What fairy tale genius decided that the answer to a woman’s prayers was Prince Charming anyway? When a woman is immobilized from a C-section, supporting the family financially without any help, too exhausted to take her own shirt off, what good does Charming do her? What if little girls today were raised on a new archetype: Prince Loving? The guy … Read More
Saying it and meaning it
The way I talked to Pete when I was upset never served me–or us, or the problem I was trying to solve. My constant disappointment, carried far and wide by my tone of voice, served primarily to cement alienation in our marriage. And things weren’t improving much in divorce. It became obvious that if I wanted our dynamic to change, … Read More
Sick
My body makes its own memorials. When I am ravaged by a sadness I can not solve, eventually I go to the calendar where I find a fact to back up the ache. Two years after the second baby I will never have left me–taking me with her right out of my marriage, I become deeply infected with the grief … Read More
What the Heart and Stomach Will No Longer Hold
He walks onto the bus, and the 12-year-old girl in me leaps to attention. Everything about him is wrong for what the middle-aged me wants and needs–it’s obvious in everything from his posture and his grooming to his Converse high-tops, but my body is responding to different cues. I tell myself, “Yes, appealing. No, you may not engage.” When I … Read More
I Wish Someone Had Told Me
I wish someone had told me: You will throw up before and after every divorce negotiation call for a year. You will lose half of your hair, and it will grow back gray in a halo of friz. You will go into unbelievable, unprecedented debt. Your son will ask you to see “the happy face,” and you will see in … Read More
The Foreign Country of Dating
Pete had been gone for about a year when my friends and family delicately started asking if I was dating again. I was about as interested in dating as being set on fire. Before my marriage, I considered sex my primary language. I never questioned my desire –or ability — to find a way to do that dance with some … Read More
Unmasked
I meet Pete and Teddy at the party supply store. It’s their weekend together but I have proposed that we repeat last year’s successful collaboration and select Teddy’s sixth-birthday-party schwag together. When I arrive, Teddy is gleefully fake-stabbing Pete with a variety of plastic swords, scythes, arrows and chainsaws with a gusto that reflects his complete deprivation of such play objects in both of … Read More
CEO of Pleasure
I met a man I liked. Sitting across the table from him, a surprising, pre-marital version of me surfaced in tact and ready for action. I was radiant, relaxed, turned on. After our first date, we voted this man in as CEO of Pleasure. After our second date, we decided not to see each other again. This left an open position at the … Read More
Four years
At the state-mandated parenting class that my husband and I took as a precursor to divorce, I heard a number that still rings in my ears. The therapist in front of the projector insisted that blending a family (as in, getting established with a new partner in a new home and integrating all of the kids) takes four years. Four years. My … Read More
Peonies
BY MARY OLIVER This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready to break my heart as the sun rises, as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers and they open — pools of lace, white and pink — and all day the black ants climb over them, boring their deep and mysterious holes into the … Read More
