Top Down and Free

I was divorced on Friday the 13th this July. I don’t know what I was anticipating, but nothing about the occasion was as I expected, starting with the courthouse crowd. In the packed area outside the courtroom were dozens of men and women, waiting their turn to be declared uncoupled. But, at 55, I was a good 20 years older than most everyone. (The median age at first divorce in the United States is 31 for men and 29 for women.) I’d been married 27 years. I was surrounded by divorce babies.

Because I hadn’t known what to expect, I made no plans for the day other than to ask a dear friend to accompany me to the hearing. When I heard the clerk call out my name, I took a deep breath. With our attorneys by our sides, my husband and I approached the bench. We stood together as man and wife for the very last time. It took the judge less than 10 minutes to unmarry us. And then I was free. I turned around and could see my friend tearing up at the back of the room. My eyes welled up, too.

Then it was time to say thank you and goodbye to my lawyer, who was sensitive enough not to tell me "Congratulations." It’s not what you want to hear when you’ve just ended the longest chapter of your life so far. She gave me a hug. I headed home. As I walked into the condo where I’d recently moved, an overwhelming sense of fatigue hit me. I was in a haze, a daze, feeling the way you do when you leave the hospital after surgery. You don’t know if you should get into your pajamas and go to bed – even though the clock says it’s only noon – or summon up the energy to start your life.

What do most people do on the day they get divorced? One friend staggered home, where a handyman was at work on her house. "He was making such a hash of it that I burst into tears and asked him to leave immediately. The rest is a blur."

Another left the courthouse, jumped into his car, and then proceeded to crash into a concrete pole in the parking lot as he was backing up. A few hours later, after he’d pulled himself together, he met with his realtor and put his house on the market.

A good friend, divorced many years now, received a large bouquet of flowers from her cousin that day, a bottle of champagne, and a dinner invitation from a handsome man who was her cousin’s friend. She went. "He was sensitive to the enormity of the occasion," she says, "and it was fine somehow."

A friend who keeps a journal of just about everything in her life has no entry for the day of her divorce. "It’s a blank."

What everyone needs on that day is a sympathetic soul to be with, and I needed that as well. But I also had an overpowering urge, like never before, to ride in a convertible with the top down. It didn’t have to be a James Bond-esque Mustang or a sexy Grace Kelly sports car. A Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, like the one Uma Thurman drives in the revenge flick Kill Bill, would do. Even a VW Cabriolet would be OK. These cars were worlds away from the Volvo wagon parked in my driveway, which might as well have "Mrs." bumper stickers plastered all over it.

My daughter advised me to call a friend with a splendid convertible. "Ask her to take you for a ride."

"That’s not what I want," I said. "I want to be driven – by someone who makes me laugh." I wanted to be driven by a really nice man. I wanted to feel the wind in my hair, the radio blasting songs I knew all the words to, heading up some highway to nowhere. I wanted to experience the lightness of my newfound freedom and not the dead weight of it, which is how freedom feels when you’ve been cut loose.

In the end, I found the perfect guy. He took me for a spin in his Volvo C70, top down, on a full-moon summer night later that week. It turned out to be the best of all worlds. I felt both safe and free. Thank you, baby brother.

Marianne Jacobbi lives in Cambridge and is researching a book on baby boomers. Send comments to coupling@globe.com.