About The Mending Year

This site is about the year after a marriage or a long relationship ends. Not the legal process, and not the question of whether you should have stayed. The part nobody hands you a folder for: the first week, the first Sunday, the first holiday, the first time the house is quiet at a normal hour and you have to decide what to do with it.

Divorce and breakups sit side by side here, sorted by where you are in the year rather than by whether there was a certificate. The practical questions overlap more than the categories suggest.

Who writes it

Tess Lindgren is the name on the articles. It is a pen name, used because writing publicly about the end of relationships under a legal name is a good way to end up in a search result you cannot take back.

She is not a therapist, counselor, coach, lawyer, or financial planner, and she does not play one here. What she does is work out the order of things and write it down plainly: what has to be handled this week, what can sit until next month, what other people found useful, and where the common advice quietly falls apart.

You will not find personal divorce stories on this site, because any story told here would be invented. No composite ex-husband, no reader letters written in-house, no client anecdotes. When a page draws on something specific, it says where that came from.

The rules this site follows

• Nothing about winning anyone back. Every page starts from the relationship being over.
• No diagnosis, of you or of them. Words like narcissist get thrown around online to describe people who are not in the room to answer for it. Behavior gets described here. Labels do not get handed out.
• No legal, tax, or financial advice. Anything touching property, custody, or money is written as questions to take to someone licensed where you live.
• Safety first, always. Where a situation involves fear or harm, the page stops offering communication tips and points to help instead.
• No numbers we cannot source. Statistics are traceable to the original, or they do not appear.
• No schedule. The name marks the shape of a calendar, not a deadline. Nobody here will tell you that you are behind.

If you need help today

Call or text 988 for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. If you are not safe at home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. Both are free, confidential, and answered at any hour.

Contact

Corrections, questions, and topic requests go to hello@themendingyear.com. Corrections get read first.

The editorial policy covers how pieces are researched and updated.