le divorce

The New York Times published a story last week about how 51% of American women are now living without a spouse:

William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, a research group in Washington, described the shift as “a clear tipping point, reflecting the culmination of post-1960 trends associated with greater independence and more flexible lifestyles for women.”

“For better or worse, women are less dependent on men or the institution of marriage,” Dr. Frey said. “Younger women understand this better, and are preparing to live longer parts of their lives alone or with nonmarried partners. For many older boomer and senior women, the institution of marriage did not hold the promise they might have hoped for, growing up in an ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ era.”

This apparently did not sit well with conservatives, who immediately accused the New York Times of lying. The National Review called it “cheerleading for divorce.” Rush Limbaugh claims the article is an example of “another far, left-wing, extremist agenda, i.e., the redefinition of a family, the redefinition of traditional family….”

The problem is that for many people the family has been redefined whether they wanted it to be or not. Why are we as a society so threatened by this? So what if the family is redefined?

Instead of attacking the messenger, we should be focused on making sure families- regardless of their structure - work in the best interest of their members.

I write about post-divorce from a single mom’s perspective but it was interesting to read about the experiences of a single dad. 

In this post, Ray discusses dating after divorce.  What most struck me is how much it is the same for men and women.  Trying to navigate the dating waters after having lived in the shallow end for so many years is not easy.  I suggest wearing a life jacket. (smile). 

One of the hardest parts about my separation and divorce was suddenly finding myself single again after 12 years of marriage.  I have never felt so all alone in the world.  You don’t realize how much you truly become “one” as a maried couple until that spouse is no longer there.  The process of feeling whole as a single person is not easy and does not come all at once.  It will take time. 

I found this article on the Divorce Mag website that I thought was extremely helpful.  The article captures the process one goes through as you slowly accept your single status and eventually embrace it.  I am three years out from my separation and I can tell you I am still not totally there in terms of feeling comfortably single.  I often find myself watching couples walk together hand in hand and I want that in my life more than anything and, in fact, I have stayed in some mediocre and even bad relationships just to avoid being single again. 

The article includes the following “test” to see where you are in the process of becoming comfortably single:

Ask yourself these questions to gauge your progress:

1. I am comfortable being single.
2. I can be happy as a single person.
3. I am comfortable going to social events as a single person.
4. I see being single as an acceptable alternative lifestyle.
5. I am becoming a whole person rather than a half-person looking for my other lost half.
6. I am spending time investing in my own personal growth rather than looking for another love relationship.
7. I can look at my friends as people I want to be with rather than as potential love partners.
8. If I have children and family, I can spend time enjoying being with them rather than begrudging the time they take from my personal life.
9. I have found internal peace and contentment as a single person.

My resolution this year is to become comfortably single.  To date myself for the first time in my life. 

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”  ~ Oscar Wilde

 Jordan and his wife filed for divorce yesterday:

Former NBA star Michael Jordan and his wife, Juanita, filed for divorce Friday in a Waukegan, Ill., courthouse. In papers filed at the Lake County courthouse, the couple said their decision to divorce after 17 years of marriage was mutual and amicable, the Chicago Tribune reported. The two have lived apart since February. They are seeking joint custody of their three children, ages 18, 16, and 14, court filings show. Court documents cite irreconcilable differences, and say the Jordans have agreed to a settlement on issues including property and debt, child custody and support, and parenting time, the newspaper said.

Not sure why I still feel validated by stories of celebrity divorce.  For some reason, knowing that the rich, famous and beautiful also stumble through love and marriage eases my own nagging sense of failure on the issue.     

 I was thinking about titles today and how I remember being so upset when I found out about my husband’s affair and first started to come to terms with the idea that I was probably on the road to divorceville. It dawned on me that I was no longer going to be a wife. Instead, I was going to be a divorcee, an ex-wife, and - even more fraught with emotional and cultural baggage - I was going to be a single mom. Ex-wife. Single mom. Divorcee. I have wanted to be a lot of things in my life but never that. No one aspires to that. ever.

Out of all those loaded designations, I have to say I like “divorcee” the best. Divorcee has a sexy, naughty, seductress feel to it. A divorcee smokes cigarettes and drinks martinis and talks in a really raspy voice. She doesn’t need men, she uses them for her pleasure and then kicks them out of her all-white leather uber-swanky high rise condo without even the whisper of a “call me.” She wears heels all the time and never wonders where her life went off the track. Never.

There is nothing sexy or scrumptuous about the ex-wife. She is a mean old bag with her lips all pursed up from years of scowling and snarling at her poor defenseless husband. She tricked her husband into divorcing her so that she could have all his worldly possessions. And now she sits at the kitchen table counting up all the money she got in the divorce settlement and laughing with her younger and hotter new cowboy boyfriend who is counting the money with her while her poor husband moves in with relatives because he’s got nothing but the clothes on his back. Not a pretty picture. I don’t want to be an ex anything. I am not the negative of a wife.

Single mom isn’t negative… if downtrodden and dejected is your thing. When you think single mom you think of someone who survives on diet cokes and the leftover McDonald’s cheeseburgers from her kids’ happy meals which she eats from the driver’s seat of her ancient minivan (because she can’t afford a new one) as she whizzes her kids from their after-school program to volleyball practice, or choir, or gymnastics. She is still in her wrinkled work clothes, which she wears at least once more than one really should between cleanings because she is trying to save on her dry cleaning bill. She would love to sip casually on a martini - like the divorcee in the uber-swanky high rise - but she is so exhausted by the time she gets home and gets her kids in bed that she barely has the energy to brush her teeth much less prepare anything - shaken or stirred. She would also love to eventually find someone of the male persuasion who she could call her own but does not hold out much hope that there is one out there who can see past the frazzled, frantic woman with kids always in tow who is in a perpetual state of being at least three steps behind where she should be by now.

Besides, the term “single mom” is just weird. What does the single part refer to anyway? If it means single as in “on her own” that just sounds so forlorn and desperate when attached to our status as mother. Why can’t we be called independent moms or unencumbered moms or even just unmarried moms? Or maybe the single refers to our dating availability. But what does that have to do with our status as mother? That conjures up images of women looking for men to come in and start paying the bills and taking the trash out.

After careful consideration, I have decided that I don’t want to be called ex-wife or single mom anymore (divorcee I’ll keep - shaken, not stirred). But if you have to refer to me in relation to the man I was once married to, call me his baby momma. Now, technically I am not a baby momma because I was (for better or for worse) married to their father. The urban dictionary defines it as the mother of a man’s child when you have never been married to eachother. Obviously, in that case you can’t be called an ex-wife. In fact, ex-girlfriend might not be technically correct either because the only relationship the two may have had with eachother was of the horizontal variety(geez, kids these days). The relationship, then, can only be defined by its end result: a bouncing baby.

I know this term is not used in a positive way now. But I propose that all of us single mom’s co-opt the word - make it our own - wear it with pride - print it on t-shirts. Like the gay community did with the word “queer” or band geeks did with, well, the term band geek.

Why baby momma? Three reasons:

1. Because it focuses on the only reason why you would even still be dealing with your ex anyway. Let’s face it, if you didn’t have kids together his number would no longer be in your address book;

2. It doesn’t accentuate the negative of the relationship (as in “ex” anything). In fact, it focuses on the good thing that came out of the union – sweet little babies; and

3. It doesn’t refer to dating status (which is no one’s business - unless, that is, you are an insanely gorgeous, single man…then, we can talk dating status).

For anyone not nearly so streetwise but interested in my proposal, here is how it the term works. First, as used in a sentence: “That girl? She my baby momma.” Please note that there is no pluralization of baby, nor is the word “is” used (you have to love the clean efficiency of it all). Please don’t say “She is his baby’s momma.” If you do, your teenage kid might die from choking on the Dr. Pepper that they will snort up their nose in laughter. When referring to the father you would say, “he my baby daddy” or “I am his baby momma.”

This could be a revolution for single mothers, er, baby mommas everywhere. We will no longer be defined by our oneness or ex-ness. We will define ourselves. We are baby mommas.

unite, baby mommas, unite.

“Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it’s all over much too soon.” ~ from Annie Hall

Up until about three and a half years ago my life was about as storybook as you get and happily nearly devoid of misery, loneliness and suffering. I married my best friend from college, finished a graduate degree and got a good job, had two beautiful daughters exactly when I planned it, moved to a big house out in the suburbs and spent my time planning birthday parties and redecorating my house. I got the bug to go back to school again so I started law school when my girls were 2 and 5. Did pretty well. Got a job offer from a firm. Planned on starting that job in the Fall of 2004 after a summer preparing for and taking the bar. Took the bar in July and was set to start my new career in October.

Things were good. I was married to the love of my life, my best friend, my soul mate. Someone I have known since high school. We had been together for 16 years. We had an endless supply of inside jokes that only we thought were funny.

But then one evening after the girls had gone to bed and my husband and I were sitting on the couch watching the 2004 Olympics - the men’s diving competition to be exact - the light of my life very calmly turned to me and said, “I am having an affair.”

ta-da.

I am sure it would not be possible to capture the surreality of that moment in words. I can, however, rememember quite distinctly that my first, knee jerk response was, “why is he telling me this now?” As if the most important point to all of this was the lack of a proper segue. For some reason, I needed to know how his statement had anything to do with this particular summer event. Why did he want to forever taint men’s competitive diving with this, I ask?

Then I did something way more predictable (although perhaps equally lacking in logical transition). I ran to the bathroom and threw up. I vomited beyond the point of the action having any usefulness. I threw up (or more accurately, dry heaved) for what seemed like at least a solid 24 hours but which more realistically probably lasted about 15 or 20 minutes. At some point during my self-induced, gastronomical exorcism, my husband, all wrapped up in his own pain, peeked into the bathroom and looked sadly at me sitting on the floor with my head resting on the toilet. “Are you okay?” he asked, furrowing his brow in a perfect little frown to show he really, really cared.

Seriously? Am I okay?! That is all you can come up with? I looked at him blankly and slowly lifted my head as if to respond. And then I turned to wretch up the rest of my stomach lining.

With his revelation, my world as I knew it came to an end. A second before he opened his mouth and uttered those words, I was as naive as they come. I believed in storybook romances and marriages that lasted forever and fidelity and trust and love. I believed, for instance, my husband when he said he didn’t go to strip clubs and he liked it better when girls didn’t wear makeup. Mostly, I believed in love. Total, full-on, give it all up for one person for the rest of your life love. It has taken me more than three years to come to terms with it all and I guess in some ways I will never truly come to terms with it all but I am at least now in a place where I can look at things more objectively and begin to look forward instead of backward.

With all the shit and all the the dark, scary moments of these last three years came moments that have somehow transcended the ugliness. Happy moments, awe-inspiring moments, and moments of startling, self-revelation. And, most importantly, the funny shit moments because it is the funny shit moments that make it worthwhile.

So I begin this blog at the beginning of what I consider my coming of age. The point in my life when I became aware that there is indeed a dark side of the moon.

There is a great quote from the movie Moonstruck (can you tell I am into movies?) where Ronny Cammerari says to Loretta Castorini: “Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn’t know this either, but love don’t make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit.”

I like that. The storybooks are bullshit.

But in good way.

Click to An affair by any other name: part deux here.

Funny that the word “affair” sounds so much better than it is. It sounds festive. Happy. Pretty and frivolous. Perhaps it is for the people in it. I remember my mind turning over the scant details I knew about my husband’s “affair” over and over in my mind. What hurt me the most was thinking about how much planning it took. So much planning. The big lie built on a mountain of tiny little lies told over days and days. Where did they meet? When did they meet? What did he tell me about where he had been? I have a hard time lying to a friend to get out of a dinner party. I cannot imagine how you lie at that level. That is the big leagues of deceit.

After the revelation, my husband wanted so badly for me to tell him: “Hey, these things happen. You fucked up. I forgive you because you look like you are really sad about this.” If only it were that easy.

I did not do what in retrospect I should have done the moment he told me about his affair. I should have thrown his ass out of the house. I should have dramatically thrown all of his clothes in the front yard. I should have taken a bat to the windows of his BMW. I should have torched something. But I have never been one to do anything impetuous. I am CAUTIOUS. I don’t make split decisions. By nature I get quiet and go inward when something is more than I can handle. I do not flail. At least not on the outside.

So, after he told me about his affair and after I wretched out most of my insides, I went to bed. Well, technically. I got in bed and laid there totally still. I listened to my dog breathing as he slept on the floor next to my side of the bed. He had run after me into the bathroom and had been right next to me ever since. Like all dogs, he sensed I was in trouble and he was not about to leave my side. Unlike my husband.

At one point my husband - who I had not seen since I retreated to the bathroom - peeked his head in the bedroom and asked me if I wanted him to leave. I told him I didn’t care what he did but that he wasn’t coming in here. I guess he slept on the couch that night. I remember that being a very long night.

My body was completely still but my mind has never been so frantic. Churning so fast I could not fully process any of the thoughts racing through my brain. I was in reverse, living through my entire marriage - trying to find the point of no return. When did we jump off the tracks? When did he meet her? When did this start? Were there clues? But I was also in fast forward - wondering what I would do if I he left. Could I do this all by myself? Could I support myself? Could I be a single mom? When was garbage day? How would we tell the girls.? Oh God, how would we tell the girls?

The next morning I heard my husband and my daughters getting ready for school. I heard him tell them that I wasn’t feeling good. They came in and gave me a kiss before they left for school. I started crying when I heard the front door shut. And I could not stop. I cried that big ugly snotty wailing crying. After awhile I got out of bed to get some kleenex and started roaming the house while I cried. I picked up photos in the living room and cried. I sat on the beds in my daughters’ rooms and cried. I sat in the middle of my closet and cried. At some point I got back in bed. I pulled the covers up to my chin.

My husband came home and made me lunch and brought it to me. He sat on the side of the bed. Who is she, I asked. He told me she was the girl who worked the front desk at the gym where we both worked out. I had a vague recollection of her. Long black hair. That is all I could conjure up. I was getting nauseous again. How old is she? 26. Ten years younger than me, I thought. How so fucking stereotypical, I thought. How Lifetime, made-for-tv movie.

Why, I asked. I don’t know, he said lamely. (To be fair, three years later and thousands of hours pondering this question I still don’t think there is a pat answer to that one.) What do you want to do? I asked. I don’t know. He said. What do you want to do, he asked.

I want to sleep. I want to eat. I want to be able to get out of bed. I want to stop crying. I want you to stop the internal bleeding. I want to erase the last 24 hours from my life and start over. I want you to take it back. I want you to leave. I want you to stay. I want to throw things at you. I want you to hold me and say you love me and will never leave me. I want the Earth to open up and swallow me whole. No, I want it to swallow you whole.

Beautiful piece on divorce on Odeo by Puawai. Lovely, lovey. Made me cry. Also reminded me of how much I love Damien Rice.

You don’t get a sick day for divorce but you should. Nothing socks you in the gut like the realization that ’til death you part doesn’t always really mean it. It breaks any last bit of innocence you had in your adult, cynical soul. It makes you doubt your ability to be loved by someone else or to love someone else.

It is the ultimate heartbreak. It is is a death in the family. It is a death of a family.

It is a long goodbye.

This weekend my daughters, ages 7 and 11, and I planned to put up the Christmas tree. Easy enough. Except that I couldn’t find our tree.

We used to do a real tree ’til my first Christmas as a single mom. That year I almost died trying to get an eight-foot tall Christmas tree off the top of my SUV by myself. Seriously. The sight of me laid out on the ground, pinned to the driveway under a Christmas tree must have been quite the Hallmark-card moment for any of my neighbors who happened to be watching. I, on the other hand, was not feeling the slightest bit merry after that.

The next year I bought my first fake tree. One box. With what seemed like three hundred separate limbs to put in place. I spent about eight hours adjusting each fake branch. That tree was Martha-Stewart perfect. I remembered, though, thinking how fitting it was that I had a fake Christmas tree because I had such ambivalent feelings about the holidays. I used to love Christmas time, but when you have to spend a large chunk of it away from your kids because they are with their Dad…well, let’s just say it sucks some of the magic out of it.

When me and the girls moved in July I had a moment of Christmas inspiration that can only come in July, when the thought of actually putting my holiday-spirited plan into motion was a half a year away. I decided I was going to give away the fake tree and go back to the real kind next year. I was ready to take back the real Christmas. Or so I thought in the heat of that July moment.

Sometime around Thanksgiving, I rummaged around the attic looking for my convenient box-o-Christmas-cheer, forgetting about that inspirational July moment. When I remembered what I had done, I panicked. I don’t want to spend another $200 on a tree. But I also don’t want to end up in my driveway underneath another live one. With such a huge decision in front me, I did the only thing one could do. Avoid the problem entirely. Maybe they won’t notice that we haven’t put up a tree. I decorated the outside with lights the first week in December. I put up all of our other Christmas decorations the second week. Maybe they will be on such a continuous sugar high from all of the Christmas cookies they won’t care.

But it was futile. My girls are no dummies. The white elephant in the room, or lack thereof, could no longer be ignored. When are we going to put up the tree? Huh? Huh? Huh? The question stumped me. Soon, I kept murmuring. It is strange the kind of things that stump you once you have kids. Could I really bring myself to say, geez, guys, do we really need to put a tree this year? Obviously, the answer is no. That would be like saying… Hey, kids, I decided that this year we are going to completely ignore your birthday. What do you think?

So…at some point my resolve to be resolve-less cracked and I weakly proclaimed that we would put up our Christmas tree this weekend.

We ventured out on Saturday to shop for a new fake tree. I had apparently waited 50% longer than most people because the fake trees were now 50% off. I plunked down my $100 for my new Christmas-in-a-box and quietly applauded the fact that my indecisiveness had finally paid off. Saturday night the girls and I put on our favorite ipod mix of Christmas songs and I made hot chocolate for them and poured a big glass of wine for myself and we decorated the Hell out of our brand new fake tree. My littlest said it was the prettiest tree we ever had. (Sounds nice, I know. but she says that every year).

I realized last night after the girls went to bed and I sat in the living room in the glow of the lights that the reason I waited so long to put up a tree was not because I was avoiding the fake/real decision. It was because it still hurts. Post-divorce Christmas is still hard for me. The everyday of divorce-ness I have gotten used to. You can keep yourself distracted by the details of just living. But Christmas is all about the special. All about the family unit. And no matter how much I have gotten used to being a no-daddy family unit, it is the holidays that still make me feel un-whole.

Fake or real. It doesn’t really matter. I dread being in my house alone with that Christmas tree glowing it’s constant reminder that this is Christmas. Be jolly, damnit. That tree mocks me.

No matter what, Christmas is still bittersweet for me.

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