33 Collages....about my divorce

 

I've been over the break-up of my marriage so many times I've lost count. Over means over--until that feeling is over. And then there you are again. In it.

When I found out that the Someone intended to terminate (in fact had terminated) my alimony at the end of 2020, I dropped into feeling it all again. Add in a pandemic, a quarantine, and a recent interest in all things book arts--and here you have it. One collage for every year spent with someone I never really knew. 

These individual collages are not meant to each sum up a particular year, but simply reflect my thoughts and feelings in the moment of making them. 

And  of course, “These are works made of paper. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.”  I might add that life often feels as fragile as paper and seems quite dependent on coincidence.

In a day or two I hope to sign the official paper that says I expect no more alimony. It turns out that the Someone is not only completely retired, he's in ill-health. 

As this final collage of the series reflects, I'm ready to move on.

Light a Candle and Move On

This Present Chaos

view from the living room window in St. Paul

Once upon a time I was married, and one Sunday afternoon the man I was married to told me the marriage was over and that he would be marrying someone else. Oh, and he and his new wife wanted the house so they could raise their new family there in the house where my husband and I had raised our daughters.

This blog was born out of the chaos that ensued, and in that time this blog had another name, which by a court order, I was required to change. I had another name then too. But my old self had plans in that time of chaos. I would leave California and live in a new place with my new name, and so I bought a condo in St. Paul, Minnesota not too terribly far from the little town in Iowa where I grew up.

Plans. Plans are good. But I fell in love with a man in Los Angeles. Love is better than plans. So I stayed in California, and first one daughter and then the other--and for a brief while both of the daughters and both their partners lived in the condo in St. Paul. Years have passed. The man I fell in love with after a first date on post-card blue sky day in Griffith Park got lung cancer and died four years ago. My mother died nine months later. Sometime in the next year I will leave the house I shared with my mother and where the man who loved me took his final breaths. My budget must shrink to fit my shrinking alimony.

Last week the daughters and their partners  moved into a house of their own. I'm not in my 50s anymore, and I do not want to live in the lovely condo on the 3rd floor of a historic building with no elevator. I am too historic to cross the icy alleyway to garage without falling down. Too historic to trudge up all those stairs with bags of groceries.

In this new chaos there will be painting, and floor sanding, and odd little fix-it tasks, and way too much cleaning. There will be too many books, and what do I keep and what do I sell, and what do I give away conversations inside my head that must eventually translate into some kind of action.

In some months, I'll start a new life somewhere else. I'm envisioning a tall building with an elevator and a view of the Mississippi River.

this present chaos

One Decade of Divorce

Monument Valley, 2007

On July 30, 2007 at 7:37 p.m., I sent out this email to my closest friends:

Dear Friends,

I hope you'll forgive the mass email approach here and bear with me.  I
learned yesterday that xxxxx is in love with someone else and plans to
remarry and start a new family.
I wish I could tell you all in person one-to-one over a good stiff drink,
but I'm afraid I'm not up to that at the moment.
What I need mostly is advice, and for those of you who are local a couple
of contacts.
1) therapist for me-not too far west
2) a divorce attorney
I know news like this can shake things up a bit for everyone, especially
old friends.
Thanks for listening.

Wish all of us luck.
I don't think I'll be able to talk on the phone in case you were thinking
of calling.


But just to be clear, my decade of divorce is not counted from the date of the decree of divorce. That happened a year later. And the division of joint assets was not in place until July 11, 2011. So there will be more anniversaries to "celebrate," but to me it's the end of the marriage that is most significant. The end of that 30-year relationship was, for me, a loss of identity and the loss of a family that I loved. This decade since the end of the marriage, I've constructed a new me--a person related to the person I was then, but also quite a bit different. I don't miss the old me. But, if I'm honest, I still miss the family. That us. That unit. I don't idealize it. It was awful some of the time, (as most families are?) but there's something lost that's irreplaceable. It's gone. Permanently.

"Really, do you want that?" I once said to a friend who was playing around with the idea of an affair. "You may never have Thanksgiving dinner with your family again." That and a million other things large and small will happen.


What I regret most is the small hurts that accumulated over the years of my marriage and not really having the skill and the strength to mend them.

I do not want to be a gatherer of small hurts.

I do not want to be a deliverer of small hurts. 

The beginning of this last decade was almost insurmountably difficult. I remember every kind thing, dear family and friends. Cups of tea, glasses of wine, home-cooked meals, your hospitality, your love, your words, your open ears, your waiting arms. I slept in so many comfy beds under so many roofs. You walked with me, drove with me for thousands of miles, held my hand on airplanes, sat with me in hotel lobbies and in parked cars, and sang to me. You told me things would be okay, and somehow, somehow you made me laugh. I have lived my life this past decade because of your help. My life has been a litany of love.

Thank you.

Labor Day/ The story of two working lives

My mom and me a few years back, doing one of the things we did best.

We got 5 cents for picking the bugs off the potatoes, she says. That was if we did it for the neighbors. On our own crops, we did it free. Babysitting all night paid a quarter, she says. Which wasn't so bad, because you could sit in the movies all day for that--and buy candy, too.

My mother’s education only went as far as the 8th grade and then she went to work. She began her first full-time job at the age of fourteen, living with a doctor, his wife, and their newborn. Never leave the mother alone with the baby, she was cautioned. In the middle of one night, my mother awoke to a commotion, and was told that the mother had tried to kill the baby even though the husband had been right there with her. In the morning, the wife was packed off to an asylum, the baby went to live with relatives, and my mother found herself out of a job. 

After that she and her twin sister worked in the cafeteria a Catholic men's college. She remembers putting the cherry just-so in the center of the grapefruit halves for the priests. They were given rooms there on campus, and there were rules. You couldn't stay out late or the door would be locked. They never missed curfew, she says. 

Then they were a waitresses in Dubuque, Iowa at Diamond’s Bar and Grill and at the Triangle Café. Thank god, they got a free meal, she says. There were no tips in those days. Except from one guy who always tipped a quarter. The waitresses would trip over each other trying to get to him, she says. They walked to and from work since they didn't have a car. Their feet were always killing them.

Somewhere in there, there was a stint at Betty Jane Candies hand dipping chocolates. Eat as much as you want, she says her boss told her. The eating with abandon only lasted a day or two. And she sold cigarettes and smoking paraphernalia at a fancy department store in downtown Dubuque. (Imagine that.) The cigarettes were in a locked cabinet, she said, but still packs would disappear. She wasn't the only one with the keys.

Then she worked in a club across the river in East Dubuque, the seamier of the two sister cities straddling the Mississippi. She worked as a dice girl in the game "twenty-six." Her sister spun the roulette wheel. One night their parents walked in, surprised to see their daughters there. My mom and her sister were just as surprised to see them.

My mom’s twin sister went out to Baltimore first. They had a girlfriend named Janice, whose parents decided to move the whole family east because they could get good paying jobs at the Glenn L. Martin, a company going full throttle in the manufacture of aircraft for World War II. My mom borrowed money from a friend to send Millie out first in the spring of ’43 and then they both worked to save money, and my mom joined her sister in the fall. In 1943 My Aunt Millie started as a riveter, and when my mom went to join her, she worked for Glenn L. Martin as a file clerk.

Then came the jobs that I envy. If I could go back in time and be my mother for a couple of months, this would be it. I'd be a hat check girl at the Chanticleer, or the Band Box, or the Club Charles. I'd live in Baltimore and hear every fabulous band and collect all the autographed headshots of the stars. I'd be the photo girl snapping souvenir pictures, remembering to ask first if the gentleman and his date would like a photo--because you never know, the gorgeous girl on his arm might not be his wife. 

A couple of things happened next. I'm not sure in what order. My mother had a boyfriend, a grocer, who was shot and killed one night when he went back to check on his store. Her sister got married to a guy who didn't especially like her. She went back home.

After my mother returned to Iowa, she worked as a hostess at a bar called The Circle where the bartender introduced her to a snazzy older man with blue eyes so beautiful, you could dive in and never want to come back up. They eloped. 

My father didn't want my mom to work--though she worked in his grocery store for a couple of years until he sold it. She lived in two different little Iowa towns after that. Cooking, baking to satisfy my father's insatiable sweet tooth, canning, filling our back porch with crocks of pickles, sewing our clothes. I'd call that work.

After he died and she was swindled out of his life insurance, she went back to work. She was 51 years old, had an 8th-grade education, and had been out of the workforce for almost 20 years. She made parts for machinery. She worked at a factory that had something to do with fabric, and one year there was a small fire and came home with bolts of salvaged flannel. Nightgowns for everyone!  She made plastic buckets at two different factories, getting paid minimum wage. Her big break came after she got laid off and heard about a union job at the John Deere plant. She got hired. She drove a fork truck, worked on the assembly line doing whatever job they asked her to for more than 9 years--until she was laid off just a month or so before she would have qualified for a pension.

She took care of an old woman, keeping her company and preparing her food. She worked in a bakery in a town so far away that her wages barely kept pace with the cost of her gas. She had another minimum wage factory job or two. 

When her twin's husband died, my mother moved back to Baltimore where she worked for the City of Baltimore as a custodian cleaning office buildings. She retired with a pension that was not quite large enough to cover her supplementary health insurance. 

                                                                            ********

My first job was at the town drive-in. I was 14 and the wage was 50 cents an hour plus tips. An exceptional night was five bucks. Hardly worth the suffering when the wild boys drove up and ordered fried ovaries or fried tits. But even before that I think I began sweeping the floors in my high school my freshman year. Friends went across the street to the Tasty Freeze while I pushed a mop as wide as the hallways. The next year I laundered towels and and practice jerseys for the football team. I can't remember how long that lasted. 

When I was 16--legally employable, I worked summers and holiday breaks at the local toy factory on the assembly line, and did that job during the summers partway through college. Probably my best day there was the day I ran a giant box staple through my thumb. After the tetnus shot, my mom and I met for drinks at the bowling alley bar. 

During college I worked in the dish line, dusting (reading) books in the library, as an art model, and as a technical assistant at the arts center, setting up for shows and running sound and lights. During a brief hiatus from college, I sold blood plasma until that went wrong and I did more art modeling at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The Bible Belt modesty caught even this midwestern Catholic by surprise. I wore a leotard with a chalk mark over my navel for the freshman classes. My last job before leaving the midwest for California was waiting tables at a fancy supper club on the Sauk River. I was made to shorten my uniform skirt twice. The trays filled with platters of surf and turf were too heavy for me and I was the recipient of more mercy tips than I would like to admit. 

In L.A. I narrowly missed getting a respectable receptionist job for 800 a month (1975) and instead got job for half that answering phones at a vocational school while wearing a nurse's uniform. Government Basic Grant money pretty much funded all our paychecks. There was a get rich and work for yourself scheme for a while where my husband and two friends and I made fiberglass automotive spoilers. It was a scam. I taught English as a foreign language at the Berlitz schools which was a wonderful gig in a bunch of ways. I met a man there who invited me to be his mistress in Buenas Aries. He has the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen and I still said no. I worked enough as an actress to get my health insurance--thanks to the kindness of friends. I got my Equity card and made enough to put my husband through law school. 

I stopped working when my older daughter was born and never went back. There was a raft of volunteer jobs and the marriage and mothering seemed like very hard work. The house was well-kept and the yard was beautiful. Roses, fruit trees, herbs, tomatoes, and a summer of endless squash that my daughters still talk about regretfully. 

I fought for more than a year after the marriage broke up to get temporary alimony. Then another two years to finalize the division of joint assets and a "permanent" alimony judgement. I think of it as my 401K. I've learned a bit about investing. I make some pocket change writing. I have a lot of contributor copies of literary magazines where I've been published. I took care of my mom for more than three years. I became a T'ai Chi Chih instructor a year or so ago and make a little more pocket change doing that. In another two years, there will be Social Security. 

I don't have a career. I'm only marginally useful in this world where money changing hands often seems like everything. I've been really, really lucky. 

A Crab Molts Its Shell

I found a spider crab shell on the beach last week. Purplish pink with the horn-like protuberances seen in the video above, it was too weird (and too large--bicycle helmet sized) to pocket. I poked it with a stick and flipped it over. Alas, it was not a shell that had been molted, but a casket for the remains of a creature who perished. Not picking it up was a wise decision. Even after the waves cleaned it out, I didn't want it in my arms.

I feel like I'm molting. Dashing around to distract myself while there are bigger things happening as the second anniversary of Dan's death approaches. Yesterday it was as if I stepped out of bed and into chasm, dropping down into a place airless and dark. I lay on the couch and dozed, too stupefied to read or muster the good sense to go out for a walk, meditate, or do anything.

Today it felt as if the sun was pouring in despite the May-gray skies here, yet there are more dealings with the dead. Another beneficiary form to fill out as we close my mother's last bank account.  And her supplementary insurance continues to send emails (despite my emails announcing her death and the attaching of a jpeg of her death certificate.) They're asking for her to sign the cancellation form, asking if she'd agree to serve on some patient  panel and fill out questionnaires about how they're doing.  While I'd like to impersonate her and participate with scathing commentary, I don't have the heart for it  right now. Darn. I know an opportunity for a heck of a good time when I see one, right?

From the New Yorker

Meanwhile, I continue to tend to my health. Beset with swollen knees, fingers, and hands and in pain since I returned from final visit with my mother in Iowa in March, blood tests show no Lyme disease, no autoimmune diseases. I have paid my thousand dollar bill and have letters from my primary care physician and a rheumatologist proclaiming the good news. A week ago I took my swollen self to a Functional Medicine doctor. Of course he told me to change my diet. No dairy. No gluten. ( I used to be a gluten free vegetarian, but converted back to being a regular omnivore about a year ago.) My cynical self didn't want to believe that I needed to give up dairy and gluten, (I mean, c'mon, it seems like such a knee-jerk alternative thing) but my desperate self was, well, desperate. After two days the swelling in my knees and fingers was pretty much gone. My right hand is still deciding whether or not to go with the miracle. But maybe it's lagging behind because it actually poured the milk and put the toast in the toaster.

And back to the molting--my caregiver skin is nearly shed. Another form/email or two and I am something new. The ex-wife skin, while only able to be gotten rid of when either or both The Someone and myself meet the same fate as the crab I found on the beach, feels like there's been  at least some exfoliation or a nip and a tuck. July holds its own treacherous anniversary. This year it will be nine years since my marriage ended with a three-sentence conversation. I lost my husband, my family, my house, my town. Three decades of personal history became a fraud. Half my life felt like a hallucination.

But I'm all right now. Quite wonderful, in fact. A new person, alive and well. There is that chasm.  But I think I can remember to climb out.

Report from the Love Shack

Hahahaha. Just kidding.

I went to a wedding today though. The bride and groom kissed like crazy.

That looked like fun.

And in other news:

My mom got accepted into hospice care this morning.

Hold your horses.

All it means right now is that there's better pain management--and I'm happy beyond measure about that. I had a glass of champagne (all by myself) when the nurse left. The champagne was already in the fridge, opened and re-corked. Because friends.

And it made a big difference in my mom's day, taking those pills in four hours instead of six.

The big thing--and this is huge. I can call a nurse any hour of the day or night. The nurse will come to the house if I say we need her. Amazing. I keep looking at that piece of paper on my fridge, thinking, oh my god, there is a number I can call and someone will be right over.

That's what people do when you live near family members, right? I was away at college when my dad died very suddenly of a heart attack. It was evening. February. The roads were probably icy and it was mostly likely colder than hell. People came over. Yes, I have friends, excellent and generous and gracious friends, but I find it harder to impose on friends, especially in the middle of the night. Shortly after my divorce when I was living alone, I took a bunch of pain pills and bandaged my eye and went to sleep after my dog poked her toenail in it. I knew I had a scratched cornea. In the morning I drove myself to the eye doctor while holding a towel over half my face.

And here's the really amazing part--my mom can still go visit relatives in Maryland (which means I can take a trip with a friend) and be on hospice there. And then come back and be on hospice here. Well, the arrangements aren't totally solid yet, but it's in the works.

Originally, the word hospice meant simply an inn for travelers, I think.

And we're all just traveling through.

Sleep well.

Friday Beach Report

 Fog.

Pelicans.

Pirates.

And in other news, I have not fucked up a single thing yet today. Yesterday there was more bad phone juju. I went off for my full day (as in 8 hours--not 24)  off from caregiving, and left my phone at home. I hurried back to get it and then went back to the charming little spot on the water I'd almost gotten to for breakfast. It was closed.

But my life is ship-shape (ahem.) If that's the ship that I think it is, there's a piece of my past on it. I believe it's this very same boat as this one:

That's daughter C, second from right. The Someone and I were on that boat (he took the wonderful photo) a million years ago. And if you're a longtime reader of this blog, you know that the marriage ran itself on the rocks not too long after that, and that this blog had a rather charming and funny name shortly thereafter, which due to a restraining order, I stopped using. The Someone is referred to only as the Someone due to the same restraining order. And my, what a lifetime ago that seems. No matter how hard the caregiving situation is here in Margaritaville, I think I'd keel over (ahem, ahem) if I ever again had to return to the no-man's land (that might be a seafaring term too) of life with a husband who shunned me.

Not quite the luck of the Irish....

One of L.A.s classic taverns closed up shop recently. I spent an incredibly wired and loopy St. Patrick's night there thirty-ish years ago. Quite a few of the regular spots I frequented with the Someone are gone now. The superb croissant place that had the only decent French pastries I've ever had outside of France, the little cafe with the great gumbo, the place on the Sunset strip with the amazing organic burgers, the pizza place just off Hollywood Blvd., the pricey place where we developed a nasty habit of dropping a hundred bucks every Sunday in the last decade of our marriage. And while I certainly don't wish the restauranteurs ill, I practically need to be heimliched whenever I drive by the eateries where I spent a lot of time with the someone, so I'm glad these places have slipped into the past.

Getting out of L.A.--leaving the geography of my marriage--was one of the best things I've ever done for myself. As the post-marriage years tick by, I'm hoping there'll be fewer and fewer of the old haunts left. Just in case I ever give the City of Angels a second chance.

And meanwhile, may the wind be at your back, T.B.

Smitten

I ran across this old photograph of my parents a couple of months ago. "1951 in the apartment" is written on the back. My mom doesn't really recognize the place, but it's mostly like their apartment above my dad's grocery store. The picture might have been snapped before or after they eloped. My mother is wearing the suit she was married in, and that seems to be a boutonniere pinned to my father's lapel, so I'd say this is as close to a wedding photo as one can get for a couple who got married secretly and then lived apart for months. I love the way he's looking at her. To be looked at like that is the sweetest of valentines.

Put Your Arms Around Something as Big as the California Sky

It's not unusual for the man who loves me to pull out his notebook and jot down a line or two for a song. We might be cooking dinner when the notebook appears or sitting with a glass of wine, talking. Quite often, as it did last night, the notebook came out when we were getting ready for bed. I was already under the covers as he stood in the dark, scribbling at the dresser in the corner. I never peer over his shoulder at these moments, never ask "What's the song about?" I wouldn't especially like to answer questions like these when an idea for a story or an essay first occurs to me. I've witnessed quite a few lines being recorded in the notebook over the past four years, and only a couple have been shared with me.

As we lay in bed this morning, I told the man who loves me my dream, admitting that I'd dreamed of The Someone. The dream had an incoherent narrative. Something about a car and a pair of shoes. And my concern about my real-life recently reduced alimony played against a backdrop of some dream-world global impending financial crisis. In the dream I was trying to ascertain if The Someone's finances were going to hell, and my own fortune, shackled to his as it is--was I destined for ruin, too, and would this happen before or after the financial apocalypse? It was still dark when I woke just enough to realize that I was pressed against one man while dreaming of another, and how absurd that was. I made myself stop the dream and go back to sleep.

This morning as the man who loves me and I stood pulling on our clothes and talking about coffee, the notebook lay open on the dresser. "Look at this," he said, "you'd think I wrote these lines this morning, but I wrote them last night." And in the notebook, was the beginning of a song about a man pulling his lover back to him although he knew she was dreaming of another man.

I can't get my arms all the way around this intangible thing any more than I can put my arms around the California sky. But there it is.

photo note: The man who loves me took this picture in his neighborhood. Don't you love it?

Hoooo-ooooo are you?

Dream:

"Don't tell me you're surprised," he said.
"I'm not surprised," I said. "Just confused." He went on to tell me there was nothing to be confused about. His marriage was over, and he wanted us to get back together. 

We were somewhere with his relatives. We were hanging around together--but mostly surreptitiously. We were talking in his hotel room. It seemed a given. That we should just paste the pieces back together. I couldn't think of any other reasonable way to approach the situation. "Have you told your mother that we're getting back together?" I asked. 
"Not yet," he said.
"Then don't," I said. "Because there's a man I love, and I can't live without him. 

Holy shit. Right? The wind howled like a maniac all night long. Musta been an ill wind that blew that dream to me. It's howling again. Styling those palm fronds into a brand new crazy do. It was so windy yesterday that when I rolled down my car window to talk to my neighbor who happened to be in the next lane, that I got dirt in my mouth. My  chewing gum was so gritty, I had to throw it away. Right now, however, the wind is blowing from the east--opposite of what it was doing yesterday. Blow a sweet dream to me, Mr. Wind. Real sweet.

Jack Gilbert: Coming to the End of Triumph

I read my first Jack Gilbert poem in Barbara Abercrombie's UCLA Extension class Writing the Healing Story. It seems overstated, perhaps, to say that now, a decade later,  I can conjure up the classroom, where I was sitting, and many of the faces around the tables that were arranged into a large hollow-centered rectangle. Barbara's writer-whisperer style of teaching often meant that she would use a poem as a prompt, and while this poem by Jack Gilbert did not wrench a premonition from me about the not- so-distant demise of my marriage, time stood still long enough for Gilbert's words to settle into me. Reading it again just after the poet's death on Tuesday, it felt all the more moving as a perfect description of how my marriage didn't end.


Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of triumph.

If you'd like to read more about Jack Gilbert, you can find a piece  here and here. 

The image at the top of the post is a Peter Paul Ruebens painting.

A Brief History of the Later Years of My Marriage through Shoes.

Good-bye velvety black shoes with the fetching bows--you were pretty enough for theatre going, yet comfortable enough to hike blocks through mid-town Manhattan. Good riddance white lacy shoes, remember that law firm party and a not-very-flattering vintage dress? When's the baby due? a partner's wife asked. I had a miscarriage two weeks ago, I replied. See ya, high heeled brown sandals. On that trip to Belize, dressing up for dinner after those sweat-drenched hikes felt extra glamorous. Good-bye satiny grey evening shoes, you were meant for dancing. Little green princess heels, I'll miss you way more than I miss him. Get out of here, green suede mules and black clogs--I met you on the rebound. And as for you, brown shoes, did we ever really know each other?

The Dark House

There we were, the ex-husband and I. We were in a small chapel. People were milling about. There was nowhere to sit, and so we sat by each other. He slipped me some kind of note or paperwork. He panicked for a moment, thinking the papers he had given to his partner were the ones he'd meant for me. He wanted us to get back together, and it was still a secret. He had his wife and his children to think of, but we'd been sneaking around, he and I, meeting for lunch and for sex. I had my own guilt to deal with. I was going to have to break the news to the man who loves me. Tell him that I might be getting back together with my ex-husband.

And then I woke up, thank god. Feeling guilty and weird that I'd dreamed such a thing. That's what I get for watching Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage"home alone.

I first saw the movie in the mid-70s not long after moving to L.A. I saw it with my ex-husband--who was just my boyfriend then. In my memory it was all shot in close-up in a white room, the lights blaring into the faces of the husband and wife, their tight smiles dissolving into loathing. I didn't care for it much back then. I had no idea, I suppose, how people who appeared so happy on the surface, could be swirling in so much subterranean turmoil. It was utterly fascinating this time around. I had to turn it off for a bit after the scene where Marianne calls her friend to tell him that Johann has left her. He already knows--had known for quite a while that Johann was planning it. My own humiliation came back to me, so palpable and present, that I got up from my chair and stood in the bathroom doorway wondering if in a second I'd be kneeling on the tile in front of the toilet. But I was okay. It was good to be reminded, in a way, of my debilitating un-doing. To contrast then with now. To see where the path began and where my feet are planted now.

As for Marianne and Johann and their dark night in a dark house where they lay in bed cheating on their present spouses, that's not a house I ever want to inhabit. That house burned down, and nothing will rise from its ashes.

The Mortgage Wolf

I couldn't do it. Standing in my garage clutching my car keys, none of it made sense. The final walkthrough of the house was scheduled for Monday or Tuesday. No one had given me any instructions about the cashier's check. I hadn't seen a final draft of the loan documents. I'd just gotten an email from the real estate agent that I didn't understand. And wait, the voice inside my head said, you're almost 60, and shouldn't you be downsizing? And my, that's a mighty big loan, my dear--you'll never live to pay that off. Debt opened its maw like a fairy tale wolf, and its big bad teeth were aimed at my throat. No one's got my back, I thought. So I cancelled my appointment with the escrow company.

Oh, I'm still going through with the deal. But I'm going to do the final walkthrough of the house before I sign the loan papers. And instead of rushing downtown to sign loan papers and rushing back, I had a  leisurely four-hour meeting with my financial adviser planning for this and that. Afterwards, I crawled in bed with the heating pad, music on my laptop, both phones, and Adrienne Rich's book of poems, "Diving into the Wreck." And despite the angst, one of the thoughts I didn't have was that it would have been worth it to stay married. Nope. It's better to take out a giant loan all by myself. It's better to know what it feels like to be loved. It's a joy to buy a big house where there's room for my family, and in a couple of months when I'm walking down to my boat dock about to paddle off in my kayak, if I feel the eyes of some monster on the back of my neck, that monster won't be my signature on a piece of paper, it'll be the shadow of a man who barely tolerated me. I'll dip my paddle into the water. I won't look back.

Changing Your Name after Divorce

"I'm on my third name," I explained to the attorney. "The form says I have never been known by any other name." He laughed and told me to add a hand-written a note. That I shouldn't worry. Forms contain vestiges of old concerns. "They're not after you," he said.

"I'll have to strike out the 'M,'" the notary said. "Your California Driver's license doesn't have a middle initial."

"Right," I said. "I dropped the 'M' after my divorce. And before I had just an 'M,' my middle name was Mary. I dropped the Mary and went with 'M.' Now there's no M. either." I didn't mention the last names I've been through.

"These forms have an 'M'," he said, pausing with his notary stamp raised. I shrugged, feeling like I was trying to conceal a vestigial tail.

"How should I sign?" I asked.

"Sign with your current legal signature," he said. "It's your mark. Never change your mark."

Easy for him to say.
Marriage changed my mark. Divorce changed my mark.
Just call me "Mark."

While I remain silent for a bit...

...take a look at some of my favorite blogs in my side bar. I especially enjoyed The Perils of Divorced Pauline as she muses on the pitfalls of turning 50.

Things You Think About When You Are Still Trying To Start Your Life at 59

I was raised on baby dolls and kittens--swaddling, cooing, and cuddling. I graduated to Barbie dolls and tried to be one myself. Flouncy skirts and high heels, dating plastic men who couldn't feel what I felt. I killed two kittens by accident, and would say that was the beginning of my ruin, except giving a child away to strangers was far worse. A cold heart turned colder in order to survive.


Or maybe it was money that ruined me. Lack of it at first, then too much. If the pot of gold at the end of the marital rainbow had been earned 50-50, split without fang and talon, maybe by now I would have retraced my steps back to that fork in the road where I missed the sign that said, "Your Life This Way." But I spent years on the path that said, "Wife"--misread, perhaps, as "Life"--an understandable mistake, wouldn't you say?

When he was through with me I hadn't gone back to school, hadn't worked in 25 years. A living breathing anachronism. Step right up and watch my evolution. Or watch me slide back into my primordial slime. Nearly 60 years old and my life's work some future fantasy.

Maybe I was meant to be a wife. Maybe no one is ever meant to be that. Maybe everyone needs someone who is meant to be that. In the deep dark of my history, I was meant to be a killer or a mother or a wife or a whore. No one looked into the crystal ball of my life and said, "You can learn to speak French, write stories, make an audience laugh and cry, you can take care of yourself.

It's not exactly anyone's fault. It's how it happened.

That moment when I stood at the fork in the road, I swear the sky was stuffed with pink and violet clouds. The air smelled like love, smelled like eternity, smelled like peace. Maybe if you had seen me, you would have said, "Those clouds are trouble. Run. It's going to rain like the world is ending, just you wait and see. And when you awake after the deluge bedraggled and bereft in some foreign land, the word, 'wife' will be something no one understands."

But that's not how it looked to me.

In Honor of the Bride and Groom

I had a little dinner last night because the bride and groom are visiting. It did not look exactly like the picture below because that photo is from a Thanksgiving dinner at my old house. But if you take the dishes and the crystal and, in your imagination, put seven of those place settings on the table in the next picture, you'll get the idea.

The china was given to me by my mother and the crystal used to be my step sister's. After the divorce when I moved from a large kitchen to a tiny one, it was easy to see I wouldn't have space for the fancy things and the every day dishes, so I left the everyday dishes right where they sat. Except for a set of bright red breakfast bowls and coffee mugs, the china is my only dish ware. Even a piece of toast and a glass of orange juice gets served up as if it were paté and champagne. So last night's dinner of chili and salad and warm bread and chicken apple sausage got the usual rather luxe treatment.

One of the couples at dinner has known my daughter since she was a baby, the other for more than a decade. I still find myself somewhat stunned by the idea that my daughter is a grown woman with a husband of her own. That baby, that little girl, the teenager all seem present, too, but just out of reach--as if she were a set of matryoshka dolls forever sealed shut. The past versions of her are there and simultaneously forever gone.

That's the way I feel about my father, too--dead now for decades longer than I knew him. I keep a lot of old family photos around, and I sometimes feel that those dead people I loved are looking out of the pictures at me. As if they, too, are present in a way but inaccessible.

A couple of months ago this photo below of my grandmother (she's seated in the center) surfaced in some kind of historic display from an old department store in Dubuque, Iowa. I suppose she's a few years older here than I am now--but maybe not much. Last night at the dinner table when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I saw a silver-haired lady with big eyes, and I thought of this picture. I never used to think I resembled my grandmother, but now I see her in my mirror as if she's been inside me all along, waiting to come out.

A Sea of Love

That's my daughter on the right, her work boots perched on a sturdy strand of rope, her body leaning into  what might be called a trestletree as she furls a sail. What you can't see in this photo is the churning ocean--or me on the deck watching her and trying to fathom how I became the mother of a tall-ship sailor. My element is dirt. Iowa black dirt. Fields of corn as vast as an ocean. Little towns rising up out of the green like islands. C's element is definitely the sea. She loved it from the first time I took her to the beach  the summer she was a year and a half old. I held her in my arms and dipped her in the salty water, then wrapped her in a towel and laid her on the warm sand under an umbrella for a nap. Her love of water and the ocean was one of the first things I understood about her. The rest has come much more slowly, and will, I suspect, continue to be a work in progress. Understanding does not always come quickly between mother and child even when love is boundless.

C. is getting married a week from Saturday. The sea of family love is so deep and so wide right now, so clear and blue that it can barely be distinguished from sky. Tomorrow morning my younger daughter will set out from her northern city and drive east, picking up her grandmother from her eastern city, and later one of C's friends. On Thursday my son and his wife will bundle up their three kids, leave the desert behind and board a plane. About the same time the man who loves me and I will get on our flight from Los Angeles. There will be aunts and uncles, cousins and friends finding their way east by land, by air, and for all I know, by boat. And we will all end up on the rocky coast of Maine to witness two sailors pledge their love to one another.

Love. I feel like I'm swimming in it.

Photo credit: Mr. Ex