At first glance it seems to be just another happy-hour gathering of co-workers on the elm-shaded patio behind an old adobe restaurant in this city’s North Valley area.
But blaring from a boombox is country singer Tammy Wynette sobbing, “Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E becomes final today.” And tying on a white canvas apron is Melissa Barker, who is about to smash the engagement ring from her first marriage with a 4-pound sledgehammer.
As her friends and her fiance look on approvingly, Barker mutters under her breath, “OK, guys, watch me miss!” and brings the hammer down. With a sharp “ping,” the thin band zips off the anvil in a golden blur, striking a bystander. On her second try, Barker slams the ring squarely.
“Yes! It’s flat-it’s gooone,” she drawls, looking pleased with herself.
A woman named Lynn Peters, who’s wearing a bright-red apron with a diamond ring-shaped logo on it, asks Barker how she feels.
Wonderful, says Barker, whose divorce became final eight months ago. Then, eyeing the squashed ring, she says, “I didn’t know it was going to turn into shrapnel.”
Peters beams. Another satisfied customer. A commercial artist and part-time jeweler, she dreamed up the ring-bashing ritual for divorced people three years ago and has since supervised nearly 50 bashings.
“Something happens-I’ve seen it in every bashing I’ve performed,” she says. “When they hit the jewelry with the sledgehammer, there’s a release. They say, `I feel so much better.’ “
While the start of a marriage is generally marked by extravagance, a divorce is made final with the signing of a few papers. There is, Peters says, a sense of loss and emptiness-and little more.
The ring-bashing ceremony, usually capped with a champagne toast, is like a wedding in reverse. It offers “closure, transition and completion,” she says.
Convinced that people will pay for that kind of catharsis, Peters founded a business called Freedom Rings: Jewelry for the Divorced.
For a fee ranging from $100 to $600, Peters will supervise a bashing, then melt down the old ring and recast it as a new piece of custom-designed jewelry. Those who want a bashing alone can have the deed done for $50.
Peters says she has done group bashings for as many as five people at a time.
She is creating a catalog of Freedom Rings products, including T-shirts, lapel pins, license plates, calendars and announcements, all targeting divorced people. And because she trademarked the name, Peters is thinking of franchising the ring-bashing portion of the business in other cities.
Caroline Jordan, who recently opened Arrow Song, a store in Old Mill Market in Geneva, Ill., that specializes in products and services for single people, said she’s planning to carry Peters’ line of jewelry for the divorced.
Peters, 41, has plenty of firsthand knowledge of divorce. As a teen, she and her two younger brothers were sent to live with relatives in Santa Fe during their parents’ “horrible” breakup.
Years later, with a master’s degree in fine arts and a career as a commercial artist, she married a fellow artist, but the union ended in 1988 after six years.
Struggling with the trauma of the divorce, Peters put her wedding band away and tried to get on with her life. But early in 1990 she had an epiphany.
“I found the ring on my little (ring) holder and I thought, `What am I going to do with this?’ ” Peters says, her accent hinting at her West Texas origins. “Then I said, `I should just bash this sucker and make something new from it.”‘
Beauty from tragedy
Inspired, Peters consulted with several of her divorced friends. Some had thrown away their wedding bands while others had pawned or sold them. They told her the ring-bashing idea was a winner.
Among Peters’ early clients was Clayta Campbell, who these days often attends ring-bashings to serve as hammer-bearer.
“It was great-it was very symbolic,” Campbell says of her own bashing. “I wanted to make something beautiful out of something tragic, and she did it.”
Since Peters held her first ring-bashing in April 1990, she has had clients ranging in age from 25 to their late 60s, some divorced for as long as 15 years and some still waiting to sign the final papers. Two-thirds of her clients are women, but Peters maintains she’s not sexist.
“I do not want to be accused of being sexist here,” she says. “This is not meant to be a bashing of either sex.”
A skeptical therapist
Although her logo incorporates wedding-cake figures of a bride and groom holding pistols, Peters insists: “I’m not promoting the negative side of this. I’m promoting a process for people to acknowledge their feelings and get past it.”
Peters says that with word of her service reaching an ever-widening audience, she has heard from people who regularly deal with divorce.
“I’ve heard from therapists, divorce attorneys and divorce recovery groups,” she says. Therapists are “intrigued, especially the ones dealing with people who are going through a divorce.”
But at least one therapist wonders whether the ring-bashing ritual does much good.
Joan Rossman, an Albuquerque psychotherapist who has spent 20 years counseling women and couples struggling with the pain of divorce, says divorce “is a process, not an event,” a journey that takes years to complete.
“Divorce is more destabilizing and more wrenching than any other emotional crisis, including death,” she says. “The legal divorce is really far easier to arrive at than the emotional divorce and the psychological divorce.”
Rossman thinks people who are in a hurry to put their divorces behind them may be avoiding coming to terms with the issues that caused the divorce in the first place.
“I think it’s misleading to talk about `closure,’ ” she says. “There’s something to be said for doing the hard psychological work of what has happened in the relationship, and applying that to new attachments.”
For Melissa Barker’s ring-bashing, Peters has pulled out all the stops. She has arranged for some tables at a Mexican restaurant where Barker and her guests can gather.
An anvil cut from an iron rail rests on one black velvet-draped table. The taped country-and-western soundtrack is appropriate for the occasion (besides Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” Peters has included Wynette and George Jones singing “Golden Ring”).
Peters, who has extracted the diamond from Barker’s engagement ring, sticks the doomed gold band to the rail with a piece of clay.
Barker learned of the ring-bashing process from Dawn Bradley Berry, a “happily married” lawyer friend of Peters’ who has helped out at ring bashings from the beginning and who is on hand today as the ring-bearer.
Barker, who says she burned her marriage license the day her divorce was final, wants Peters to make a pin from the ring and some other old jewelry from the marriage. Her fiance, Dale Waltemire, supports her decision. He says he threw the ring from his first marriage into the Cooper River in Charleston, S.C.
Wearing an apron adorned with a pin in the shape of her logo (made from her wedding ring) and a button that says, “I still miss my ex-husband-but my aim is improving,” Peters calls everyone to attention and reads a liturgy of her own devising.
A recommendation to Mom
“Dearly Enlightened,” she begins. “We are gathered here today to celebrate the new life of Melissa Barker.”
She enumerates the rights and responsibilities of the newly released, among them, “To have and to hold anyone you damn well please.”
As Campbell hands Barker the hammer, Peters tells her, “Bashing this circle will bring you full circle.”
Afterward, Barker seems satisfied, so much so that she’ll recommend the process to her mother, who’s divorcing her father.
Barker says she moved from Dallas back to her hometown of Albuquerque a year and a half ago as her marriage fell apart.
“I moved back here to start over,” she says. “The new life is sort of already there.”
Peters, too, is pleased.
“I’ve had more fun with this,” she says. “Every time I do a bashing or a jewelry piece, it feels really good, because the clients are having a good time.”
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For more information about Freedom Rings: Jewelry for the Divorced, call Lynn Peters at 505-898-2386, or Arrow Song at 708-208-0547.
