I experienced one of my most rewarding moments as a parent last night. My 13-year old-daughter and I watched the first three episodes of the zany British TV show Absolutely Fabulous, which had us ROTFL together.
I hadn’t seen AbFab since it originally aired way back at the turn of the century. (Remember, when we had to sit in front of the TV at a specific time each week or we’d miss it?)
Back then, I related to the super-sensible, righteous teen daughter Saffy, who is forever trying to scold her loopy middle-aged mum, Edina Monsoon, into behaving just a little bit like a responsible grown-up. (In one episode, Edina tells Saffy, “We don’t use the word sensible in this house, sweetie!”)
To my unwrinkled under-30 eyes, Patsy and Edina looked old. Weathered. Clinging to the last vestiges of youth. But last night, watching AbFab–which, it being 2009, we’d Netflixed as if that’s a real verb–I realized to my horror that they look surprisingly young. In fact, they are younger than I am now. It was one of those chilling where-has-the-time-gone moments, like when it hits you that all sorts of professional adults are not automatically older than you anymore just because they are your dentist or the President of the United States.
And it’s my sensible, eye-rolling daughter who is the Saffy now. Which makes me…which makes me…0h, please, no…the Edina!
OK, I am not nearly as whacked-out as Edina (right??) But I can relate to her, which is scary enough. We’re both in our 40s, both divorced, both single mothers of too-responsible daughters. Edina leads a life of debauchery; I don’t, but my daughter is convinced that I do when she’s not around to keep me in line. Edina has tantrums in front of her child and does not model appropriate behavior. I try to model appropriate behavior, yet this new single-mother gig has at times pushed me thisclose to having a tantrum in front of my kids.
See? I told you!
Hold on, though. Maybe there’s still hope. I don’t own anything by Christian LaCroix and I refuse to get so thick around the middle that my daughter will quote Saffy and say: “Mum, it doesn’t matter to me that you haven’t seen your navel in 25 years or that you can wear your stomach as a kilt. Just as long as you’re happy.”
Have any AbFab memories to share? Any Edina moments to fess up to?
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:
Feeling devilish
I abandoned costume-wearing on Halloween when I was around 16 and remained completely uninterested in the holiday until my older daughter turned two; at that point, my urge to dress her as the world’s cutest pumpkin overcame my vague disdain for October 31.
But we were never one of those zany families where the whole gang gets in on the act—mom and dad as Princess Leah and Luke Skywalker, the kids as Yoda and R2D2—or everyone as a different-colored M & M. In fact, I’ve always rolled my eyes a little at adults who go all out on Halloween. (I’m not sure why, but there it is.) As parents, our role was merely to provide the ordinary, everyday backdrop against which our adorably-clad little darlings could stand out.
And then, last year, on my first post-separation Halloween, I felt an overwhelming urge to dress up. But I wasn’t going to wear just any costume–no fat suits or cardboard boxes for me. Inventiveness was the last thing on my mind. I just wanted an excuse to parade around in public looking sexy.
I’ve been tsk-tsking for years over how girls use Halloween for this purpose at increasingly young ages. I was not at all happy to see my 13-year-old strut out of here on Saturday evening looking like Minnie “She Works Hard for the Money” Mouse. And I would never wear those truly slutty costumes sold at Ricky’s—you know, like Nurse Kandi or Pocahottie. (Well, I might, but not in public.)
So at the last minute, I was trying to throw together a costume. Since we had an assortment of ears and tails left over from Halloweens past, I decided to go as a cat (look, I told you I was not trying to win an originality contest.) This would require me to wear black leggings tucked into my black pointy boots and lots of eye makeup. Perfecto!
In retrospect, Halloween ’08 was a pivotal moment in my midlife makeover, one in which I started to shed my somewhat-neutered married persona and began to embrace a somewhat-sexier, available one. Maybe donning kitty-cat ears and a tail wasn’t the most liberated way to get my groove back, but it worked. I felt a resurgence of a side of me I had lost touch with. Whether it was the cat costume that brought it on, or vice versa, I don’t know–but, curiously, just around a week later, I had embarked on my rebound fling.
I hadn’t planned to dress up again this year, but by the time the trick-or-treaters got going at around 4pm, I was infected with Halloween spirit. I ran to my closet, remembering a long red dress I’d forgotten about, grabbed the extra set of devil horns and the pitchfork we had lying around, and turned myself into a rather elegant devil.
I felt less invested in how I looked than I did last year, but maybe that’s a good sign. Maybe it means I’ve gotten used to having my groove back.
Yesterday the girls and I visited my good pal K. Her two boys and my two girls are the same ages and have known each other since infancy.
K unearthed a box full of home movies from when our kids were little. It was a rainy day and we thought it might be fun to show our increasingly too-cool, eye-rolling teenagers movies of themselves at age 2 taking a bath together (it’s so satisfying to really mortify a 13-year-old).
So we’re watching these tiny, completely un-self-conscious two-year-olds toddling around in diapers and droopy overalls. So utterly clueless are they of the metamorphosis they will undergo in just one short decade. They have no idea how often they will need to stare at themselves in the mirror, or how much they will care about how their hair looks. They have no idea that allowing their parents to choose their clothes will become the most horrifying thought on earth, or that one of them will insist on wearing something called Uggs on her feet.
I wondered if our 13-year-olds–she with her pout and perpetual eyeliner, he, wearing a knit cap even though he’s inside–are really the same people as those tykes. I mean, they have the same genes as those cute, goofy toddlers, but are they the same people? Know what I mean? (Do I sound like I’ve been smoking pot? I swear I have not.)
But what blew my mind more than the toddler-to-teen transformation were the the baby girl’s parents, who wandered randomly in and out of the frame. Talk about clueless. Who are those people–that curly-blond-haired woman with the impossibly thin and graceful arms that she won’t appreciate until she sees this video 11 years later? And that lantern-jawed man in the green shirt with whom she exchanges a kiss, a touch, a hug, some kind of affectionate gesture every time the camera catches them? Who are they, that young man and woman who seem to genuinely love each other?
Yup, we all know who they are. Still, isn’t it freaky that these two have the identical genetic make-up as a pair who now never touch, avoid looking each other in the eye, and pay an exorbitant hourly fee to a woman who will legally pronounce their togetherness a thing of the past? If you had told that couple back then that they’d be divorcing in 11 years, they’d never have believed you. Nev. Er. No way.
What am I getting at here? I guess it’s that while it’s always astonishing to watch children grow and change, we expect and accept it. That a decade can turn a happy couple into a divorcing couple, though, is mysterious and sad, even though, that, too, happens all the time.
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.
Yesterday I attended school with my 8th grader; it was “open school day,” the one chance to see what your kids actually do all day.
Parents were asked to sit in the back of the room during the classes. At one point, I noticed an attractive, stylish couple sitting side-by-side. Later, as we were milling about prior to the start of math class, I realized I was about to sit down next to the male half of the attractive, stylish couple. I gestured to his wife, who was seating herself on the other side of me, and asked if she wanted to switch seats with me so that they could sit together.
“No. We’re divorced,” she replied.
I found it funny that a) she would offer that information at all, b) she seemed blatantly relieved not to have to sit next to her ex and, c) she assumed it’s a given that divorced couples don’t sit together.
And then she asked me: “Are you married or divorced?” Just like that.
I found her directness curious. Typically, when you’re thrown together with the parents of your child’s classmates, one of the first things you say is “Whose mother are you?” or “Hi, my name is Cassandra. I’m Sam’s mom.”
After a few beats, I answered “I’m in-between. I’m separated.”
For one terrifying moment, I thought this bold woman was going to try to fix me up with her ex, but then math class began and suddenly everything became a blur. Algebra? Calculus? Why was the teacher writing random letters and numbers on the board and then, like a lunatic, adding parentheses and brackets? I wanted to stand up and say “Excuse me, kids, but you do not need to learn this. Sure, try to get a good grade in math so you’ll get into a decent college, but, really, don’t sweat it because there are no real-life situations in which you are required to write {} a, x , y and 5 in the same line. None.”
I wanted to share this insight with my kooky, blunt new divorced friend, but since there were 32 minutes left to class, I decided to look around and think interesting thoughts instead.
Needless to say, what I saw was a room full of 13- year-olds. Oh, the horror.
I flashed back to my own 8th grade year–the all-important Frye boots, Stan Smith sneakers, Huk-A-Poo shirts and Shetland sweaters. My size 27AAA “bra” and the stupid boys who made stupider jokes about ironing their shirts on my chest.
The whole dating/sex/relationship thing was a complete mystery to me at that point. I could not imagine how on earth I would get a boy to like me or ask me on a date. And to think that one might kiss me? Forget it. That stuff happened to other girls, usually the ones with real bra sizes. (Still, I kept my Dr.Pepper-flavored Bonne Bell Lip Smacker handy just in case.)
I looked at my lovely daughter, in the throes of thirteen-ness herself, and got a little lump in my throat, followed by a feeling of certainty that no guy will ever be good enough for her because she’s exceptional in every way (ahem–now’s when you politely say “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Christina.”) But maybe I was being a bit harsh, given that the pool of men available to her at this juncture are a bunch of doofy 13-year old boys and nothing like the fine assortment of gentlemen who will pursue her when she grows up and gets to join match.com.
I awoke from my reverie to the sound of math textbooks gleefully slamming shut. I guess a lot has happened in the 33 years since I was in 8th grade (wait, did I just write thirty-three years?? Dear god.) At some point, I got a boy to kiss me. I imagine my daughter will figure that one out too, though I doubt she spends much time picturing her separated self sitting in the back of her daughter’s classroom chatting with a stylish, blunt divorced woman. I mean, she still lives in a world where it’s important to learn algebra (or was it trigonometry?)
You might have noticed that a craving for order is a persistent theme in my recent posts. I thrived on the structured life I enjoyed at summer camp. Then came my blatant convent envy. Today, I celebrate the mother of all mental-chaos tamers: Ikea.
Was it coincidence that a new store opened right near me the same week that R moved out? I think not. I go there when I need to escape the madding crowd of clutter in my house and my head.
Shortly after R left, I entered a brief, semi-euphoric, whoopee-I’m-a-single-gal-now phase–which necessitated, among other things, an urgent bedroom makeover. Sleeping alone in a queen-sized bed was sort of sad, but it was exciting to have a room all to myself for the first time since 1990. (In fact, who decided married couples should share a room?)
During my marriage, I was unofficially in charge of home decor, but I tried not to impose too much femininity on our bedroom since only one of us was feminine. A few years ago, I fought my urge for lilac walls and pretty white things and chose a moldy green shade of paint, just to prove that I did not have a girly agenda. I now see that being enveloped by that ghastly hue night after night certainly cannot have helped our marriage.
That first post-separation trip to Ikea yielded, interestingly, a lot of round items–a couple of Ringum rugs, two Korda mirrors and the Ofelia duvet cover–all for around $100! Oh– and some nice ropey baskets to corral toiletries. And a sisal-ish rug for our back porch. And hundreds of things I never knew I needed until I was sucked into the vortex known as the Ikea Marketplace.
Since then, I have returned to the store several times, always soothed by the cheerful, orderly faux rooms with their drawers and shelves and cabinets and other forms of flimsily-made containment.
Today was an Ikea day. We’ve been transforming our third floor into a rental apartment, which means our remaining two floors are overrun with boxes of stuff, crap and junk that used to be upstairs.
After fretting about whether it would be worse to increase my credit card debt or to remain in this fragile disorganized state, I decided to make a pilgrimage to the blue-and-yellow temple. (I mean, really, it’s almost like getting stuff for free when you shop there.)
My goal was to find a sideboard for my dining area. It would house my marital silverware, tablecloths and other whatnot that the woman gets to keep.
As I entered the store, that familiar Swedish calm came over me. It was a weekday morning, so it was empty. The showroom was perfectly air-conditioned and orderly, and–freakishly enough–there was actually a tow-headed Scandinavian family shopping and chatting in a mysterious tongue. The Marketplace was, as usual, a more fraught experience and, once again, I was forced to buy things like placemats and trays and little boxes (fortunately, they have a good return policy.)
I didn’t purchase a sideboard (though I think I want a Besta combination when the time comes), but I did leave with restored faith that there is almost always a way out of chaos.
