Bummed you missed last week’s hot ticket?
I know, I wish I went to see Beyonce at MetLife Stadium, too. And after you finish Googling videos of her performing “Single Ladies” and “Crazy in Love” in NJ last week, check out the show I put on in a slightly smaller Garden State venue.
Here’s my ode to being a Jersey Girl and the merits of getting a spray tan:
And here’s something a little heavier, reflecting on the stages of divorce:
For the three of you left who haven’t heard the news, last week I got to pretend for one night that I was a successful writer.
And it was great.
Some friends had thought it would be fun to invite a bunch of people to come hear me read some of my work in hopes of maybe introducing some new readers to my blog. And plus, it was an excuse to get a bunch of women together to drink wine. Who’s not up for that?
So, they invited a bunch of their friends and about 50 women showed up at a local cheese shop for an event that was billed as “Wine & Words With Amy;” two of my favorite things, all in one room. We stood around and drank some wine and noshed on snacks and then I got up and spoke a little and read a few selections from my blog and then we drank a little bit more.
So fun.
But of course, not everything was perfect. There were a few glitches and things I’d do differently if I ever had the opportunity again to do something akin to it. Herewith, the top five things I learned at my inaugural reading:
Many thanks to all of you who came out and to the many people who told me they wished they could have come. Perhaps we’ll do it again some day because we always need a reason to get out and drink wine.
In the meantime, check out some videos from the night.
This is a funny story:
I was sitting at my kitchen island one night last week watching Jeopardy and eating dinner with my 21-year-old son when a commercial came on for the new Diane Keaton movie called “And So It Goes.”
Son (putting down pizza bagel, annoyed): What is with this woman?
Me (looking up from salad): Who? Diane Keaton? I love her. She’s, like, who I want to be. (“Something’s Gotta Give” happens to be my all-time favorite movie because who doesn’t want to live in that beach house and write a successful musical that throws the guy that broke your heart under the bus while getting it on with a much-younger fellow with a trip to Paris on the side?)
Son (picking bagel back up): She’s so annoying. She’s always playing some woman who finds love late in life.
Son (stopping mid-bite to look at me): Wait a minute.
My ex-husband and I finally and completely called it quits on our marriage on July 4, 2009. Afterwards, even though he was the one who pushed me off the steep cliff of indecision, he sent me a text wishing me a “Happy Independence Day.” And while that was kind of a snarky thing to write, it was also kind of true.
I was finally free.
We had initially separated about seven months earlier and then agreed we would go to counseling together to try and find a way to make things work. But honestly, I don’t think I ever really thought that was going to happen. Neither of us ever got what we needed from the other.
And I keep going back to the notion of things we want versus things that we need. Because even though I initially wanted to stay married and keep our family intact at all costs, a divorce was the one thing I really needed.
I remember standing in the foyer of our house after he’d rushed over early that July 4 morning to confront me about something that had happened the night before. Something pretty stupid and not something you’d end your almost 18-year marriage over. But we were at the end stage where you didn’t really need much to snuff out whatever life was left in the relationship. It was like the bad fall that beats cancer to the punch.
As we stood there by the front door and he asked me if I was sure I wanted to end things, I remember thinking about how good his arms looked. He was wearing a sleeveless grey workout top and his biceps looked pretty great after months of living on his own during our separation and working out twice a day. It was hot out and he was kind of worked up from the heat and the situation and his tanned arms kind of glistened from the exertion of it all and I stood and admired how good he looked and thought how much I’d miss those biceps.
And then I looked into those beautiful blue eyes of his – the ones I looked into that rainy day all those years ago when we said “I do” and the ones I kissed, between and over his perfect brows countless times – and told him that, yes, our marriage was over.
And he walked out the door.
At the time, I didn’t even shed a tear. I was more terrified than sad about the rapid turn of events. It would take at least another year and countless hours on my therapist’s couch to really start feeling the sadness of what happened. To start burrowing a tunnel through the fortress I had built around my heart.
But over time, I’ve learned that the takeaway from my marriage is that being a part of a relationship shouldn’t cost you anything. Sure, you might have to barter and trade for certain things – you need to be willing to compromise – but you shouldn’t have to pony up, like, your dignity or self-respect just to be a part of a couple. That is a steep price to pay just so that you don’t have to be alone.
This revelation came in handy recently when I found myself seeing somebody who just couldn’t give me what I needed and my options were to go along with it but feel yucky about myself, or cut bait.
And because I can no longer compromise what I need out of a relationship or the way I have to be treated, I had to cool things off. We didn’t totally close the door, but we’re taking a break.
But I’m just not willing to sacrifice the freedom I’ve tasted to be a part of a couple. I’ve worked too hard trying to be true to who I am for that shizz.
I still miss the barbeques and fireworks we shared as a family and of course, those really nice biceps, but not how much it all cost me. I really want to be in a relationship – I know that now – but not at any price.
Freedom is too expensive to waste.
I don’t know what it’s like at your house, but over here it’s Game of Fucking Thrones without all the nudity.
It’s like, everybody wants to rule the world, and I’m just waiting for my head to roll.
As such, everyone who lives here is embroiled in a non-stop power struggle in an effort to usurp control from whomever is perceived to be the one in power.
And, mostly, that top banana would be me.
Even the cat has been known to make a power grab or two in an attempt to inch her way further up the family food chain. She came in half dead off the streets four years ago and now is practically second-in-command, so she’s someone I’m definitely keeping my eye on. She’s always quick to jump on my bed if I get up and sits like some weird Buddha, her back pressed up against my pillow as she licks her midsection. When I return and discover this gross scene, she just looks up, mid-lick, and stares. It’s really quite scary.
The jostle for power kicked in about five years ago when my ex-husband, the undisputed alpha figure, moved out. When he lived here, there was a natural order to things. Like, he was at the top of the food chain, since it was generally accepted that– as the one earning a paycheck — this was his house, and the rest of us just lived here.
After he moved out, everybody made a play for the top. Even Rudy, truly the sweetest dog you’d ever want to meet, made no bones about the fact that he viewed me as his subordinate. He thought he was the boss of me, and to prove it he would just sit down in the middle of a run or poop on my family room rug.
In a house brimming with scheming animals and ruthless teenagers, I had to work really hard to establish myself as the top dog, so to speak. So I set boundaries, stopped putting up with disrespectful behavior and suspended cell phone service on a regular basis to get my point across, which was: I am the fucking boss. Nothing gets people attention like the inability to send texts.
And slowly, over time, it started to work.
One of the things that helped the balance of power shift in my direction was when I started working full time because for some reason, a paycheck connotes power around here. When I was a stay-at-home-mom for many years, everyone viewed me as some kind of freeloader, just looking for the easy way out – like getting to spend my days wiping butts and hanging out in supermarkets with a bunch of whiny toddlers — in exchange for some laundry folding. So when I started to be compensated for my services, like with money, the kids took note. Not that they loved it and weren’t jealous of the time my new job took away from all my sandwich making duties. But it somehow helped to elevate my worth.
Now that I’m back out of work, I think it’s helped them to appreciate the seemingly endless supply of Boars Head Chipotle Chicken in the refrigerator and homemade dinners on the table. They like having a ruler who is so good to her people.
But I’ve watched enough Game of Thrones to know how quickly the tides can turn. How you can be sitting pretty on the throne one minute and choking on poison the next. Like last week, I went into the bathroom while my little guy was eating his Cookie Crisp and returned to find Joe and Mika had been replaced by SpongeBob dancing around in spandex like Jane Fonda on my TV screen. Doesn’t my son know that the queen likes her Morning Joe and the remote is off limits before noon?
Or, when we sit outside on our deck to eat, it is a truth universally acknowledged that I sit in one of the two bouncy chairs but just the other day, daughter #2 sat right down in one of them, at my spot at the head of the table, and started to eat.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked her.
She looked up from her plate and said, “Eating a salad.”
“That’s my seat,” I said, trying to move her plate to a nearby seat and she looked at me like I was crazy.
“Okay, crazy,” she said, and moved to the next chair.
But the power struggle that vexes me most lately is the parking game being quietly played out each day by those of us who drive one of our three family cars. In my mind, there’s a parking hierarchy, with my car getting the coveted spot in the driveway closest to the house, my son’s car next to it and my daughter’s jalopy parked in the street. But it seems every time he returns home and finds my spot open, my son pulls right into it. He’s worse than the cat and makes me want to throw him in the dungeon.
I even ran out in my pajamas the other night and moved my car into its rightful spot when I noticed my son pull out of the driveway. He returned about 10 minutes later and was like, “Really?”
Maybe I’m like Cersai Lannister, always on the lookout for anyone trying to seize her power and willing to have her own brother killed if necessary (and we all know what she’s doing with her other – albeit infinitely hotter – brother).
But the difference between Cersai and me is that I don’t have to depend on my dad or some potential suitor to maintain control.
I already own the castle.
This is totally not what’s happening in my bedroom. That would be weird.
I have a grotesque number of books stacked around my bedroom. Like, I hesitate even taking a picture of the situation, lest you think I am a total nut.
There are young adult books that my daughter has recommended, like Rainbow Rowell’s “Attachments.” Some novels lent by my friend and fellow writer including Ann Pachett’s “The Patron Saint of Liars” and the new Sue Monk Kidd book from another reader friend. There are books on writing screenplays and memoirs and just writing in general, a few by Dani Shapiro (who I actually have been reading lately). Something called “Yoga and the Quest for True Self” that I will probably never get around to and of course, self help books galore – like “The Five Love Languages,” that sounded like a really good idea at the time I ordered it off Amazon late one one night. And then there’s “Middlemarch.” Fucking Middlemarch. It’s like always there, all 853 pages of it, just mocking me since I started reading it on a sailboat in the middle of the Aegean last August. Reminding me of all that I’ve yet to have accomplished.
My Kindle is also not immune to the log jam of unfinished and never opened reads. “The Husband’s Secret” lost me once we found out what his secret was and I only read a few of the short stories, I am ashamed to say, in George Saunder’s “Tenth of December.” I never even started Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” or Elissa Schappell’s “Blueprints for Building Better Girls.” Then there’s Pete Hamills’ “A Drinking Life,” Stacy Schiff’s “Cleopatra” and the third installment of “The Game of Thrones” series I never got around to, probably because I’m so busy watching it unfold on my television. But don’t worry, all three Fifty Shades of Grey books were quickly and thoroughly read because they are the literary equivalent of eating a bag of Doritos in one sitting. Great at the time and thoroughly addictive but in retrospect, kinda unhealthy.
Anyway, not to get all ambitious, but I think this summer is the summer I start getting through all of the reading material I actually spent money on. I mean, if you tallied the costs of all the unread books both physical and digital I have purchased, it’s got to add up to at the very least, a really nice pair of shoes (which is another item I probably own more of than I really need).
So, as part of my plan to spend my afternoons this summer accompanying my little guy to the beach so he can Boogie board his heart out in the cold Atlantic surf with his little buddies, I would like to spend my time reading stuff I already own. Maybe with, like, one exception.
So, I think my top five books to start will be:
What have I read lately? Well, I just finished the recently-released novel “Bittersweet” the other night, which got amazing reviews in Entertainment Weekly and People but left me sort of cold. I was hoping for more of a shocker at the end after the whole build up throughout the novel that, according to Amazon, “exposes the gothic underbelly of an idyllic world of privilege and an outsider’s hunger to belong.”
I finished Julia Fierro’s “Cutting Teeth” last week, which was a fun skewering of a Brooklyn play group that goes off to spend the weekend at a Hamptons beach house and plenty of hipster angst ensures. It’s the perfect smart beach read and kind of made me glad I had teens and not toddlers to deal with nowadays.
What about you? Do you feel bad about all of your unread books or are you better at reading what you already own (maybe that’s my problem, that I always want what I don’t already have)?
And don’t forget to let all of us know what’s on your summer reading list for all of those good people that don’t have already have a queue of books lined up next to their bed or in a cloud somewhere.
Happy reading!
This print sits on my desk and is referred to often as I try to make sense of things in my life.
One day, during the early days of my divorce – when I lost 10 pounds in a week subsisting on wine and carrot sticks – I went to get my brows waxed (and mustache if you must know) and spilled my tale of woe to the woman grooming my facial hair.
Aside from my therapist, my brow and hair coloring ladies serve as important sounding boards for my life. I’ve been going to them both for so long, they knew me when I was a brunette with babies instead of the blonde-of-a-certain-age I am today.
So after I filled her in on what was going on, I laid still on her table as she tweezed away and talked. She explained that I had just entered a dark tunnel of my life, with no light yet visible on the other end. She said I could see the light from the entrance growing dimmer, but had to just keep moving forward and have confidence that at some point, I would see the light again.
I can’t tell you how often I thought of that tunnel metaphor as I moved through the darkness of my divorce. How often I wondered if I’d ever see the light on the other side and then, finally and without warning, I could see a little pinprick of sunshine coming through the other end.
As I sat up on her table, the paper crinkling as I adjusted myself, my brow girl reached down and pulled a silver cuff bracelet off her wrist and said, “I want you to have this.”
It read: Be true to yourself.
I read the words etched into the metal and as I slipped the thin bracelet on, became emotional as I told her how special it was. It became a part of my armor that helped me get through my darkest days and reminded me why I had to go through the pain and sorrow of divorce. It reminded me of whom I needed to be.
I wore that bracelet religiously for about two years – I never took it off — and then, one day, I returned the favor. I was with another woman struggling with similar bullshit and slipped the bracelet off and gave it to her to wear. “Be true to yourself,” I told her.
Because I no longer needed to look down to be reassured by those words. I had read them so many times that they had become etched on my own heart. I didn’t need a piece of jewelry to remind me I needed to honor who I am.
Who is, of course, some chick with nice eyebrows and no mustache, at the very least.
Here’s the benefit of dating someone who’s not really ready to be dating: You get to see how far you’ve come since your own divorce.
I’ve been trying to keep it in perspective. I’ve been trying to remember what it was like when I was in the thick of ending my own marriage five years ago. When my days were filled with attorney letters, financial spreadsheets and venomous texts from my soon-to-be-ex.
How I had to let go of everything to learn how to fly.
Contrary to what I thought I knew about metamorphosis, I recently learned that a caterpillar doesn’t just go into its cocoon and sprout wings. Instead, it dissolves into some gooey matter and then reshapes itself into a butterfly. It literally dies and comes back to life.
Curious whether butterflies remembered life before wings, scientists subjected a group of caterpillars to a horrible odor and subsequent terrible noise. Eventually, the creatures freaked out every time they came into contact with the yucky stimuli. Then, after the caterpillars transformed into butterflies, they were subjected to the same noise and stink and had the same negative reactions.
Memory carried through the metamorphosis.
I think it’s safe to say that during the whole terrible divorce process, the period when your adrenaline is kicked into permanent overdrive and you eat, sleep and breathe heartache, you are reduced to a puddle of goo. You’ve crawled inside whatever your chrysalis is – like a giant glass of wine – and start to let go of the person you were just days before. Everything you’ve known for sure up to that point begins to dissolve.
But eventually, you do become more of a fully-formed human being who can talk and think about stuff other than divorce, much to everyone’s relief. You’ve sprouted your wings and can feel the wind from them as you flutter through your days.
In an effort to recall my own dark days, I dug back into the journals I kept around that time. It turns out that during most of 2009, I was a bit of a wreck.
Witness an entry on Oct. 1 of that year in which I recount my reaction to learning my husband had just returned from a 10-day trip to Italy with his girlfriend after we had split up just three months earlier. “My pain is searing,” I wrote. “My agony has no end.”
I then recount how, in what in retrospect could only be described as a psychotic break, I tried to smash the Murano heart necklace the pair had brought home as a gift for one of my daughters with a giant bottle of Bumble & Bumble hair conditioner. I pounded it repeatedly with the heel of the oversized plastic bottle like a crazy woman.
I had forgotten about banging the shit out of the necklace, a symbol of how seemingly easy it was for my husband to move on with his life. How easy I thought I was to replace.
Turns out, Murano glass is pretty fucking shatter proof and held up to the attack, which could also be a handy metaphor for my own seemingly-fragile heart. It, too, survived a pounding.
But I never would have remembered that incident if I hadn’t written about it in 2009. Turns out, my memory of that gooey stage of my life is pretty sketchy. I can recall big moments, like the day we stood in front of the judge in the seedy courtroom and ended our 20-year marriage. But the day-to-day occurrences, all that yucky stimuli that I reacted to during that tumultuous time, have started to fade from my memory.
I think it’s a matter of self-preservation.
But here’s something else I learned about metamorphosis: that memory also works in reverse. If you carefully peeled back the skin of one of those tiny caterpillars, you would find structures within of the future butterfly: Microscopic wings, antennae and legs.
And I think if you had peeled me open in 2009, you would have found — deep inside — pieces of the girl I was to become.
Wings and all.
I feel like I spend an inordinate amount of time doing my 11-year-old son’s laundry. Every time I turn around, the hamper in his room is full or he’s just returned from a weekend at his father’s with an overnight bag brimming with dirty socks.
Luckily, his is the only other pile of dirty clothes that’s my problem nowadays, so I don’t really do the laundry as much as I used to. Back in the day, when I was doing all four kids plus my then-husband’s wash, I put a load or two in every day. There was no way around that. But then I threw in the towel (LOL) and told the older three that they were on their own in the laundry department.
So now that it’s just me and the fifth grader, I only do laundry like twice, maybe three times a week, or whenever I run out of exercise bras.
But even though I’m only doing the wash every three days, for some reason, I’m washing what seems like a week’s worth of my little guy’s clothes. There’s no correlation between the number of days and amount of laundry. The load I folded this morning, consisting of about four day’s worth of clothes, contained the following items:
From left: 8 pairs of shorts, 11 t-shirts, one pair underwear.
If I didn’t already know better, I’d be wondering what was up with the underwear. Or lack thereof. But one of the upsides of having a passel of kids is having the advantage of history. I’ve found in parenting, it tends to repeat itself.
So when his older brother was the same age, he spent two weeks at sleep away camp and I was especially focused on making sure he had 14 pairs of underwear to see him through. I went to Target and bought a few packs of Fruit of the Loom, labeled them with his name, and packed them for camp.
When he returned home two weeks later, I opened the bag — preparing to be greeted by an onslaught of dirty underwear — and found instead one rumpled pair. The other 12 pairs were still neatly folded. It turns out, he changed his underwear exactly once the entire two weeks, which jibes with the one shower he reported taking during his stay as well.
“Mom,” he told me when I reacted in horror to his disregard of personal hygiene, “did you see how disgusting those showers were?”
That long car ride home was memorable less for all the Amish people in buggies we passed and more for the odor inside the car. Dirty boys of a certain age can be very ripe.
Luckily, it’s because of that older brother that I am confident that my little guy won’t always be so gross. At some point, I have seen that they grow out of it and become nice-smelling men who put on a clean new pair of underwear every day.
And I should be happy there’s just less for me to fold. Pretty soon, his dirty laundry will be his problem and I won’t have to see how many pairs of underwear he’s wearing each week.
The showering, however, will continue to be monitored because no one wants to sleep down the hall from someone who smells like a homeless person.
I guess I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” when it came out in 2006, along with every other woman of a certain age living in the United States.
I was turning 40, had been married about 16 years and spent my days as a stay-at-home mom with four kids living in New Jersey.
So my life at that point could not have been less like Gilbert’s, who famously wrote her memoir about her year-long journey to Italy, India and Indonesia to recover from her divorce and subsequent meltdown.
But I dutifully read it because that’s what I do, read the books that everyone is talking about. I mean, I even read “Anna Karenina” when Oprah said we should all read Tolstoy because I can’t stand letting pop culture pass me by. Or not doing what Oprah says.
At the time, I remember liking the book. I certainly didn’t take issue with the author for her existential crisis and search for herself. I definitely wasn’t as judgmental as a woman in my book club who declared during our discussion of the book that Gilbert was selfish. “If you’re a mother, then you know what life is all about,” she explained.
That line of reasoning — believing your way is the one true way — is really the cause of much suffering in this world.
Anyway, it’s not that I took issue with Gilbert’s journey; I just got kinda bored during the whole “pray” part at the Indian ashram and was in a rush to get to the good stuff in Bali.
But then things began to change in my life. Or, more specifically, I finally started making some changes.
Coincidentally, the movie version of “Eat, Pray, Love” came out on my 44th birthday and I made an event out of it. My sister-in-law and I took our teenage daughters out to get Tarot card readings and dinner and then we sat way up close in the theater (the only place to sit) to see the movie. I mostly remember loving the trailer for the movie more than the movie, which featured Florence and the Machine’s “Dog Days Are Over,” which I would totally use in the movie soundtrack of my life.
Anyway, while I was on my own, albeit more domestic, journey at that point, Gilbert’s story was still just that. A story with a really great ending. I mean, she ends up with Javier Bardim, for fuck’s sake. Oh. Wait. That part was pretend.
But sometimes, you just can’t see things clearly while you’re in the midst of them. You need distance to get the right perspective on things.
So recently, I was looking for an audiobook to listen to while I’m out and about. I’m okay with sitting in silence, too, but sometimes I am in the mood to listen to something other than my blabbermouth inner voice.
After an extensive search through, like, every audiobook on iTunes, I came across “Eat, Pray, Love” and, having just watched one of Gilbert’s Ted Talks, decided she would be a pleasant person to spend 13 hours listening to and downloaded the book.
Okay, I need you to stop reading this right now and go and download the book, too, so you can be as obsessed as I am with Liz Gilbert. I can’t tell you how much I love her and want to hang out with her.
And I don’t know if that it’s because I’ve done a bit of my own soul searching/navel gazing over the last few years and can relate more to Gilbert’s journey – I’ve now been known to chant — or it’s just that I love hearing her read to me, but I thoroughly relished listening to it. Even the ashram part.
Gilbert’s voice is so warm and full of personality. It’s like she can’t wait to tell you what happens next in her story. I especially loved hearing her speak Italian, describing how the sandwich maker called her “bella” each day and how Italians are masters of “bel far niente” (the beauty of doing nothing).
I listened while walking up a tree-lined path on a sunny spring afternoon as she ate pistachio gelato for breakfast in Rome. I knelt in the dirt and cut back the woody stems of the hydrangeas in my front yard, as Gilbert struggled with and then embrace her meditation practice. And I drove down the New York State Thruway under a clear blue sky while she described just how thoroughly she was adored and loved by her Brazilian lover in Bali. She may have even used the words “unpeeled, revealed, unfurled and hurled” to describe the situation.
I pulled into my driveway yesterday afternoon after a trip to the orthodontist and some errands, and sat in the car as my daughter brought in the Trader Joe’s bags and listened as Gilbert read the final lines of her book. She described how she and her lover carefully got out of the little fishing boat they’d been sitting in, moored off the coast of a remote Balinese island, and as they did, she turned to him and said in Italian, “Attraversiamo.”
Let’s cross over.
And it killed me. It had me so teary and swooning, I had to go back and listen to her read those last lines three more times, just sitting there in my car alone pressing the rewind button.
Because while in Italian, “attraversiamo” is used for useful tasks, like crossing the street, it can also be applied to larger concepts, like moving from one stage of your life to the next.
And I think what resonated for me is that I have, indeed, crossed over. I have moved to a place where I no longer define myself by my divorce. I stand in a place where it’s no longer strange to go places by myself, like dinners and vacations. And most importantly, I have sailed to a place where I know I am ready to open my heart to somebody new. I’m no longer afraid of taking that risk.
Because, as Gilbert so eloquently writes:
“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
I’ve recently spent some time with someone who’s in the thick of a divorce and it’s been a reminder of how far I’ve come. It’s shown me what a big mountain of grief that puppy was to climb.
I have been on a journey, too, even though it’s pretty much happened right here in suburban New Jersey. I’ve come so far personally — traveled so far from the girl I used to be and closer to the one I intend to be — that my imaginary life passport should be filled with stamps by now.
All that’s missing is the Brazilian lover.