Relinquishing the Baggage from My First Marriage

How I finally stopped carrying my ex-husband’s baggage for him

Photo by Michal Balog on Unsplash

My fiancé, Josh, and I watched a muted rainbow of suitcases glide past us on the baggage claim carousel. Our well-used suitcases now in hand, we awaited two cardboard boxes labeled “Raymond” in my handwriting. I was tired after the flight from Baltimore to Salt Lake City but keyed up for the week ahead; I’d be introducing Josh to my natal family and to my ex-husband, Raymond, and his new family.

Our COVID masks hampered our usual banter, but I tracked Josh’s posture and gestures as he marveled at how many blond children wandered past, how many double strollers circled. As the cardboard boxes slid-thumped onto the baggage claim carousel, I noticed Josh straighten his back, then look at me. My shoulders tensed, my right leg jiggled, and my fists clenched. I shoved them in my pockets, then met Josh’s eyes. I know. I stepped forward to retrieve one box; he grabbed the other. Now was not the time to revive the squabble.

Six months before, I decided to move in with Josh. We had to pick which items from my basement storage would make the fifteen-mile drive to his place. Moving has never been a big deal for me; I can make a home wherever I am. I’ve been able to downsize and take items to the trash or donation bins as needed. But there was one group of a dozen or so boxes I was particularly unsure about.

“Will, look at me,” Josh said. I met his eyes. “I love you. We are not bringing your ex’s shit to my house.” I glanced over at the boxes, jaw tense. I’d been asking Raymond to take his boxes for months. He had never been the type to deal with the past. When we were married, he would wait until the last minute to pack his things for a move, leaving no time to organize or decide what to keep and what to let go.

If you asked Raymond, he’d say we divorced because I came out as transgender. But that was just the catalyst. In the “before times”—before I realized I was a man, before I knew how to label my gender dysphoria—Raymond and I met at Brigham Young University in 1998. Just home from his missionary service, fresh-faced, glowing, he was ready for a wife. I’d never had a boyfriend. As good Mormons, we married young, nineteen (me) and twenty-three (him), but we look like high schoolers in our wedding photos. His brown eyes stare at the camera, his almost-black hair gelled sideways. My dark blond updo bursts out in sun-highlighted curls like a crown; my lips form a tight smile. Wedding guests called me beautiful. I answered with downturned eyes and a discomfort even I mistook for virginal modesty.

We spent our first Christmas at his parents’ California home. His mom pulled several boxes from storage and plopped them at his feet, insisting they were his responsibility now. No, our responsibility now. She explained that when Raymond departed for his two-year mission at nineteen, he didn’t pack up his room—just left a mess as if coming back for dinner. She bulldozed photos, school notebooks, baseball cards, and bric-a-brac into boxes.

Throughout our marriage, Raymond created more cairns of school papers, burned CDs, our son’s scribbled crayon drawings. When the towers threatened to topple, I channeled his mom and shoveled them into boxes. We hauled the amassed jumble from university apartments in Utah to Connecticut, then to Maryland as we progressed through grad schools and away from Mormonism. At each location, I disappeared the boxes into closets.

By 2016, I had a faculty position and a weekday rhythm punctuated by frenetic bike rides between the office, home, school, and the small town’s favorite café. My best friend and I convened semiweekly for lunch and to vent about work. One windy day, she paused a venting session, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Are you okay?”

I looked away. Why do people keep asking that? My internal tornado swirled too quickly to focus, to grasp any one thing, to create a coherent thought.

“I’m fine.”

Her fingers grazed my forearm across the café two-top. “You are not okay. You are a rubber band stretched too far—you’ll break.”

I booked a therapy appointment soon after. The first session’s homework: Draw a picture of your issues as baggage. Label them. We’ll unpack them together. I penciled in a suitcase (parenting), trunk (Raymond), chest of drawers (work), and armoire (both “Mormon religion” and “Mom”). The therapist pointed to additional shapes. “What about these? They’re unlabeled.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. She waited. “I—just—there’s more?”

That same summer, a family friend shared with Raymond and me that his teenager came out as nonbinary. I registered Raymond’s confusion, but I felt a deep familiarity. Masking my excitement, I grabbed a piece of metaphorical baggage and scribbled “gender” on it.

That box worked itself open in slivers over the next eighteen months until looking in a mirror or being called ma’am, which had always bothered me, now distressed me to tears. A gray fog obscured my future. It became necessary—inevitable—to leave the small town and transition: new name, men’s clothes, chest binder. After enrolling our son in a boarding school for his junior year, I moved to Baltimore in 2018 and reintroduced myself as Will, he/him. Raymond refused to join me in my new home. Still, I clung to the marriage that had now encompassed my entire adulthood. After six months of exchanging increasingly exacerbated emails, Raymond and I agreed to meet in a town in the middle to talk. Within two days, we’d agreed on a divorce.

I met Josh a year later, in the 2020 pandemic summer. Both five feet six inches with similar high-fade haircuts, we often get mistaken for each other. But Josh has blond hair, blue eyes, and an Alabamian accent, and I have light brown hair, brown eyes, and a subtle accent people place as “somewhere in the middle?” I proposed in the spring of 2021 as the first vaccines rolled out—love in the time of COVID. Now, I was merging my life with Josh’s, and my son had joined us in Baltimore. Raymond was sheltering in place in Europe with his new European wife and stepkids.

Raymond’s boxes burdened my brain and my basement, with nowhere to go—until he flew to town that same spring. I shoved boxes into my car and carted them to where he was staying. When I dropped off more boxes, I spied him through the glass of the front door. He was examining individual items like an archivist in a library’s special collections: holding Taco Bell receipts up to the light to decipher their ancient mysteries, peering into his past via three-by-five photos.

The morning of his flight back to his side of the Atlantic, he texted that he’d whittled sixteen boxes down to five and expected me to reabsorb them. “It’s not that much of a sacrifice to have a couple boxes in the basement,” he texted.

“Having them in the basement is one thing. Moving them to Josh’s is another,” I wrote.

“I thought you said he has even more space.” For me and my son, not for you.

An hour later, I met him and loaded up my car with his remaining boxes and several large, black plastic bags swollen with his junk—now categorized as garbage—before he zipped off. I dragged each bag through my long, narrow rowhouse to leave in the littered back alley. The third bag split as I pulled it outside; a glass shard from a broken picture frame had sliced through. Nudging the contents around, avoiding the sharp edges, I uncovered a snapshot from when we had dated: a teenager with long, straight hair, clear skin with no makeup, and a slight smile, looking away. I snapped a digital version of the picture and flung it back into the bag.

Raymond and I texted about his remaining boxes, but I swallowed my frustration. In mid-August, Josh and I flew to Salt Lake to introduce him to my family. I checked two of Raymond’s boxes for an extra $80. We lugged the boxes in a rental up to an RV campsite in Provo Canyon, where Raymond was vacationing. Josh and I arrived and stayed for an hour, chatting about nothing with Raymond, his wife, and her tween daughters. I coaxed his twelve-month-old to smile while trying to comprehend that my now nineteen-year-old son had a little sister, unconnected to me. The boxes rested there on the gravel outside my view. Raymond didn’t thank us. He never paid me back.

Four remaining “Raymond” boxes wriggled their way into the storage facility I shared with Josh. I pushed Raymond to plan for them, but he ignored my solutions. He never offered a counter solution except leaving them there “until I can get back to Baltimore or get a job.” Each time I visited the unit, his boxes taunted me.

Organizing the storage, I found memorabilia from the wedding: the diamond ring Raymond picked, the plastic rings he used in the proposal, dried boutonnieres. I touched the crumbling white and lavender fondant flowers from the cake. Raymond had insisted on a cake, and I had insisted he not smash it in my face.

In the wedding album, the “before” picture shows him smiling as he lifts a piece of cake. My face is pleading with him as I said, “No, no, please,” my right arm outstretched between us. I hoped maybe he was feigning a smash before switching to a gentle offering. In the “after” picture, my chin, mouth, and nose are smeared with chocolate cake and white icing. He’d picked the chocolate layer on purpose, over vanilla and yellow. My face is contorted somewhere between a scowl and a fake-it-till-you-make-it smile. I smashed back, if only to draw the guests’ eyes away from my red-faced humiliation.

As I stood in the storage facility alone, my anger flared—twenty-two years delayed—and I let it burn through my body. I chucked the flowers, boutonnieres, and plastic rings into the garbage with a whispered “fuck you.” I resolved to ship Raymond’s boxes to his sister’s place in Utah, without bothering to tell him.

Josh pulled into the driveway as I Tetris-ed the boxes into the trunk of my red Corolla. He climbed out of his blue hatchback, loosening his workday tie.

“Did he finally agree to pay?” Josh asked.

“Nope.”

His eyebrows shot up. “How much is that gonna cost?”

I shrugged. “It’s worth it to me. I just wanna—” I thrust my hands forward, pushing the baggage off an imaginary cliff. He nodded and let himself into our house.

Will Cole is a queer, trans man and an MA student in Creative Nonfiction Writing at Johns Hopkins University. His work is published in Another Jane Pratt Thing, Baltimore Fishbowl, and Welter.