Dream, Reality, Fantasy

You know, I try to be Ms. Revolutionary and try not to care that I am no longer married, am jaded and accepting of a non-traditional lifestyle, but sometimes this tra-la-la stuff stops and I get smacked in the face with gorgeous engagement pictures on Facebook or bridal showers or weddings of well-adjusted individuals I know. My fear is that I will veer away from this sort of happiness because 1) I feel I don’t deserve it. I had my chance and/or 2) this sort of happiness and stability doesn’t really happen anymore. Yet, there it is in front of my face, this POSSIBILITY of the American dream: someone to commiserate over student loans, to have more children with, to know the ins and outs of each others quirks. Maybe I’m just not built for it anymore. 

I wonder if this is a post-divorce phase? Will I ever be or feel eligible for a real baby shower or bridal shower? Will I ever wear my dream wedding gown? None of those things happened with my first marriage or first child. I feel this is the price I pay for having been a 19-year-old mother and newlywed.

What are your experiences? Have you been here? Did you get out of the slump? Did you embrace the new “fun-loving, devil may care” you? Are you a married lady who thinks women like me are nuts? 

Tell me.

How to Date a Single Mother

After hearing about this list of  '50 Reasons to Date Me' in a Craigslist Man for Woman ad, I felt inspired to make one of my own.

How to Date a Single Mother:

1)      Don’t imply anything her child does is lame.

2)      Never expect her to meet you for the first time anywhere but in a public place, undermining her awareness to stay safe is a jerk move.

3)      Treat her like the normal woman, not one who should be lucky a man ‘in this day and age’ would want to date a woman with a child anyway.

4)      Don’t take it as an insult when she insists on the first date being in a public place. That’s another jerk move.

5)      Wanting any woman to meet you in a non-public place for the first time is creepy (OK, moving on from this point now).

6)      Never say you want to meet her children if you are not sure. Make sure this is at least after a few months of dating.

7)      Don’t try to date anyone if you don’t even have enough money to buy your own cup of coffee.

8)      Don’t break up with her to date a woman who lives upstairs.

9)      Always be honest. Seriously, you can avoid many problems this way.

10)  As in all things in life: be kind, have manners and treat her as you wish to be treated.

An Ex-Boyfriend Confessional.

I can’t believe I loved him.

Charm, I know now, is an understatement. He grasped life like it was one big bowl for him and I had NEVER. Ever. Done that.

His European eyebrows. The ka-blam when we kissed. Dancing in his kitchen. The fact that he listened to the radio station of all Christmas music during the holidays.

The fact that he cried on our first date that lasted 14 hours.

These are most of the things that blinded me to the bad. The texts from girls I didn’t know. Pictures saved on his phone. The fact that I WOULD go through his phone.

He never made plans with me ahead of time. A trip halfway through Montana to see Bess get married was finalized the day before. But I’d planned to go without him.

I was used to being disappointed.

Blinded by the fact that his time with his kids is sacred. That his ex-wife cheated on him.

But the fact is, he cheated on her first. He’s first rate Spokane player scum and I…the girl getting divorced…didn’t see it. I just FELT hope.

All I wanted was grace.

And the fact is, I felt that grace 85% of the year we were together.

In bars, if women tried to hit on him in front of me, he would introduce them to his best friend. Dance only with me in front of the band. This fodder made for a good New Year’s Eve memory.

The way he would put me on his arm. I was nothing to be ashamed of. How could I not be important to him? I felt important. Even if it was momentary.

A few weeks after we dumped me for another woman he cried, like he did on that first date, about what a bad guy he was. Confessed to being the one who cheated on his ex-wife and then she divorced him. Said he was sorry. Didn’t want a life without me in it, somehow. But I’d already been too broken. Couldn’t look him in the eye, for what reason, I don’t know. Perhaps, I was afraid I would laugh. Laugh at the pain he had caused me and to now be seeing him in pain. Or maybe I would have cried, too. I couldn’t trust myself to look at him. Too risky. But when he asked me to look at him, I did.

A few days ago, I came out of my apartment to see his car parked by mine. A man was telling him to stay away from his girlfriend. To never come around here again, if he knew what was good for him. I saw the stoic Section V* that I knew, learning on his car, eyes vacant, slowly smoking at the ground.

Turns out the women he had dumped me for lived just two floors above me. Said she had met him in a bar. The guy who had told Section V to leave was her boyfriend. She said she had never been Section V’s girlfriend and that he had been texting her incessantly. She hadn’t heard from him for about a week and now, he’d shown up at her door.

It was then, I knew. The man that I knew didn’t really exist. He was a selfish liar.

How had I not seen this? Did he get worse in the past few months? Could I have been so blind?

I feel now that I made Section V into a character of my own life. He danced, caressed and performed in my poems but in life, he was just really out to get what he could from a broken woman trying to get over the car wreak for her marriage. He could bandage me poorly and I was grateful. Grateful for any sort of salve I could get.

I hope someday I find I still have enough belief in grace, hope and yes, love, that I can put all my proverbial eggs in one basket.

Even if it’s just my own basket, it’ll all have been worth it.

*Name for Ex-Bf. Also refers to the fact that Section V of my thesis contains only poems about this relationship.

Of Mice and Failure.

As much as I like to pretend that I have it all together, truth is I am always hanging on by a thread. Ani Difranco said it best, “As bad as I am, I’m proud of the fact that I’m worse than I seem.”

I have been officially divorced for a short time. The whole process has been like pulling a deeply rooted plant out of the pit of my lungs. I’ve had to find strength down in me to remove myself from a dysfunctional marriage and now I am trying to have the courage to write about it through nonfiction which, let me tell you is a task for me, a poet.

I feel like I have been hiding behind my poems during this whole process. Not to knock poems at all. I love them. They provide an outlet where I can tell as much or as little as I want to about my life. I know my pain and confusion has come out in my poems but for me, to just say Hey, this is REALLY hard for me has seemed impossible to do. And frankly, a bit weak.

I feel that a stigma can surround someone who is divorced. People who might want to date me, acquaintances, the barista or even friends could wonder What did SHE do wrong? I believe there to be a self-imposed stamp on my forehead that says I’ve failed.

Now, I know I didn’t fail at marriage alone. It takes two to tango and all that but there are times when things get hard with regular life and that is when I miss having a partner in life, such as, I have mice in my apartment. I have lived here for a year and a half and the mice show up this month. My lease is up and I am just grossed out. I’ve tried to trap them but nothing. I have no bodies as evidence. And with no evidence of dead mice and continued “surprises,” I feel I can’t go on living here. It seems silly to move but having mice droppings in my drawers makes me feel like a failure of a mother. I have failed to provide my son with a safe and healthy home.

It also makes me wish I had a person that I could still bounce fears and situations like this off of. You can’t do that with a guy you casually date because 1) you don’t want him to know you live somewhere with mice and 2) leaning on someone in that sort of domestic crisis could scream “I want to be serious.” Which may or may not be the case, but shit, it’s a game out there and I’m not up for playing. It's 'take me or leave me' time.

Heavy boxes depress me. The idea of moving to a new apartment makes me cringe. I have to figure out if I can handle it all cause frankly, the divorce and the ex-boyfriend “Section V” have shot my nerves all to hell.

So, I guess what I am saying is: I want to be able to look fear in the eye. But I have: every day for the past 2 years. I’m tired. And saying this in prose makes it seems more real.

In the poem version of this blog, there are mice machinists, torturing the feet of women and we then turn to the sad longing gaze of a hungry cat. Autumn leaves cover the ‘lost hope,’ disguised here as a fallen pet rat, run over by a bicycle. He blinks at the clouds as his life gives way. Somewhere, a clock strikes eleven.

Post-Divorce Dating is a Writing Exercise

Being single for the first time since I was in high school has been weird for me.

When I had been married for 5 years, I started seeing stories in the news about all the inappropriate things kids were doing on the school bus and learned what a “rainbow party” was. And it freaked me out. When I was in high school, there were still grungy riot grrrls who wore black eyeliner, knew who Mia Zapata was, didn’t take any shit or do anything they were told and guys still thought they were hot.

So when I found myself back in the world of dating, I think there was a huge learning curve. The first guy I spent more than one date with, let’s call him “Section V” because sadly, the last section of my thesis revolves around the fumblings of feeling something for him, this someone besides my ex-husband. Turns out, a year later, he is a manipulative, lying douche bag.

Oddly, I can talk about my dating life with my ex-husband (Yeah, yeah. It’s weird. We’re FREAKS. Whatever. Judge all you want…it’s just how it is) and he made the observation that perhaps my abilities to find a decent non-douche bag were not very good as I first stumbled out of nine-and-a-half years of marriage. And I think (I can hear the ex-husband patting himself on the back now…sigh) he is right. I just needed a guy who would say the right things and let me cook him dinner so I could feel domestic again. I was douche blind.

But on the upside, these events of crashing and burning with “Section V” and other men have made for great metaphorical weirdness in my poems. Men say some pretty crazy shit. Men also do some pretty crazy shit and women (I am talking particularly about me here) don’t do much better. But I am lucky because I find interactions between humans, especially those trying to care about each other (or giving the illusion they care) horrifyingly fascinating. Weaving together human contact is imbedded in the core of humanity and man, that isn’t easy. To give you a metaphor: you have to wander through the corn maze and sniff a lot of pumpkins before you learn to tell which one TRULY isn’t rotten. Apparently, I like finding a foul smelling gourd and then writing about it.

It is in these times, post-relationship and trying not to hurl eggs at his house, I can sit down and write a poem to focus. And the restraint in trying to use language to pinpoint my missteps, figuring out how exactly to juxtapose my perceptions against his actions in the relationship, and organizing it all brings about a reflective place inside me where poems can grow. Even if they are just about apple pies, hotel room doors closing or what his note said when it was over.

So, to those men who have mingled with me this past year: take heart…at least I wrote some poems about you.