As a big coffee "freak", I make - I don't know how many - half-pots (in a 12-cup machine) I make for myself each day.

Besides coffee, however, I'm also a big tea person. (I tell people I just have "a drinking problem", and if you knew how many cups of coffee and tea I drink each day you'd realize that's not an exaggeration.)

So, in the coffee aisle (where we always start at the coffee first and then work our way up to the teas and eventually the soy milk), the first step is always that I pick up either my usual Maxwell House Original or else my alternative, Eight O'Clock. Once that important step is over, my shopping buddy and I will begin to peruse the many varieties of coffee there are, either for him to try (he's not "married" to a couple of old-faithful brands the way I am), or else for him to buy with the idea that the pot I make when we get to my house will be some new and different gourmet type-of-thing. Neither of us is above instant or bags on occasion, and both of us do enjoy re-hashing the variety of beans available for grinding. (I, personally, have been reluctant to use the grinder since I got leftover vanilla beans with my standard Eight O'Clock (which is also the reason I bought myself my own coffee grinder).

My companion is less interested in the teas than I am. Besides liking the usual (and basic) Lipton of Tetley, I'm a big fan of Twinings. Also, I have a thing about knowing I have a great selection of teas for anyone at the house; so, with my sons liking green teas and my daughter preferring herbal teas, I make sure my kitchen cabinets (and a couple of special canisters I have) are stocked with an enviable selection of teas.

English Breakfast tea and Irish Breakfast tea are among my favorites. For colds or anything that ails anyone I keep a variety of ginger teas with/without lemon. Of course, fresh lemons and lemon "add-ins" are important. So is honey. A nice tin of loose tea is great (although I don't always have the time to be bothered making a whole pot). While I stay pretty much with "regular" teas (black, orange peko, oolong, etc. ), my daughter likes the fruit teas. I do make sure I have decaf tea in case I want any before bedtime; because although coffee with lots of cream in it actually helps me get rid of anxiety and sleep, a couple of cups of tea will keep me on a tea high for hours and hours.

When my husband and I were together (as married people, not as coffee-drinking and grocery-shopping buddies), we would sit for hours every Sunday morning, drinking cup after cup of tea and talking about our plans for everything. When the world outside dealt us, as a couple, some rough times we'd spend those Sunday morning hours talking our way to feeling better, and to coming up with some kind of plan of action, which seemed productive. Once - on a weekday, when we were talking about one problem or another - my husband joked, "Oh, sure. We get all hyped up on tea sometimes and think we can do anything!" He was joking, but it was pretty much true. On those Sunday mornings when we'd tea-drink the morning away, it was if, together, we talked a week's worth of talk, and drank a month's worth of tea, and somehow found a way to feel better for another day or so (before the problems from the outside world made their way back into our lives).

When all those problems from the larger world had clearly caused my once-best-friend and me to pull too far inward and away from each other, mostly because each of us had to deal with grief, stress, and loss in our own ways, my tea-drinking pal began to leave the dining-room table after one cup of tea. Somewhere along the way, he began complaining that tea gave him heartburn; so, instead of having tea, he'd get up from the breakfast table and go sit on the couch in the other room. I would still spend my Sunday mornings drinking tea, but I'd begun to use that tea time for things like paying bills, organizing my projects, or otherwise taking advantage of some free time (now that I no longer had to worry about using our conversation time for something else).

When I eventually was faced with providing the "divorce lawyer" with information about what had gone on, I realized that putting things in writing was more efficient than trying to come up with things in person, or on the phone. I had discovered that, with a string of lawyers and other professionals involved in the case, there was no such thing as being asked one question once. So, I wrote everything down and gave the appropriate copies to anyone looking for that particular type of information.

One thing that always stands out in my mind is writing to the lawyer and, with a hint of humor or else wistfulness (or something else that was some blend of sadness, humor, and cutting accuracy), that I had known the marriage was over "when the tea-drinking stopped". It seemed so silly and yet so sad and so true at the same time.

Now, years after that tea-drinking stopped, my ex-husband and I so frequently hang out in the coffee and tea aisle, smelling the coffee (and in some ways, even smelling the roses), reading the tea boxes, and laughing. Sometimes I imagine how the store employees might assume we're a couple. A few times friends I don't see often have asked if we're getting back together. Last week I was waiting for my coffee-aisle pal to get back from the car. A friend asked me who I was waiting for. For a few seconds my mind came up blank, because I didn't quite know what to call my ex-husband ("friend"? certainly not "husband"). After a few seconds I realized that I should say, "ex-husband". When I did that's when she asked if we were getting back together, and when my reply came out almost before she was finished asking, "No. No. Oh, no." I again said, "No," and added, "We're just friends." Having taken a whole lot more muddling than it should have taken to simply say, "We're friends," that's what I eventually said, satisfying the curiosity of a friend who, I know, has seen me and my coffee-buddy laughing in the coffee-and-tea aisle on more than one occasion.

And so, even though we spend oddly large amounts of time in the aisle my ex-husband and I established was "the best aisle in the store", we inevitably and finally get to the soy milk end of the aisle, where he buys the unsweetened kind, and I buy the regular kind. He never, however, buys tea. I don't know - somehow it just kind of seems to me as if coffee-drinking is for friends and sisters, and tea-drinking is all about plans and dreams.

Still, as we hang out in that coffee-and-tea aisle (and hang out we do), it can - at least for a little while - seem as if all the complications and complexities that destroyed a marriage and continue to surround us in a lot of ways lift away; and for a little while life is as simple as a new bag of coffee beans or a new brand of ginger tea. We are friends - just two friends hanging out in the best aisle in the store. After all we've been through together and separately, I guess that's not such a bad thing.