What Do You Do With the Ring?

We had another uncoupling moment today – the second to last bit of administrative work that will really be the end of our marriage.

I didn’t really think about it, but put on jewelry as I was getting dressed, including my engagement ring, which I have taken to wearing on the middle finger on my left hand. I wear it not because I feel sentimental for our marriage, but because it is a beautiful ring and the center diamond belonged to my grandmother.

She promised the stone to both my mother and my aunt, and with Solomonic wisdom, bequeathed it to me, the only granddaughter. She’d had the stones from her ring made into a necklace which then sat in the safe deposit box from the time I was eleven years old until I got engaged and asked my groom-to-be if we could use it. I think I got to wear it when I was a debutante. (And yes, I was a debutante.)

He noticed, and was hurt by my wearing it. I felt badly immediately for making him feel badly, and he said with a quiver in his voice that it had always been much more to him than just a piece of jewelry. I spent the next hour trying not to gesture with that hand, or leave it on the table.

Driving home, however, I realized something.

He was still gas-lighting me.

Because, you see, after we got engaged and I put that ring on my ring finger, but even before we were married, he did something with someone that belies his statement that it represented something more to him. And he did that same sort of something years later, with someone else. A someone else who in theory was wearing a ring that may or may not have been more than mere jewelry to her own husband.

I wish I’d been quick enough to call him out on those times, to remind him that there was one of us who hewed to our vows and it was not him. And while I’d like to be the bigger person, clearly, I’m exhausted from being the bigger person in all of this.

It was a lovely symbol of something we had, but it is more than that to me, and it is mine, and I will wear it with full knowledge of the path it took to get to my middle finger, where I’ll be happy to display it to him any time he asks.