Betrayal at Tiffany's

One secret, two rings and a trifecta of feelings. Inside Inner Gold Digger's jewelry box.

A rendering of Maya’s trade-in Paloma Picasso ring from Tiffany’s.

Maya from Inner Gold Digger works in public education, designs and sells jewelry and loves to share jewelry stories. This is one of them. As told to The Literary Jewelry Box.

A crumpled Tiffany receipt on the floor of my husband’s money pit of an old Land Rover told me there was someone else. He’d bought her the same diamond studs he had given me when we first got married.

I was 34, unemployed, with a three-year-old, a one-year-old and breast cancer. It was a lot of things converging at the same time, to put it mildly.

I took that receipt to Tiffany, with my pair of the earrings and a variety of Tiffany pieces I had acquired over 10 years of marriage. I dumped everything on the counter and told the man behind it, “I don’t want any of this sh*t. I want to give it back. What can I return?”

And this guy, God bless him, he looked at me as if thinking, ‘Oh Goodness, here’s another one.’ Then he said, “I’m really sorry, none of this is anything we can take back except this ring, which is technically an engagement ring. We can take it back with credit for an upgrade if you can do that now.” (It wasn’t my engagement ring, but one I’d gotten as an anniversary gift).

At this point, I had had a bilateral mastectomy, I had gone through recovery, betrayal, through continuing to raise two little children and act as if everything was OK. I had never felt more alone. But somehow, in this moment in Tiffany’s, I had this feeling of invincibility. Nothing else could happen that would cause me to fall apart.

It made no sense for me to upgrade a ring at that time but I didn’t care. I looked at the sales guy and I said, “Let’s see the engagement rings.”

I chose a Paloma Picasso diamond solitaire. It couldn’t be sized because of its design, the man said, to which I replied, “What if I end up marrying a French pastry chef and I move to Paris and I get really fat and happy and just have these big sausage fingers from sitting around eating pastries all day and it doesn’t fit me anymore? It can’t be sized?” No, he told me. I decided to cross that bridge when I got there.

I wore the ring all the time. It really marked the beginning of this period where I realized I didn’t need anyone. I thought, I’ve gone through all of these things, I can handle anything. Before I got the Paloma Picasso ring, I felt like I was incapable of being fine. And then, in that moment in the Tiffany store, that ring became emblematic of freedom and self love and joy.

Eventually, we reconciled—after years, counseling and mending, the loss of friends who couldn’t transition back from their readiness to break his kneecaps, and, the sale of that stupid Land Rover. I sold the ring to a friend who loved the whole story and wore it as her own special self love ring.

And I ended up trading that ring for something I wasn’t expecting.

One random Tuesday in Santa Cruz on a day off, in the presence of a bubblegum machine, my husband put his coins in and, of all things, pulled a plastic-stone ring out. When he realized what it was, he got back down on one knee.

I think about jewelry and the meaning behind things, what they represent, whether it’s Paloma Picasso or a bubblegum ring. That bubblegum ring (which I kept and still admire daily on my dresser) became symbolic of the fact that people change, I changed. The ring became a symbol of this next iteration of our marriage and our union and commitment to each other.

Maya’s bubblegum ring at top, with a new ring made in its image below. Courtesy Inner Gold Digger.

The ring I wear on my ring finger now is one with my original engagement diamond but set anew to resemble the bubblegum ring.

It’s complicated, the relationships we have with ourselves and with our partners. But we’ve been married 26 years now and this is all just part of the fabric of our story.