During An Ugly Divorce, Hula-Hooping Kept Me Safe

In this exclusive excerpt of Shayla Lawson’s new book, How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir, the writer leans on, and into, a childhood plaything to bring their world into balance.

I had a messy divorce. In this, I’m not alone, but divorce is such a lonely process. My wedding was a fairy tale. A long lace train, down under the Brooklyn Bridge, where my fiancé wore a suit he had custom-made. On the day, he surprised me with a bouquet of flowers. I wasn’t a froufrou girl at the time. I planned to walk down the outdoor aisle without them. But once, I’d randomly come across a picture in a magazine that looked like a meadow and a forest wrapped in old country twine and said “OK, this is a bouquet I could tolerate,” and he remembered — that was seven months before we got engaged.

I was a Southern Christian girl. It was hard for my divorce not to feel like failure because, despite the fact I was nearly 28 when I got married, my husband-to-be was my only — my wedding night, my first. So, when he admitted about a week into our marriage that he’d been cheating on me throughout our courtship, I took the L and did my best to soldier on. I constructed it as my fault that I was in love and unhappy.

And I assumed my husband loved me, and because he admitted to cheating, it must have meant that he had stopped. He hadn’t. He didn’t. Two years later, my sister found continued evidence of his infidelity in a Facebook post that popped up in the wee hours of the morning, something long-since deleted by the time I woke up. She didn’t tell me about it. She told him he had to. But the ultimatum didn’t stick because he never did, I didn’t know, and when my sister saw nothing changing in our relationship, she started to resent me for being what she assumed was a delusional so-and-so.

My husband didn’t confess to cheating again until he was actively pursuing a new woman, about six months later. We had this family rule where you could say anything and the other person wouldn’t get mad if you said it in bed. The idea was we’d stay in bed until we worked out the problem, because we wanted to always be friends. My parents hadn’t been. So when I made that rule up, I thought we’d use it to solve arguments about visiting my in-laws or leaving dirty socks on the carpet. I didn’t expect my husband to stick his head under a blanket and squeak out some new betrayal like a naughty kid. Naive and trusting, I told him we needed to take this directly to the church. A Jehovah’s Witness, I’d stayed chaste all those years because I thoroughly believed in the Scriptures, the sacrifices of Jesus, and the promise of a better Earth. In fact, my husband and I were training to be missionaries and planned to enter the service once I finished grad school. Surely, the elders in our congregation wouldn’t want to see such a blight on cherished members of their flock. But institutions are institutions. I learned that the hard way. I knew the Bible backward and forward — honestly, back in the day I could have pimp-slapped you with a psalm — so I was shocked beyond mortality when the first spiritual heads we approached with my husband’s problem told us this was “normal” for men sometimes and that I should just keep being a “good” little wife. Pharisees, I thought, remembering how Jesus knocked down the tables of the men collecting money at the door to his Father’s house. In this case, the price was my body, and I wouldn’t accept it because it would mean to the blood of Christ the ultimate disrespect.

But I was poor and barely 30. We had a condo and a car payment, but with me in grad school and both of us devoting full-time hours to our ministry, we were getting by on about $40,000 a year. Maybe an extra 5 grand in the years I won a few prizes for my poetry. And the rift my husband had intentionally caused between myself and my family was pretty irreparable. My divorce took time because I was nearly broke and alone.

I had two small indulgences at the time. The Nicki Minaj clothing line for Kmart, which could keep a girl in the Midwest looking pink and sexy for $17, and the random tchotchkes I’d snag from T.J. Maxx. One day, scouring the clearance aisles in a kind of blood panic, I came across a Hula-Hoop. With an instructional DVD attached to it. “Why not?” I said to myself, although it’s more likely I said “f*ck it,” since I’d been teaching myself to say one swear word a day — a task I practiced at home while washing dishes in the kitchen — my tiny rebellion against my former tribe. I purchased the hoop and took it home.

My new Hula-Hoop was soft and loud. It was as big as the dining table and covered in fuchsia neoprene. I’d been a clumsy kid, the kind who was teased because she could never keep the world in safe orbit around her body. I didn’t expect to be good at this now, but that was precisely why it appealed to me. I was tired of how much goodness mattered in my pursuit of being a grown woman. In the midst of my divorce, the world owed me my lost girlhood. I took the cellophane off the DVD and balked at some white woman talking about “unlocking the goddess in you” while hooping beside a mountain in the intro credits. But, by the end of the first lesson, which was just passing the hoop from one hand to the other, I was hooked.

It felt good. I felt good. I had no other lover; I hadn’t been able to pinpoint how much the infidelity had divorced me from my body. Whenever the blues started to creep over me, I would push some of the furniture out the way in our living room and lose myself in a wave of my own rhythm. In those few seconds I kept the hoop up, I felt beautiful. No competition. I felt flawless and earthy and privately mine.

Staying inside the groove, staying inside the swirl of my own rhythm, kept me safe.

My husband and I separated. When my mother and sister came to inspect the house, expecting it — and me — to be a wreck in the aftermath, they found the house clean, happy, a bouquet of flowers on the table, and the woman who never liked to be too girly girlishly excited to show off a new trick.

“Whoa-ho-ho!” my mom said. The ultimate compliment.

“Girl, it looks like you could be ironing laundry and cookin’ on the stove!” my sister joked. We all laughed as they continued to imagine scenarios in which I worked and werked a hoop in motion — the balance of a Black woman’s life. They were proud of me. Although the conversations that would come later about my impending divorce and decision to leave behind our family religion would not be mild ones, my Hula-Hoop tempered them with a sort of grace.

As evidence of the blessings of God, as I divorced my husband, my life became rich and his a chaotic mess. He begged to move back into the house during a winter when I’d be at an Italian writing residency because he’d run out of friends’ couches on which to crash. In mercy, I said yes and packed my hoops in my suitcase. By this time, I had allowed myself a collection of four, two of which could fold in ways that made them portable for travel. It had been maybe four months since I’d started hooping, but I’d become quite good. I’d advanced to watching tutorials for tricks on YouTube, and I treated myself to a slim gold speed hoop I’d had custom-made on Etsy; it broke down into four pieces compact enough to fit in a carry-on suitcase.

In Venice, I’d take my hoop out late at night and dance by the canal’s edge, its glimmer and wave synchronous with water. I ran through the city with the hoop across my shoulder like a circus performer, occasionally unleashing it to twirl or lasso around my body in the empty streets when no one was looking. Before my Hula-Hoop, I had never associated my purpose with pleasure. With my own delight. If you knew me back then — I didn’t even have the guts to say I made the cut in my Top 10 list of favorite people. But in the months that followed returning home from hooping in Venice, I would lose the companionship of all of them: my mother, my father, my sister, my best friend — my husband. And staying inside the groove, staying inside the swirl of my own rhythm, kept me safe.

Around Jan. 2 — the anniversary of our engagement — my husband and I took a trip to Jamaica in an attempt to reconcile. Before we left, my mom and second church mom held an intervention, trying to convince me not to go. They did not want me to divorce the man. But they were literally scared that if I went alone out of the country with him, he might kill me. I couldn’t understand the rationale. But it was a lack of balance I was accustomed to in the world outside of hoop life. By this point, I had graduated to spinning multiple hoops on my body at one time. I stayed in the flow. I trusted my gut. I stood up to my mother. She took a long time to forgive me. But I was a married woman who needed to see if there was anything redeemable in her Christian courtship. I owed this to the girl in me who had spent all those years doing her best to keep me safe.

While my competition tried to keep the beat of the music, I kept the speed of the space handed to me, the hoop, a whole entire life lesson.

The trip was disastrous. Naive and trusting, I assumed we would use the time to align our values and recommit ourselves to the task of my husband’s fidelity. He believed it was going to be a smoke-and-mirrors game. A romantic getaway where we went back to being the adventurous, carefree version of us other people envied. I wasn’t having it. Pretension wasn’t my kind of life. Lying on the beach next to him, trying to forget about him, I watched an old man pass by with gray dreadlocks and a handsome beard. A coastal activity coordinator.

“Miss, we’re about to start a hula contest over there,” he said, offering me a light blue hoop wrapped in a ribbon of turquoise cellophane. Having packed none of mine, I snatched the hoop out his hands. We contestants gathered: a scattering of kids, me, and a Jamaican sex worker (identifiable by the particular tattoo that adorned her thighs) — a woman who could actually dutty wine. The music started, and we all wiggled our hips.

After a few false starts, I tested the hoop’s weight and width with my hands. It was a child’s hoop, not built for a full-grown body, so I compensated in the spin by pouching my tummy out a bit, like a little kid. The move wasn’t cute, but it was effective. The song reached its end, and the kids had abandoned the competition in favor of using the hoops to beat each other over the top of the head. It was down to me and the sex worker, whose gorgeous hip-to-waist ratio made her a shoo-in to win. But what I had in my heart was the rhythm of life. I summoned it and went into my happy place, where nothing could hold me back and nothing but love surrounded me. While my competition tried to keep the beat of the music, I kept the speed of the space handed to me, the hoop, a whole entire life lesson. I kept hooping long after the music stopped. I didn’t even notice the competition had ended. My worthy opponent came over and gave me the biggest hug.

“How’d you learn to move like that, girl?” she said, holding her weave back with both hands — the ultimate gesture of Black girl appreciation.

I laughed. “Girl, I am going through a terrible divorce!”

We were still cackling when my husband walked up, shriveled and surly.

“Wow! You must be some type of gymnast or something,” the bearded man said, shaking my hand as my husband approached. My husband tried to say something —“Yeah, my w…”— but no one was listening.

And from that day on, I danced for myself.

From HOW TO LIVE FREE IN A DANGEROUS WORLD: A Decolonial Memoir, by Shayla Lawson, to be published on February 6th by Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2024 by Shayla Lawson.