My Unbecoming: The First Mile of My Midlife Rebuild
The first mile of my new life after escaping a toxic marriage tried to take me out before it even started.
After selling my home in closing, I immediately rushed to a small town where I bought a vintage RV on FB marketplace sight unseen. It would serve as a temporary home while I recalibrated. The RV was charming and ordinary, but it was love at first sight for a reason I couldn’t explain. The woman I bought it from had lived in it for a year after escaping her own marriage, and when she handed me the keys, it felt less like a transaction and more like a baton pass. I loved the idea that my camper is the kind of home that still holds the stories of other women in her walls.
I towed my new home with the dented red truck I got in the divorce. Dented because my drunken spouse wrecked it (then denied the obvious damage) before he had to hand it over to me.
This was his parting gift to me, a fitting reminder of the years he dented my soul.
I named the red truck Lucille after Lucille Ball. I mean, if you’re going to drag your entire life down a highway, you might as well name your dented truck. I had never towed anything before, but off I went with my entire future rolling along behind me wondering, am I in the right gear? do I have tail lights? is this even legal? EEK how do I make this thing stop?! And mostly, holy shit am I really doing this?
One mile down the road, POW! a tire on the RV blew.
It wasn’t a polite little pop, oh no, it was violent explosion. Rubber shredding. Cars swerving. Lucille fishtailing just enough to let me know this could go very wrong, very fast. My hands were locked around the steering wheel and my heart pounded like it was trying to escape my body.
And I remember thinking, seriously? We’re doing this fucking right NOW?? On the first mile?!
I had already survived personal and financial betrayal, emotional abuse, and the slow erosion of self that happens when you live too long in a marriage with a covert narcissist that made you shrink to survive. I had already crawled out of things I should never have had to crawl out of. So the idea that my first physical mile toward freedom came with a blowout felt like a cruel joke from the trailer towing gods.
Once I managed to wrangle control of Lucille and ease onto the shoulder is when it hit me.
There was no one in the passenger seat to fix it.
There was just me.
If you’re rebuilding, you know that moment. It’s not always a sobbing breakdown in a Target parking lot, sometimes it’s just a quiet, cold realization: the scaffolding that helped to support me is gone (scaffolding you later come to hate with the fire of a thousand suns). And many times throughout your rebuild, you will think I Don’t Recognize Myself Anymore. And that’s not always a bad thing.
Thankfully, a truck driver pulled over to help (as they do when women are stranded on the side of the road, bless them). It was the type of kindness that makes you want to cry because you don’t know how to receive it without further unraveling. He changed the tire using the questionable spare tire my RV came with while I stood there trying to pretend I was fine. Like a woman with her life together. Like my hands weren’t still shaking and I was about to hurl in public.
Tire on, thank you said, the offer of money declined, I climbed back into Lucille and continued on my terrifying but exhilarating journey. Because that’s what women like us do, we keep driving when we’re terrified. We keep driving even when we’re suddenly alone. We keep driving even when we have no idea where we’re going yet.
I gripped that steering wheel like it was the only thing holding my life together.
Eventually, I turned off the highway and onto gravel roads that turned into dirt roads with potholes that each seemed to ask me, are you sure you want to do this? But toward the forest I continued, to a very small campsite near a national park I had loved as a child.
I would rebuild there with happy memories in wild nature.
The Hard Truth About Rebuilding
There was one humiliating part about rebuilding that I never saw coming and no one warns you about.
The part that shakes you is realizing how much of your years of being a responsible, reliable adult woman doesn’t count for anything.
For a dozen years, I held everything together: I paid the bills, the mortgage and the auto loans, made sure the insurance didn’t expire and the dogs were vaccinated. I scheduled the taxes and the tune-ups and the weekend getaways to places I didn’t want to go. I ran my own global consulting firm while also carrying the emotional weight of being married to a narcissist like it was my second full-time job.
But the mechanical things, the technical things, the intimidating things like chopping firewood and fixing the well pump and replacing the hot water heater had always defaulted to him. I’m not incapable of doing such things, but I had been assigned a different lane without realizing it. And that’s where I stayed.
Until…I was forced to step out of that lane, and suddenly, the world I moved through without effort started giving me the side eye for being out of my lane.
Like the first week into my new life, I called to open a new utility account like a grown adult. I was told I had no credit history and no payment history. My name wasn’t primary on utilities, and we had joint auto loans and credit cards. So to get electricity in my name, a grown-ass, successful adult woman in midlife who ran a global business alone, I had to pay a $300 deposit because I couldn’t prove I existed before that phone call.
Every interaction with utility companies and banks and cell phone services and insurance agencies carried the same unspoken message: Prove yourself.
It was all a humiliating experience after having built a life and successful businesses, to be treated like I didn’t exist because my name wasn’t on the damn electric bill I paid with my own money for over 10 years.
That is where my rebuild actually started: when the rage hit. And it hit hard.
I didn’t start my rebuild the way the traditional wellness industry tells you to: with a vision board, manifesting on a beach in Bali and forcing a positive attitude when all I wanted to do was hide under the covers with a bottle of wine.
I took charge of the things I could take charge of alone: I read my truck’s manual with a highlighter and a glass of wine by the fire pit. I bought a toolkit for my truck and one for my RV before I knew how to use them. I learned to check oil, coolant, and wiper fluid, how to change a tire and how to jump a battery.
I learned how to chop wood for my fire pit, change propane tanks, work the breaker panel, repair leaky faucets and seal leaking windows. When I started this blog, I needed a small space for a desk so I dismantled the bunk beds in the bunk space in my RV and turned it into a cozy, small office space.
When I had to call a professional, I would ask them to explain the parts needed, the cost, and the timeline. Then I asked for it in writing. Then I got a second opinion because, guess what? People take advantage of women who don’t say, “let me check with my husband” as a security deposit. I was fresh meat and I had to pay “the helpless woman tax” everywhere I went.
When you’re a single woman, there’s a bullseye with a dollar sign in the center on your forehead.
How to Rebuild Without Burning Your Life Down
Make the call you’ve been avoiding. Ask the question you think sounds foolish. Take notes. If someone talks down to you, let that be information about them, not evidence about you, and then inform them they will not talk to you like that again.
Do not make yourself small because you’re scared or embarrassed.
Open the account. Transfer the bill. Watch the You-Tube tutorial. Read the manual. Buy the toolkit. Learn the thing.
Then learn another thing.
The goal is independence and self-sufficiency and to choose help when you need it instead of always requiring rescue. There is a difference between asking for support and dependency. I would not have survived that first day without the kind stranger who stopped to help with the tire.
Please know that if no one is coming to fix it for you, it does not mean you are doomed.
It means you are about to discover what you are capable of.
Before You Go
Where in your life are you still waiting in the passenger seat… and what would happen if you reached for the wheel before you felt ready?
If this article spoke to you or answered questions you don’t have answers to, leave me a comment below, I respond to every comment. You might inspire other women who struggling with her rebuild.
One mile at a time, baby.
Melissa
P.S. By the way, that blown tire? It still sits on the spare rack on the back of my RV as a reminder of my first mile toward freedom that tried to break me.
