Friday. Five-forty-seven p.m. You are in the parking lot of the Chick-fil-A on Route 9 because that is the meeting point on the parenting plan, page seven, paragraph four. You have been in this parking lot every other Friday for forty-one months. You know the white Tahoe in the third row of spots is her car. You also know she sees you. You also know she will not get out until the kids have undone their seatbelts.
The handoff is two minutes long. The handoff has a script. "Hi, buddy." "Cleats are in the bag." "Did you do your reading?" "Have a good weekend, guys." She does not say anything. You do not say anything. The kids walk eight feet of asphalt and the marriage that ended forty-one months ago re-ends in those eight feet. Every other Friday. Twenty-six times a year.
The divorce was not a single Tuesday in March. The divorce is a parking lot at Chick-fil-A every other Friday at five-forty-seven, for the next eleven years, until your youngest leaves for college. And on that Friday, the last one, you are going to sit in your car alone in that same parking lot because you do not yet know what to do with the slot the handoff leaves behind.
The slot is what nobody warned you about.
Most guys are still in the part of divorce where the slot has kids in it. The slot has the back-and-forth text about pickup times. The slot has the cleats. The slot has the script. The slot has Friday at five-forty-seven. You do not have time to think about what the slot looks like empty.
But the slot empties. One Friday at a time. Junior year, then senior year, then graduation, then a Tuesday in August when the dorm room gets unloaded and you drive back to the same town and the same parking lot and the slot is just a slot.
Eleven years sounds like a long time. It is not. Forty-one months disappeared and you cannot tell where they went.
The guys who do okay on that last Friday are the guys who started filling the slot now. Not after. Now. They picked up the guitar. They started lifting. They went back to school. They got into therapy. They built a friend group of men in the exact same spot, and a Tuesday that is theirs.
The guys who do not do okay are the ones who held the slot open. Who told themselves they were too busy with the kids to start anything for themselves. Who treated the slot like a vigil. The slot does not care about your vigil. The slot empties on its own schedule.
This is what hundreds of men do in the HFM Brotherhood. Fill the slot before the slot empties. Build the Tuesday. Sit in the parking lot with brothers who know what five-forty-seven feels like.
The Parking Lot at Chick-fil-A
