Buying Myself a Necklace

Was I worth $64? For a non-necessity? A short, true story of a medium-priced Instagram necklace, self worth, and moving on from the past.

“The row of destruction” ©Deborah Copaken

How do we define self worth? Is it what we give to others? Is it what others give to us? Can it be taken away and therefore reclaimed? Or do we have to, a priori, give it to ourselves, and, if so, what form should that take? Is self worth theoretical, immeasurable? Or can it be calculated, traded for goods, held in one’s hand?

These are the admittedly hyperbolic if pressing questions I’d begun asking myself each morning as I stood paralyzed in front of a row of necklaces hanging from the cheap plastic thingamabob in my closet. A few of them had been gifts from my ex-husband. Others were given to me by the ex-partner who followed. None were exactly my taste, but I gamely wore them for years out of the kind of love, commitment to commitment, and forgiveness of human foibles that were never, in retrospect, reciprocated. Grouped tightly next to one another—like guns on a rack, my lizard brain kept telling me, though this was hardly the simile I would have consciously chosen—that “row of destruction,” as I called it, became a daily reminder of poor choices. Both mine and the men’s.

They had to go. But where?

Melt them down and create a new object? Give them to my daughter? Donate them to charity? Burn them? Turn them into art?

Back in 2014, I’d transformed my wedding band—which had previously lay languishing in that purgatory known as the nightstand drawer—into a giant circular flower after I had a dream about doing this. I’d been reading a lot of Thich Nhat Hanh in the wake of my separation. It made perfect sense to turn those twenty-three years of marital mud into a lotus. Plus a circle is the symbol for life, wholeness, the self. Just go with it, Deb, I said to myself. It’s not like you have any better ideas.

What to do with a Wedding Ring, 2014 ©Deborah Copaken

So I bought fake white petals at the fake flower shop near my office. In my dream, the petals had been real, but dreams are not practical, and as a solo parent of three I now had to be extremely practical as well as frugal, so I went with cheap permanence over expensive verisimilitude. To save money on art supplies—house paint instead of acrylics, a 3’ x 5’ wood slab instead of stretched canvas—I purchased the rest of the materials at the Home Depot on West 23rd Street.

I lugged my supplies plus my eight-year-old son, my wedding ring, a hammer, and five nails—representing the five family members who were each wounded by the end of my marriage—on the subway down to my friend Donal’s in Brooklyn, where I would be housesitting and “vacationing” between Christmas and New Year’s Day. There, during that small respite from harried life and underpaid work, I painted the board with primer and paint and covered the second coat with drippings meant to mimic sperm surrounding an egg—this was an act of creation, after all, why not announce it with Matthew Barneyesque bravado?—before going about the absurdly laborious act of producing a giant ass flower, petal by petal.

It took forever, my mandala. Hours upon hours of diligent flow and patient, penitent focus with a bottle of Gorilla glue, a pencil eraser to hold each petal down until the glue dried, and my son by my side, “helping.” The nails came last, forming a stamen around which I superglued my wedding ring. When the work was finally done, I placed my lotus above my bed as a reminder that pain can and must be transformed. Albeit painstakingly slowly.

But the necklaces? No dreams or messages from the Buddhist beyond were forthcoming, telling me what to do.

My favorite necklace, designed by my friend Ann Lightfoot, broke into a thousand pieces a couple of years before my marriage did when, distracted by a missing husband, I forgot to take it off before removing the shirt underneath it. (Don’t do this! You’ll be sad.) The necklace’s stone beads scattered across the floor of my friend Marion’s apartment in Paris, where I was staying with my kids and trying to reach said husband back in the States. He’d flown back from our family vacation early. Pressing stuff at work, he’d said. For two days, I kept stepping on and finding tiny stones in every corner of Marion’s guest room as I texted and called the father of my children to no avail. When he finally answered, I lost it. “Where the hell were you?” I said, crying. “Why didn’t you answer your phone? What if there had been an emergency with one of the kids?”

My husband told me I was overreacting. I told him I wanted a divorce. I still have no idea where he was during those two days, but at this point it no longer matters. What matters is this: I was finally, after years of accepting the unacceptable, standing up for myself and owning my worth as a human being, deserving of love, truth, empathy, and a timely call back.

The next man who gifted me necklaces asked that I please remove my wedding band from the stamens of my lotus before he would hang it in our new home. “I don’t want that kind of karma hanging over our bed,” he said. With a sternness and intransigence that should have set off alarm bells but didn’t.

Though it pained me to do so then—and it pains me even more to admit this now—I took a steak knife and chipped away at the superglue holding my wedding band to the five nails of my former family. Of course my new partner, I said to myself, would not want such a reminder of my marriage in our new home. And yet it still bugged me, this erasure of my past. No one reaches middle age without baggage. The ring was no longer a ring. It was part of my history, the seed of a piece of art, one I was proud to have created with my own hands as a way of transforming its pain into beauty. Wasn’t that the simple message of my flower? No mud, no lotus? Would he perhaps reconsider?

“No,” he said.

Conflict averse, after so many years in war zones, both real and metaphoric, I capitulated. His need for the removal of the ring from my flower felt stronger, at the time, than my desire to keep it. But when I think about this choice now, knowing everything I now do, I see it for what it was. I chose his self worth over mine because he kept choosing it, too, and I was more concerned with keeping the peace, not making waves. That’s my cross to bear, not his.

The week before we moved in together, I went for a solo hike up to the top of Inwood Hill Forest, where for years I’d climbed up and down alone to breathe and heal from marital rupture, and where I now tossed my wedding ring into a ravine. (It’s probably still there if you want to find it.) When my new partner subsequently moved out, four years later, I kicked myself for bowing to his wishes and ignoring mine.

Turns out? It wasn’t my past that would loom over our bed. It was his.