After the year I’ve lived through, I’ve come to believe modern divorce has its own mythology—its own witches, its own spells, and most certainly its own flying monkeys. And like Dorothy swept up in the Kansas twister, I never expected the storm of a new world it would drop me into.
Divorce exposes the entire ecosystem around it—friends, siblings, lawyers, therapists, and self-appointed advisors—who swoop in with wings spread, clawing at the story, distorting reality, and sometimes carrying away the most vulnerable person in the relationship.
It can feel less like counsel and more like abduction.
In The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch relies on her flying monkeys—shrieking, grabbing, doing her bidding without ever pausing to consider the damage they leave behind. After a year of deep, tragic heartbreak, I can say without hesitation: in a marital crisis, the flying monkeys are real.
They are the friends who affirm the darkest interpretations, the coworkers who feed resentment, the wounded souls projecting their own failed relationships into yours. And sometimes—and this was my harshest lesson—they are the professionals hired to “help.”
One lawyer told me bluntly: “This happens all the time. A woman feels she must ‘perform’ strength in front of her friends—her flying monkeys—or they’ll judge her. They need a villain. They need a Wicked Witch’s script.” Once that narrative is set—husband = monster—the real marriage disappears. Its cycles, struggles, shared grief, joys, and imperfections vanish beneath a black-and-white fairytale.
True complexity collapses. Fear takes over. And the monkeys tighten their circle.
But anyone who has lived inside a real loving marriage knows the truth: Not every argument is abuse, every frustration is trauma, every dry season doom.
Marriage is made of emotional weather—storms, droughts, unexpected calms. Yet in the mythology of divorce, those seasons get rewritten as one long dark forest to justify an escape. A twenty-five-year marriage—full of memories, sacrifices, and the ordinary struggles of aging—can be repainted almost overnight as a stylized tale of a heroine fleeing a villain.
The husband becomes the monster. The wife becomes Dorothy, clutching her ruby slippers. And anyone who questions the script becomes an enemy.
And yet something equally important must be said—because no marriage is one-sided. Of course, the husband is never perfect! Like any man, there are flaws, blind spots, and regrets. All sinners make mistakes—sometimes from exhaustion, distraction, fear, or simple human limitation. And in the quieter moments where clarity breaks through, I can admit that I didn’t always value my wife the way I should have. Her absence has revealed just how much her presence meant. That realization should lead not to abandonment, but to humility.
Given the chance, I would make amends. I would walk the yellow brick road again—together—doing the work with honesty and grace. But that requires a shared reality - two imperfect courageous people — not a mythology built on fear and performance.
And that is precisely what gets lost when the flying monkeys take over. Because the people who step into your crisis are not neutral. Some gather not to heal but to bind—forming a coven of grievance, a sisterhood of shared disappointment. They reenact old wounds, encourage impulsive decisions, and inflate small problems into existential threats.
They aren’t malicious—just unresolved people. And unresolved people turn pain into folklore.
Ironically, The Wizard of Oz also holds the antidote. Dorothy’s real journey is not escape—it’s integration. She doesn’t defeat Oz through violence; she sees through him. She discovers the Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man were always parts of herself—courage, wisdom, and heart waiting to be reclaimed.
The same is true in any marriage crisis. Healing does not come from fleeing the “monster husband.” It comes from seeing through the false mythology and reclaiming the integrated self.
At the end of this dark cloud of a season, I’ve learned something with absolute clarity:
You must learn to ward off the flying monkeys.
Reject the black-and-white thinking.
Push back against the rewritten history.
Resist the grievance coven that gathers around a crisis.
And like Dorothy, find your courage, your heart, and your mind again.
Only then can you look behind the curtain and see that the “Wizard of Divorce”—the monstrous husband, the total doom, the tale of villains and victims—was never the full truth. It was a projection. Performance. Smoke and mirrors.
And once you see through it?
You can finally go home— not to the old “evil” marriage, but to a transformed one, rebuilt with humility, honesty, courage… and two people willing to take another step together on the yellow brick road.
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