I’ve been meaning to send you an email with the subject line “I am opening the floodgates” for the last several weeks, because inspired by some of my close colleagues I’ve been wanting to be more transparent and vulnerable with you.
But now the NY Times has beaten me to it.
As you might imagine, like every author, I always dreamed of making and appearance in the NY Times, but I never thought it would be for this reason!
Today, my ex-husband, Michael Ellsberg and I are featured in the Sunday Styles section in an article about our posting about our amicable divorce on Facebook last July.
Yet unless you are following me on Facebook or we’ve connected personally in an other way, you would not have heard about it. I wrote about my wedding and I’ve written about love and romance… but for the last year I’ve fallen deathly silent on the topic.
It was last December after almost 6 years as committed partners, while traveling in India on a trip I naively thought would be a relationship-rejuvenating second honeymoon, that Michael and I arrived at the realization that the most loving next step for us both was to get divorced.
“I set you free,” were words we shared with each other with streaming tears.
And just as marriage has the on-ramp of engagement, our marriage had a 7-month off-ramp between the day we made that decision and the day the marriage completed and we announced it on Facebook. In that time we processed the heart-break, grief and anguish, and set our sites on new futures.
I was just starting to feel ready to write about it publicly when I received a call from the journalist that resulted in today’s New York Times article. Though the subtitle of the article is “The Unhappy Marriage”–and Michael and I definitely had our very serious challenges during last 2 years of the marriage leading to our separation and divorce–I also want to emphasize that there were many many moments of joy in our marriage. Really the first 4 years of our relationship (including the first two years of our 4-year marriage) were joyful, before it became quite challenging for both of us. And, neither of us have any regrets about the ride we went on together.
I’ll always be grateful for all the ways Michael nurtured me to become the woman I am today. We are still family, now as soul brother and sister rather than husband and wife. Michael as given me immeasurable gifts, notably including the gift of becoming an author. On our first date, Michael told me that he believed I could be an author. And the month before we took that trip to India, after years of his encouragement, support and guidance, I landed a six-figure book deal for my first book, Pleasurable Weight Loss. My book is coming out on Jan 1 and the dedication is to Michael reading, “This book will always be our baby.”
With love,
Jena
P.S. For brevity, the article left out the full text of the announcement we made. The full text of the original post we made in July is this: “Michael and I are no longer married. This has been a heart-wrenching process for both of us, over the past year, and we are thankful for the support of our friends, family and community in helping us through this. We are on very good terms, and we know that we will always be a large part of each other’s lives. We are mostly through the pain, and are focusing on the values of gratitude, letting go, and forgiveness. We love each other very much, and always will.”
New York, New York
ibrahim
hello jena , its really great how both of you handled this situation , respect for both of you #muchlove from jordan