How I Learned to Shovel Snow

70538-11805-103536-1-dudley-do-rightI’ve spent most of my life being capable. Adaptable. Resilient.

I’ve never really been one of those damsel-in-distress-types. But sometimes, I’d really like to slip into that role. I’d really like some Dudley Do-Right to come galloping to my rescue and, like, fix my running toilet or figure out how to move my router.

But because I don’t really come off as needy, I’m generally left to fend for myself. The upside to this is that it means that folks assume I am on top of things. The downside is that I’m outside shoveling snow and trying to start generators with all the husbands while the wives sit inside and watch Kelly and Michael.

And when I was married, I didn’t have to worry about things like snow and generators either. I live in a part of the world where people toe a fairly traditional gender line. Most of the dads go to work in offices and the moms stay home with the kids. Men do the manly things like mow lawns and get rid of dead things that show up in and around their yards and women make dinner and mail out Christmas cards (although I recently met a guy who actually took on that job each year when he was married and I am fascinated by that). Before my husband moved out, I never even touched a snow shovel.

Now I get to be in charge of everything. The lawn. The Christmas cards. Dead things. When I was married, I couldn’t even handle the feel of a dead bunny that weighted down the end of the net I was trying to scoop it out of the pool with. It took me about 20 minutes to stop carrying on and lift the thing out of the water and into the waiting plastic Target bag and then even more time to psych myself up to carry the bag to the trash can in the garage.

Now I’m an expert at removing stuff that ends up dead somewhere in my yard. A few years ago, I even helped my neighbor Susan get rid of some weird dead bat that appeared at the base of the pine tree in her front yard. I went to my house and fetched one of the hundreds of plastic sleeves I store under my kitchen sink that my newspaper is delivered in each day – it’s one of those items I feel compelled to hoard, like shopping bags and shoe boxes (you never know) – and marched back to Susan’s to pick up the bat carcass. I slipped my hand inside the blue plastic bag and picked the bat up off the ground and then pulled the bag back over my hand so that its body fell to the bottom of the bag, which I tied off and handed to Susan to throw into one of her trash cans.

“Tell Michael I said, ‘You’re welcome,’” I told her, since I had just done his job for him.

But my two younger kids and I are staying with Michael and Susan over spring break at their new digs in Hong Kong so I guess the Universe has more than repaid me for helping a brother out and getting rid of the dead bat so that he didn’t have to.

But really, I’m okay with being stuck with the dude jobs around here. Number one, it’s a small price to pay for not having to put up with someone’s shenanigans just because they’re good snow shovelers and number two, it puts my life in more of the Free to Be, You and Me alignment that always appealed to me as a kid.

But it’s still a work in progress.

We woke up this morning to discover that the BLIZZARD OF 2015, the storm that was predicted to dump three feet of snow on my yard that had me out yesterday combing the stores for “D” batteries and loading up on water (I have serious Sandy PTSD), was pretty much a dud. I’m a terrible eyeballer of measurements, but it’s safe to say that we didn’t even get one foot of snow, much less three. But it still needs to be managed. We will still need to get out there and clear the driveway and path to the front door like good citizens.

But I’m sitting here in my bed waiting to see when my neighbor Bill starts to shovel. I use him as my snow removal barometer since he seems to be really on top of this kind of thing. I usually look out our front windows after storms to monitor his activity. I mean, he even owns a snow blower, which is a clear signal that he takes his snow removal very seriously. Until I hear that motor, I know I can remain here tucked under my covers and enjoying the lazy morning like all the other mommies.

My girlfriend across the street – you know, Punky’s mom – texted a little while ago to ask if my little guy would help her teenaged son shovel the driveway of some of our neighbors who are well past the shoveling stage of their lives.

I had also mentioned to my son as he put on his boots that he should also shovel the driveway of the elderly couple next door to us and told him that I would be out in a bit so we could get going on our own driveway.

“What,” he squeaked. “I don’t want to have to shovel three driveways.”

“You’re a dude,” I told him. “Get used to it.”

“That’s so sexist,” the little 12-year-old reminded me and I was like, “Poop.”

So, maybe he’ll live more in a world where men send out Christmas cards and make dinners and women go outside and shovel snow.

Which is where this damsel is headed right now.

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Free Falling

For a long time, I resisted change. It made me nervous.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I totally wanted things to change. Or better yet, I knew that they really had to. I just didn’t know quite how to go about it.

Check that. That’s a lie. I knew exactly what needed to be done. I just didn’t have the balls to do it.

So for what, at the time, seemed like an eternity, I kind of teetered at the edge of a big cliff of indecision. Because there were a lot of things I really liked about my life. I got the family that I really wanted, the multitude of children. I loved our house with the pool and our big golden retriever. We lived in a nice town with great schools where I got to help make pilgrim costumes out of brown paper shopping bags for the Thanksgiving feast in second grade and hot-glued pennies onto a baseball hat to celebrate the 100th day of school. There were dinner parties and tennis lessons and piles of presents for Christmas.

On the outside, it was all so fucking perfect.

But inside – I probably don’t need to tell you – it was a different story. There was sadness and regret. Anger and resentment. People doing shit they probably shouldn’t have been doing along with people not doing the things that probably really needed to be done.

But we suffered in silence. Literally. The silent treatment was an often-used tool for conflict non-resolution around here. Because what were the options? I mean, I guess I had a pretty good idea what they were, but they were big and scary and things that other people did, but not me.

But then, as luck would have it – although I did not think of it as very lucky at the time – a series of events occurred that gave me the kind of push I needed to make the leap into the unknown.

I said I wanted a divorce and things began to unspool.

Not long after that, I took my four children north to stay at our friends’ place in Vermont for a few days. The kids swam at a local waterfall and we ate sticky cinnamon buns at our favorite farmer’s market. We made the windy drive up Mount Equinox and passed monks walking along the side in flowing white robes and arrived at the top to find it shrouded in a thick layer of fog obscuring our view. The kids swam at night in the condo complex’s indoor pool, running along the tiled deck before diving in while I sank into the steamy water of the hot tub, letting the bubbles swirl around my neck as I considered the Pandora’s Box I had just unlocked. All of the shit that I had unleashed.

One day we drove over to the quarry in nearby Dorset and dove off the big blocks of marble into the icy green water below. The swimming hole is bordered on a few sides by cliffs of varying heights, which the more intrepid visitors leap from into the 60-foot deep pool. We ate our sandwiches and watched people of all ages – parents, teens, kids – stand at the top and contemplate the fall while others shouted words of encouragement from the comfort of their picnic blankets below.

Some recklessly flipped backwards off the 20-foot cliff like it was nothing while others sheepishly made their way back to the bottom on foot.

“The girls should do it together,” announced my oldest daughter and the three of us picked our way up the dirt path that led to the top of the cliff and looked down.

Now, what some of you might have already surmised, things look a lot less threatening when viewed from a distance. When considered in theory. But when you’re standing with your feet dangerously close to the edge of a cliff and there’s nothing between you and some really dark, cold water but 20 feet of air, you start to lose your nerve. Well, that’s if you’re like me. I started to rethink my earlier bravery and weighed the embarrassment of retreating down to my blanket in defeat versus falling into a protruding ledge of marble on my plummet down or hitting the water at a bad angle. There were a million things that could go wrong.

“Don’t overthink it!” yelled one of the parents standing below who watched me move close to the edge and then back away.

“I’m really nervous,” I told the girls.

We debated whether we should jump at the count of “three” or the word “go” while my oldest son stood below and shouted for us to hurry up, tired of having to wait for us to jump and so he could take our picture as I had instructed.

I stood at the top of the cliff with my daughters standing on either side of me and thought about all the things I’d never done because I was afraid. I thought about how I never wanted them to see me timid again. How I wanted to show them what it looked like when you do something that scares the living shit out of you.

And then I heard my older daughter say, “Go,” and the three of us leapt off the side. We flew together through the air and plunged hard into the cold, dark water and then kicked our way back up to the surface. We bobbed in the water for a bit and languished in our bravery. Our badass-ness. Then we swam to the ladder laughing and pulling ourselves up to stretch out on our towels and bask in the hot August sun.

And much like the more allegorical jump I’d made a few months earlier, leaping into the pool of divorce, my dive off the steep marble cliff taught me to have faith in the unknown. It showed me how flying through the air, either real or metaphorical, was sometimes the only way to really live.

Taking the leap, 2009.

Taking the leap, 2009. Credit: Max Walsack.

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Forty-Eight

photo-35I knew that my 48th birthday yesterday was a something when it even seemed to give my father pause.

I called him the day before to thank him for the gift he sent, and he mentioned my age and how the calendar on his computer had told him it was “Amy Byrnes’s 48th birthday” and then he says, “Huh” and literally paused.

My father is a man of few words so I could tell that for him to bring it up, he thought my age was a something, too. I think it even made him feel old.

And honestly, I usually don’t really get caught up in my age. I still feel like the same, albeit much smarter, woman who I was 20 years ago. I feel healthy and strong and know that I can still turn heads if I really put my mind to it and wear, like, mascara and stuff.

It’s just that I’m starting to feel, as I near the end of my 40s, that there’s an expiration date on all of this. Things are starting to feel a little less infinite.

For one thing, as much as I didn’t really worry too much about a man’s age initially as I re-entered the dating scene, I’m starting to think that a cap needs to be put in place. I need to draw the line on just how young of a man I am willing to spend time with, which is really going to limit the already pretty limited dating pool I’m forced to deal with.

It’s like that really great line from the movie “The Other Woman,” which I watched last night with my daughters, in which the Lesley Mann character — who is struggling with whether to leave her philandering husband — expresses her horror at the idea of dating in her 40s.

“The last time I was single I was 24 and the dating pool was everyone,” she cries to the Cameron Diaz, not-very-sympathetic, character. “And now it’s like a shallow puddle of age appropriate men who are old and gross.”

Ha.

I’m also starting to feel that I need to get going on all of those things I was going to do “some day” – like write a book or be a famous blogger –because “some day” is, like, right now.

I worry, which I never did before, that I’m getting too old for some things, like going to certain bars on Sunday nights to dance and wearing the cat necklace my 11-year-old gave me for my birthday out in public. I’m concerned about what other people might think about me and whether I can pull certain things off because even though I feel young, my looks are beginning to betray just how old I really am.

And that light I’d been looking for at the end of my parenting tunnel — that time in my life I fantasized about when I still had to wash three little heads under the tub faucet each night and sweep piles of discarded Cheerios and bits of American cheese off my kitchen floor – when they’d actually grow up, is kind of here, too. In no time I’ll watch my oldest turn 22 and graduate from college and send my third kid off to school and things around here are really going to start to change. Even my days as the mom of an elementary school student are starting to wind down, which you’d think – as I’ve had a child in grammar school since 1999 – wouldn’t come as such a big shock, but it’s hard to believe that those days of art shows, band concerts and middle school dances might actually come to an end.

The good news is that I am ridiculously optimistic, like, as hopeful as a golden retriever just waiting for you to drop something off your fork onto the floor, so I know it’s all going to work out. I’m just going to move to new stages of my life while my neck continues its downward spiral as it tries to merge into my décolletage but it’s all going to be okay.

Because what are my options? I have a girlfriend right now who is facing the challenge of breast cancer, so I’m certainly not going to start crying about my sagging boobs. I’m lucky their collective droop is the worst issue I have to deal with in that department.

And even though this was the fifth birthday I’ve celebrated as a single person, I appreciate how it’s forced my kids to take responsibility for making it a special day for me. They bought me great gifts, took me out to dinner and even paid for parking. They also took care of some pesky chores around the house – like putting chemicals in the pool and organizing shelves in the garage – without a peep of resistance. Someone even emptied the dishwasher.

So, am I thrilled about turning 48? Um, not so much. But am I grateful for all of the things I am blessed with here, in the middle of my pretty wonderful life?

You betcha.

Happy birthday to me.

Happy birthday to me.

 

 

 

10 Days of Fun

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This meme pretty much sums up my last 10 days.

Here is the downside of going out nine times in ten days: you don’t really get a lot of stuff done. And while I’ve amassed about a book’s-worth of stories – oh my god, do I have some good stories – I can’t really write about most of them. I mean, you can call me up and I’d share a few of them with you, but I totally can’t put it all out there on my blog. I have a reputation to maintain, you know.

So I haven’t really known what to write about in the meantime. Even the guy I work out with, who was away on vacation last week, laughed when I told him some of my stories this morning and was like, “You haven’t written anything in so long, I knew something was going on.”

My “10 Days of Fun,” as I have taken to calling this party-thon, was a convergence of pre-planned activities that were coincidentally strung together over many consecutive days – including a dinner to celebrate some Leo ladies’ birthdays, a going away party for neighbors and good friends and my 30th high school reunion.

I know.

And there has been dancing, people, lots and lots of dancing and teetering around in high heels and as a result, walking has become a bit of an issue. I woke up Sunday morning and the first thing I said to my high school BFF, who came up from Virginia for the reunion and was lying next to me in bed, was, “My fucking bunions are killing me.”

Sexier words have never been spoken between two people lying in bed together.

But I’ve had a bee in my bonnet lately about going out and having fun. It’s like I’m going through that phase that most divorced people go through when they first taste the freedom of being single, except I’m on a five-year delay. When my marriage collapsed, instead of rushing out to party and console myself in the arms of someone else, I kind of went into hiding. I spent my time drinking wine in the homes of close friends and acting like Greta Garbo. I just hated the idea of people talking about me and didn’t want to add to things already being said. I kept my nose clean and focused on my kids and my new, all-consuming job.

And I think it’s safe to say that that was a good move. I figured out how to be happy by myself and with myself and maintain my dignity during a difficult period. I had fun, but it was more of the go-out-to-dinner or go-to-the-movies kind of fun.

Oh, how things have changed.

I had more fun in the month of July than all of 2011. I have danced to “Rosalita” on a packed dance floor on a hot Sunday night. I stood and ate cheese fries around midnight with high school friends and laughed about how much and how little had changed in 30 years. I squatted with my face pressed next to my oldest daughter’s at the bottom of an ice luge as shots of vodka raced down the chutes and into our mouths. And I kissed a guy in a bar on a dare by a girlfriend and was reminded of just how good chemistry between two people can be.

That kind of fun.

I spent my final night of fun back out with a group of friends from town to celebrate/mourn the pending departure of one of the families to Hong Kong and also trying to recapture all the fun we had at this particular bar the week before. We brought the husbands this time, too, and ate sliders and peeled shrimp on the back porch before heading downstairs to dance and drink mixed drinks out of Dixie cups. Even the guys got in on the act of being my Wingmen and interviewed my potential dance partners over beers. One poor guy had to go through so many rounds of interviews before he could dance with me that by the time he was finished, I had snuck off and found someone else to dance with.

I think some of this non-stop fun is due, in part, to my upcoming 48th birthday but can attribute a lot of my recent shenanigans to just being more open to dudes. I now realize that for a long time, I just wasn’t into the idea of guys and dating. For some reason, it freaked me out. I just couldn’t deal. But then I dated someone I kind of liked and, boom, wanted to do it again.

But I’ve always been a late bloomer. I mean, I started drinking and smoking when I was, like, 12, but some of the bigger things – like developing self-awareness and healthy boundaries – came a lot later to me than normal people.

So, you all will be happy to know that tonight, I will not be putting on eye shadow and telling my kids to make themselves pizza bagels. Instead, I plan on getting into bed early and watching a movie or starting a new book. I might not even drink.

I need to rest up, since I’m out every night for the rest of this week. There are four more weeks until Labor Day, you know.

Maybe we should call this my “Summer of Fun.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dating Naked: The End of the World as We Know It

Credit: VH-1

Credit: VH-1

It’s official: The end of the world is right around the corner.

How do I know this? Because I just learned about a new show on VH-1 called Dating Naked, and if that is not a sign that civilization is about to implode, I do not know what is.

I’ll be honest, I have not watched – nor do I ever intend to – watch the show. I am basing everything on reviews I read about it in The Times and New York Magazine. And I still feel dirty.

I mean, isn’t dating bad enough? Isn’t it hard enough to have to sit at a bar and worry about exposing how many kids you have to your date, much less the state of your abdomen?

And, honestly, what woman really wants to see a guy’s junk right away? I mean, no offense, but that’s a visual really best left to the imagination.

For second date fun-and-games on this new show, couples actually have to move around naked and do stuff like roll around in the ocean in a giant see-through ball and body painting (I don’t even have the stomach to tell you which body part one of the gentlemen uses to create, ahem, art).

Credit: VH-1

Credit: VH-1

But of course, these contestants – or however we need to refer to them – are not middle-aged divorcees but generally folks in their 20s and 30s. I guess they didn’t go to 12 years of Catholic school and feel really good about walking around naked. But still.

It takes a lot of courage to put your heart out there, even in a turtleneck. Why would you want to up the vulnerability ante by doing so naked?

And who would want to watch that?

Credit: VH-1

Credit: VH-1

 

 

 

 

‘How Ugly is This Guy?’: Things My Kids Ask About My Dates

images “Okay, Mom,” said my 17-year-old daughter, totally out of the blue not long ago. “How ugly is this guy?”

We had been lying around our den one afternoon – along with her older sister and best friend from across the street – laughing and chatting about nothing in particular, when she asked her question.

I had just started dating someone and although it was the first real relationship I had had since I split from their dad five years earlier, the girls really didn’t want any details. In fact, the entire subject of this new guy made their faces twist in disgust and brought an abrupt halt to the conversation.

So I was surprised she would ask me anything about him, especially what he looked like.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I think he’s kind of cute.”

She then proceeded to make gagging noises and pretended to vomit over the arm of the leather chair she was draped in. But the neighbor was all over it; leaning forward to get every detail she could about my new dating life.

“Maggie is, like, obsessed with this,” my daughter sniped and she told her friend to cut it out. She made it clear that my dating life was totally disgusting and not cool.

I always thought that by the time I got around to dating, once we were able to brush all the ashes and soot of the nuclear fallout of my divorce off and get on with our lives, my kids would be happy to see me happy.

I am so naïve.

The truth of it is that children, for the most part, are not really that interested in their parents’ happiness; especially when it puts their own happiness at risk.

No, it turns out my kids would rather see me alone, surrounded by cats and stacks of newspapers and back issues of The New Yorker, than with a significant other.

And for a long time, that seemed to be my trajectory. I was really busy with a demanding full-time job and managing the fallout of the divorce – all of the emotional ups and downs – to even think about dating. I had a pissed off ex-husband and three ornery teenagers so I didn’t really feel the need to develop any new relationships. I had enough personalities on my plate to manage, thank you.

But five years after everything imploded, even my therapist was like, “Start dating, already.” And I tried. I signed up for online services and never said “no” to anyone trying to fix me up with someone. I even gave a checkout guy my number, for gods sakes.

But my heart wasn’t really in it.

So, unlike all the glasses of wine and cups of coffee I shared with a litany of fix ups before, I went on a date not long ago with not only an open mind, but an open heart and kind of liked the guy enough to go out again the next night.

And I’ve got to admit, the whole thing came out of the blue. One minute I’m going to meet yet another guy at a bar for a drink and the next, we’ve gone out together seven times in two weeks.

So the kids were annoyed that this new relationship briefly took me away from being on call 24/7 for sandwich making duties and counter wiping. They like the idea of me standing in our kitchen at the ready as they go about their lives. They like to know that I’m around on the off chance that they might need me.

And they’ve been jealous of things that have taken my attention away from them in the past – like my girlfriends and my former job – but nothing compared to the disdain they employed when discussing my love life.

One night, as I rushed around the kitchen putting out taco fixings for dinner before I got picked up to go out on a date, two of the kids were complaining that I was going out with this guy again and I threw up my hands and asked, “You guys, don’t you want me to be happy?”

And the two of them looked at me and said, unequivocally, “No.” They barely blinked before they said it.

My 20-year-old daughter told me she had come home from a summer class the night before and was feeling cranky about the course and when she saw her older brother sitting on the couch watching TV, she asked him where I was.

“Out on a date,” he said.

“AAARRRGGGHH!” was, I think, the response she said she gave him and he immediately snapped back, “Cut it out. Mom deserves to date.”

So, at least a quarter of my progeny can see past themselves and support my love life.

I tried to talk to each kid about it privately. I tried to assure them that I wasn’t going to marry the guy. We were just dating and that if it wasn’t him, at some point it was going to be somebody else.

I told this to my little guy, and he just said, “Face.”

“Face?” I asked. “What do you mean face?”

“I want to see his face,” he told me. “Take a selfie so I can see what he looks like.”

But it never came to that. The relationship lasted the duration of two gel manicures — for whatever reason — but it taught me a lot about myself and what I want. And I think it was a really good experience for the kids. It helped brace them for when I am in a relationship that lasts longer than a month.

No matter what he looks like.

 

 

 

And So It Goes

tumblr_m7di7b27fc1rpjvnkThis 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.

 

The Price of Freedom

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being True to Yourself

quotes-about-life

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.

 

 

 

The Stages of Divorce

European-butterfly_044-II

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.