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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:
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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;
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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
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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.
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.
