So it’s Monday afternoon and I’m at work, which means my laptop and I are cuddled up in bed together. I’m wearing jeans, a tank top and socks with Christmas trees on them; messy hair, no make-up. It is 2:43pm and I have not yet interacted with soap and water today.
This is the professional lifestyle I’ve been leading since before my 13-year-old was born. Way back when, I did the thing where you set an alarm clock, shower in the morning and head to an office, but then I snagged a breadwinner-type husband, became a mother, and settled into what, for a long time, was an ideal arrangement: I was part-time stay-at-home-mom, part-time freelance journalist–able to interview Gloria Steinem or research rheumatoid arthritis in the morning and spend the afternoon hosting playdates or going to the playground.
And then, as we know, my life changed a little. The relatively warm, fluffy loaf of bread that R provided for a family of four living under one roof became a thin smattering of crumbs when that family started living under two roofs. (Doesn’t it seem like it should be rooves?) Add the fact that the recession has put many publications out of business or eliminated their freelance budgets, and my semi-luxurious work-from-home existence went poof. (If Gloria Steinem needs to be interviewed now, they’ll make her do it herself.)
So, big news here in the land of the midlife makeover: Two weeks from now, I am going back to work full time in an office, where I will write about health for a series of consumer-friendly booklets and–get this–be given a regular paycheck for doing so. Apparently that means I’ll get paid even if I don’t call the accounting department 7 or 8 times first, which boggles the mind in such a good way. (Fellow freelancers, I know you hear me.)
I. Am. So. Psyched.
True, there are trade-offs. I won’t be able to take my sweaty yoga class at noon or grocery shop anytime I feel like it, and my younger daughter, especially, will not see me as much, which makes me sad. I might have to dust off my Crock-Pot so that a nutritious dinner is ready when I get home. (Got recipes? I want them.) I won’t work lying in bed in a tank top anymore, and when I wear my Christmas-tree socks, no one will know, because, well, Mama needs a new pair of shoes, and now it looks like she might get them.
As usual, the end of the decade is being marked by countless articles, TV and radio specials–all of them scrambling to accurately distill the ’00s into a tidy list of significant people and events.
Oh sure, there was that 9/11 thing and a few wars started here and there–but apparently one of the most shocking things to happen in the past 10 years was that a rich, famous athlete had extra-marital affairs.
If you are among those who claimed to be floored by this news–who has perhaps smashed the face of your Tag Heuer watch in disgust–here is what I say to you: Give. Me. A. Break. You are so not shocked and you know it. You know it. Whatever one may think or feel about Tiger’s indiscretions on a moral level, I find it impossible to believe that anyone is genuinely shocked. Disappointed? Sure. But not shocked.
Since when has anyone with a squeaky-clean public persona lived up to it in his personal life? If you are a rich and famous married man, you are required to cheat on your wife. It’s not a choice. Ask David Letterman, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and all the others. Having extra-marital sex with younger women is written into their rich-powerful-man contracts. They are not allowed not to cheat. (OK, there’s the occasional Paul Newman, who finds a loophole by making salad dressing and pretzels.)
My cynicism about this should not suggest that I am one of those bitter divorcees who thinks all men are weak and pathetic–because truly that is not what I’m trying to convey. I certainly don’t condone adultery or deception, and I feel for all the duped wives involved.
I just think it’s naive to be surprised, given that unremitting monogamy seems like a longshot for most humans–rich, poor, male or female. In fact, what Woods did was so predictable that that’s what he should be most embarrassed about. Couldn’t he have instead surprised the world by not philandering? That would have been refreshing.
I like the way Frank Rich put it in a recent New York Times op-ed called Tiger Woods, Person of the Year: What’s striking… is the exceptional, Enron-sized gap between this golfer’s public image as a paragon of businesslike discipline and focus and the maniacally reckless life we now know he led. What’s equally striking, if not shocking, is that the American establishment and news media — all of it, not just golf writers or celebrity tabloids — fell for the Woods myth as hard as any fan and actively helped sustain and enhance it.
I just hope our president, who has so much riding on his own image as The Perfect Husband, has something like the Paul Newman clause written into his powerful-man contract–because if he ends up in a Monica Lewinsky-type situation, we will surely be looking right in the face of Armageddon.
What are your thoughts? Why is our society so, um, wed to the concept of lifelong fidelity, and why do we feign shock when we discover that, for the gazillionth time, someone has cheated on a spouse?
Once again, the blogosphere threw me a bone. Just when I was feeling low on inspiration, Sunday’s New York Times Magazine landed with a thump at my front door and begged for my attention. So, thank you, Elizabeth Weil, for writing Married (Happily) With Issues (and, btw, feel free to introduce me to your editor because I’ve always wanted to write for the Magazine; actually, I got close once, but then…oh, never mind.)
The article chronicles Weil’s foray into marital therapy with her husband–only they engage in it before they’re on the verge of divorce. According to Weil, by the time most couples enter therapy, they have been unhappy for six years, making the endeavor futile. So kudos to her for trying to nip that shit in the bud (and sorry for cursing, but it felt necessary). Seriously, I’d estimate that 90 percent of couples I know who have gone to marriage therapy have ultimately ended up in Splitsville anyway.
Weil’s marriage follows the standard script: Boy and girl fall in love during their clueless, carefree 20s, get married, skip around and play house for a while until the game turns serious. Then they have babies and lose sleep and spend the next few years singing the Alphabet Song and groggily emptying the Diaper Genie until–surprise–one day they emerge from the fog and notice that the romance has mysteriously departed from their relationship.
Which is not to say that the kids are to blame, because of course we all love our kids and they add immeasurably to our lives and we can’t imagine a world without them (there’s also that pesky biological drive to perpetuate the species).
Ultimately, Weil concludes that maybe the “good-enough” marriage is, well, good enough. She asks what, exactly, a better marriage would look like: “More happiness? Intimacy? Stability? Laughter? Fewer fights? A smoother partnership? More intriguing conversation? More excellent sex? Our goal and how to reach it were strangely unclear.”
Now I’ll confess that my goal in writing this blog post and how to reach it are also strangely unclear. I’ve been mulling this what-is-a-happy-marriage stuff over and have not come up with satisfactory answers. I do, however, have a few new questions inspired by Weil’s piece:
OK–your turn. What are your questions and/or answers on this subject? My inquiring mind must know.
It’s not always easy to come up with ideas for blog posts, so when a holiday like Thanksgiving rolls around, it’s like a freebie from the blogosphere, a no-brainer. You simply write a post about being thankful, even if everyone else is doing the same thing, and even if the holiday was four days ago.
So, while this blog has chronicled the assorted forms of emotional and financial devastation for which I am decidedly not thankful, I am also genuinely grateful for many things in my life.
Here we go:
Oh, and one more thing: I’m very thankful that I got over my blog-aversion, read WordPress for Dummies, and created this blog, which I enjoy working on more than almost anything else I do all week. Mostly, I am thankful to you for reading it.
Here is a sentence I never thought I would write: I am in New Jersey sitting on the couch with my boyfriend, who is watching football.
The two words that leap out at me are boyfriend and football. (I was going to make a crack about New Jersey, but that’s so cliche at this point, plus it’s really not that funny. It’s just a place where people live–some of my favorite people, in fact, so I say let them live in peace.)
And I know I’ve already mentioned S-the-boyfriend, so maybe that’s old news. But I still find it kind of a bug-out that a) omg, I have a boyfriend; how did that happen?, and b) I can say it openly, especially given that, technically, I still have a husband. I have a husband and a boyfriend! Look at how far we’ve come that I can say that on a public forum without fearing that I’m going to be burned at the stake or forced to parade around with a scarlet A on my chest. To add to the excitement, my husband has a girlfriend, whose husband has a girlfriend, etc. We are all so out-of-the-box evolved, aren’t we? Why, it’s just a matter of time before we’re all vacationing together on cruise ships for the amicably divorced.
But I digress–because what’s most remarkable here is the football thing. I know: Guy who watches football describes 97 percent of men in this country–yet I have never had a boyfriend who was into football. Nev. Er. I’ve had boyfriends who wore eye make-up and/or trendy hats, and I had a husband who watched the Superbowl–but he’s of the breed who is in it for the commercials and the snacks.
Not only is S into watching football in the can’t-miss way that some of us watch, oh, Mad Men, but, because he has a Y chromosome, he actually understands what’s going on. He insists that no, it’s not just a bunch of over-sized brutes running into each other and knocking each other down until they become brain-damaged. He talks about it as if it’s a chess game, using words like strategizing and premise and intelligent. Yet, try as I might, I cannot see anything but a bunch of big lugs randomly bumping into each other–and from an informal poll, it seems most women are equally perplexed by the appeal of this sport. Are there women who really get football? If you’re out there, please reveal yourselves. (And, btw, I don’t want to hear about how you like soccer, baseball, basketball or tennis. I’m only interested if you’re a woman who actively enjoys watching football and can explain why.)
Usually this is the point at which I reach a pithy, often touching conclusion, but I don’t have one for this post. All I can say is that I don’t get football, but I do like sitting on a couch in New Jersey with a certain guy who does.
Being Mrs. Don Draper could turn anyone into a Mad Woman.
I’ve been toying with writing a Mad Men-inspired post for weeks, and now that the season finale has occurred (leaving so many of us questioning if life is worth living until the show resumes next summer), it’s time to get down to it. The show is so chock-full of marital woes that it would be irresponsible for me not to weigh in.
(Oh–here’s the part where I warn you that I will be revealing plot details–aka, “spoilers.” If that matters to you, stop reading, go back to whatever it was you were doing, and come back when you’re caught up.)
Cripes, could there be a more miserable portrayal of matrimony than the unions depicted on Mad Men? I mean, the writers won’t even pretend that there was such a thing as a happy, fulfilling marriage in the early 1960s. It’s just one smoky, alcohol-soaked, sexist nightmare after the next. Let’s have a look:
R and I have been seeing a mediator. Mediation is divorce lite for conflict-averse couples who don’t want to drag each other to court or traumatize their kids with custody battles. It’s for the amicable divorcing, oxymoronic as that sounds.
R and I are the poster pair for mediation. We get along, have the same basic values, try to put the children first, and donate to WNYC when we can.
So if it’s all supposed to be so downright pleasant, why would I rather stick pins in my eyes than endure another hour in that office?
Oh, wait. Here’s why:
On the other hand, I have been thoroughly enjoying one of the major benefits of my marital disintegration. S currently stands for Strong, Sensitive and Swoon. Oh, and let’s throw in some Shoulders and a Sweetheart.
I’ve always been a bit arrogant about my vision, which was as perfect as it gets for most of my life. I was the one who could see which bus was coming from 6 blocks away and I could read the tiny print on over-the-counter medications. I sort of understood that those who couldn’t read without glasses couldn’t help it, but secretly I felt they just weren’t trying hard enough.
Simply put, I did not get what it means to have your eyes fail you. And now I do. Dammit.
Why must my blurry vision join the unwieldy mattresses, sides of trees, and petulant automobiles in their metaphorical mission? My eyes seem to be saying ha, ha, get it, Christina? You can’t see clearly anymore now that your future is blurry.
Duh. Really clever of you, eyes. Like, could you be more obvious?
But it isn’t just me who can’t see (though it IS just me whose car spontaneously combusts). My previously un-bespectacled friends have started holding newspapers six feet from their faces, and on every date I’ve been on since separating, there was a menu moment, where the man pulled out a pair of reading glasses and gallantly offered them to me when he saw me squinting in an attempt to distinguish steak from salmon. (Me: “It must be the light, but, thank you, I’ll use the glasses just this once. I’m sure my eyesight will return to normal any day now…”)
Once I accepted that ocular decline was just another non-negotiable midlife perk (and reading glasses the skinny jeans of my age group), I broke down and bought a pair. But I keep going through cycles of denial and acceptance. I lose the glasses, pretend I don’t need them anymore, then grudgingly buy more when I realize I can’t see jack. I recently purchased three pairs from the dollar store and sprinkled them here and there–anywhere where reading matter and I might converge.
I was really taken aback when I saw R toss on a pair, because his vision was possibly more perfect than mine (I said possibly, not definitely). Since I don’t see him every day anymore, the small physical proofs that time is passing as we soldier on in our separate lives tend to jump out at me. He wears clothes I don’t recognize, and more and more gray seems to sneak into his hair when I’m not looking. And now the glasses.
I’m starting to think that my sudden need for glasses suggests that I, too, am aging–a fact that hits me right between the eyes.
These are my toes on vacation.
I just got back from vacation. Sort of. It was a single-mom style vacation, so the days were roughly twice as exhausting as usual. The girls and I and a delightful assortment of friends were up at the beloved house in the Adirondacks that’s been in my family since it was built by my grandfather in 1912; I’ve gone there every summer since I was born. Because so little in the house and the surrounding landscape has changed since then, the things that do change from year to year–the cast of characters, life circumstances–are thrown into stark relief against the ever-constant backdrop.
R first joined me up there a few months after we’d started dating. It was July 4th weekend, 1989; his immediate and total appreciation of the place sold me and my entire family on him and ushered in the all-about-the-two-of-us vacation years. We were strapping twentysomethings who voluntarily woke up at 5 am so we could hike 14 miles and be back before sunset. During our free time, R would play with wood–chop it with an axe or make nifty things with twigs–while I made the house lovely. We were just adorable in a way that was probably a little nauseating to those around us.
That phase lasted until 1996, when our daughter was born (we baptized her with water from the lake.) Those early baby-makes-three years involved waking up involuntarily at 5 am; if we had any leftover energy for hiking, it would be a brief hike, carefully scheduled around nap time; the pursuit of glorious mountain-top views was replaced by the pursuit of a rock at the ideal height to change a diaper and frantic attempts to keep the baby from toddling off the dock.
In 2001, we added daughter number two and fully surrendered to a child-centered, the-four-of-us life. We compromised in ways that would have seemed blasphemous during those early years, purchasing a brightly-colored plastic kiddie pool, even though the house is set on a magical lake. Sweet the-four-of-us rituals evolved–popcorn by the fireplace upon arrival, no matter how late; a trip to the library in town the next morning, roast chicken and potatoes for our first dinner. R built a Barbie tree house. We wanted to introduce our girls at an early age to the joys of hiking in the wilderness, but the relative convenience of mini-golf was suddenly apparent too.
So there’s 19 years of summer fun in a nutshell, during which my house became unmistakeably ours. Hence, last August–two months after we separated and the first time R did not join us–we were disoriented. The surroundings were still there, reliably stunning as always, but it was a week of non-stop soy-milk episodes. I knew R wasn’t with us, of course, but still, I wondered “where is he?” Sitting on the dock felt weird because I kept expecting him to do his signature run-jump across it and into the lake. Looking at his assorted twiggy touches around the place made me cry. The first-night roast chicken tried too hard to make everything OK and didn’t taste good. I was certain I would never find my magical summer place fun again.
But this summer, I’m pleased to report, fun started to seep back in (you knew that was going to happen, didn’t you? It would be such a downer otherwise.) I didn’t wait for R to run-jump into the lake and I didn’t cry once during the entire week, not even when I caught a glimpse of the Barbie tree house in the corner of the play room.
I guess the girls and I have officially entered a new the-three-of-us phase–a different one–to be played out against the reassuring, constant backdrop until the cast of characters, or the circumstances, shift once again.
This week has been all about my new relationship with driving and the ways in which my car forces me to face, unflinchingly, my single-female status. It used to be the car or our car and now, for better or for worse, it is just plain my car–my Sob (nee Saab). I am grateful for the smooth ride it offers, its pretty swirly wood dashboard and very cool cup holder. But being the single mom of a sometimes-surly Swedish station wagon has also been trying. A sampler:
Like, do I have a choice?
(photo credit: The Brain Toad)
