Tag Archives: divorce

The Cool Kids

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We do a good bit of this…

If I have one wish for my daughters, it is that they will find a tribe of girlfriends like the ones I have found. I’m lucky to have a couple of tribes–the GHPers from high school, the Wesleyannes from college, and lately, the Cool Kids from work. “The Cool Kids?” you ask? Yep, The Cool Kids. All capitalized.

Along the theme of “choosing yourself” instead of waiting to be chosen–we named ourselves The Cool Kids. It seems that not a single one of us (except maybe Susan, the elegant blonde and Nicole, the sassy one) was a cool kid in high school. We were the B team, on the margins, always worried that we might be found out and kicked out. So now that we are All Grown Up, we decided to become The Cool Kids. Our table in the cafeteria is the one ringing with laughter, the one people walk by and say, “Y’all are having too much fun!” Nope, no such thing.

…and a little bit of this.

How did The Cool Kids begin? Well, I made a speech about employee giving at New Employee Orientation and I began by saying that my baby had kept me up all night (Vivi) then went on to mention that the cancer support center for which we were raising money had really been a great resource when my fiance was diagnosed with leukemia. Heather came up to me at the break and said, “So it sounds like everything turned out OK?” Um. No. Well, eventually, but….no. She was mortified, but had the strange similarity of also having been a young widow. We bonded quickly over that shared part of our past.

Then one day, Heather and I were having lunch in the cafeteria and Jean joined us. Jean is a palliative care nurse, and she and I had talked a lot after Richard died. A week later, Erica, a nurse like Jean and a singer like Heather, came by and fit right in. And Susan joined us a while later, the woman who used to intimidate the hell out of me because she was so wise and elegant–but funny and genuine too. Heather started working for Jana and Jana joined us, too. Libby and I started talking babies when Carlos came along. And Courtney had a little boy, too. Then Courtney hired Nicole and she fit right in. After about a year of evolution, there we were…The Cool Kids.

Jean’s Merry Christmas. I still have a jelly worm in my purse.

What does it mean to be a Cool Kid? It means that we fill in the gaps for each other. Last year, Jean confided that she had never really had a nice Christmas. So we got together and surprised her with a Christmas lunch with all her favorite things: a Loretta Lynn album, a tiny tree decorated with jelly worms and dog biscuits, books, and dog toys for her Scout. She couldn’t believe it.

When I was at home on maternity leave, Erica made me black bean burritos that I could eat with one hand. When Erica went to Chile for five months, Heather kept her dog like a member of the family. Libby and Erica get their sons together to play XBox. Nicole and Susan swap baseball mom stories.

Two of us are adult children of alcoholics and a few of us need to hear those lessons. Some of us know about grief. Some of us know about divorce. Some of us are learning about divorce. Susan has been married for the longest time and she shares advice that begins with, “I remind myself, ‘Don’t Kill Wes…'”

Two of us have left that place where we all worked, but we still get together for Friday lunches. A few of us just survived a hellatious few months on the job, with the help of our tribe. Sometimes Jana comes to lunch with two phones, but she comes to lunch. Sometimes Libby can only stay for 15 minutes, but she’s there.

Warrior Dash 2012

When Erica is out of paid time off, Heather picks up her son from school and gets him to his playoff game. Courtney brings books for Nicole’s son to share. I pass Vivi’s clothes to Libby’s daughter and Heather sends her son’s toys to my son. When Libby is making hairbows for her daughter’s softball team, she makes extra for Nicole’s daughter. I buy books that I loved for Libby’s little bookworm. If there’s a birthday, Courtney bakes a cake from scratch that would make Julia Childs pull her hair out in envy. Susan once came to my house and decorated for a birthday party in the June heat because I had strep rash and was nine weeks pregnant kind of sick.

Go, girl!

We cheer for each other. When Nicole is running, I holler from the sidewalk. When Libby wants to do something crazy, Courtney and I lace up our shoes and get muddy. When Heather took a sabbatical, we mailed her a birthday party in a box. When Jana won Boss of the Year, we shouted Hooray!

Wrong one of us and get the stink eye from all of us.

Our friendship really shined through this weekend. One of us needed to reclaim a rental property that she had been leasing to a person she used to be married to. Ahem. Not the best of situations. He, despite a month’s notice, hadn’t done SHIT. And let’s be honest–he hadn’t done shit for SEVEN YEARS. That place was Single Man Nasty. Like cheese that expired in 2010 and old underwear beneath the kitchen sink. The toilet was so filthy that we thought about just buying a new one.

But down swept The Cool Kids, in a bustle of good intentions and steadfast “get yo ass outta here”-ness. Jean loaded stuff on his truck and backed that trailer up like a girl who grew up on a hay farm. Hit the road, Jack. Heather put together a trundle bed that Erica had procured and when she didn’t have the right tools, Nicole called her husband to swing by with the toolbox. Nicole and Jana snatched a knot in that kitchen, even bleaching the floor behind the refrigerator. Courtney shampooed rugs while Susan crawled around on her knees cleaning stains out of the carpet.

Coolest Cleaning Crew Around!

Libby washed the blinds while Terri cleaned a ceiling fan that was black with dirt. I spent an hour scouring muck out of the tub. And Erica? She may have gotten there late because she wasn’t going to miss church, but damn if she didn’t hit that forsaken toilet like it was nothing but a thing. Cleaned it with a toothbrush and a smile. I learned that if you have a nasty mess to clean, invite a couple of nurses to help, because they aren’t afraid of ANYTHING. Through it all, we laughed. The sweet aunt and uncle who brought lunch for our weary work crew said, “I’ve never heard such laughing!”

And in the middle of all that GROSS, Jean looks over at me and says, “This feels so good. To help out, doing something together.” I said, “Yeah, it’s one thing to love somebody enough to clean their toilet, but it’s a whole other thing to love somebody enough to clean their ex-husband’s toilet.”

There comes a time in every one of our lives when we look around and think that it’s all gone to hell. I’m so grateful to know that when that day comes for me, I’ve got the Cool Kids. A good set of girlfriends is the key to life.

How Could I Have Missed This?

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There was a time in my past, that time when Fartbuster started making a real effort to be happier. He got contact lenses. He started working out. Bought some new clothes and experimented with hair products. I found myself saying, “He’s getting better. He’s taking care of himself.” Duh! He exhibited every cliched sign of a cheating man–right down to the lipstick on his collar. Once the lies came to the surface, I sat all alone in the ruins of my life and said, “How could I have missed this?” I was so ashamed that someone had fooled me like that. How could I have been so stupid?

There was a time in my past, that time when Richard couldn’t seem to shake that cold. He had no energy. Sometimes, he’d spike a fever. He finally went to the doctor but the doctor said it was bronchitis. The antibiotics didn’t clear it up but it was the end of the semester so he was feeling exhausted anyway. That was probably all it was. His grandmother died and he felt low. He had bruises, but said they were from skiing…back in March? And now it was May? Then there was that blood vessel that burst in his eye and didn’t get better during two weeks of vacation. His vision began to cross so he finally went to an ophthalmologist who thought there was a chance he had a retinal bleed. When Richard mentioned that he hadn’t been feeling himself for a while, the doctor ordered a CBC. Within 48 hours, Richard was at Johns Hopkins on the oncology ward. A few days later, our film from that vacation came back and when I saw the pictures–him resting on a driftwood tree, his legs covered in a solid swath of bruises from yellow to purple–I was so ashamed that I had “let him” walk around like that, so obviously sick. I hid the pictures. And I asked myself, “How could I have missed this?” How could I have been so stupid?

Red flags. Why didn’t I see them?

I know, I know–it was never my job to police a cheater. And I know, I know–leukemia is easy to miss in an otherwise healthy 37-year-old man who doesn’t like to go to the doctor. No one blamed me because I didn’t order a CBC right away. But because I’ve been spun sideways by a couple of doozies like these, I sometimes feel like I am just living in wait, waiting for some shoe to drop.

I thought that shoe had fallen back in December when I took my darling son in for his well visit and left with a handful of red flags. Filling out those social/verbal/motor skills inventories threw me for a loop. I thought he was independent, a free spirit….but maybe he doesn’t know how to interact with other people? I thought he talked when he wanted to talk…but he’s falling behind his peers. Where’s the line between a hard-headed little boy and a syndrome, a condition, a diagnosis? When our doctor said, “I don’t think he has autism, but let’s get him screened now that he’s three,” the first thing I asked myself was “How could I have missed this?” How could I have been so stupid?

Now it turns out that my son has some kind of language issue. I haven’t wanted to talk about it here (and as soon as I typed that, my stomach knotted up and I thought about deleting the whole thing for the 1000th time) because it’s still hazy. He’s getting speech therapy and he’s making swift progress. The doctor is encouraged. I’m encouraged. And the fact is that he’s still my baby boy, no matter what. I write about personal things here, but usually it’s things that are resolved. Lot of rear view mirror stuff on Baddest Mother Ever. Not things that are “we’ll see.”

The whole thing got me thinking about this reflex of saying, “How could I have missed this?” Because when I sat across the table from a speech therapist who says, “Yeah, he’s not making sentences,” I felt like an idiot. How could strangers be telling me something about my own son?

The same way a doctor knows how to read a CBC. It’s what they do.

Now I’m looking for red flags EVERYWHERE. I won’t be fooled again. I will figure this OUT and by sheer force of will I will……

….what?

I will accept whatever comes along.

Because that’s what I learned from the other doozies. Even if I HAD seen the red flags from Fartbuster and Richard, I couldn’t have changed anything. I can’t “fix” what happens with other people, even my own kids.

All I can do is love them where they are, how they are, who they are.

I am hopeful for Carlos. On the first day he started getting speech therapy, I picked him up and decided to spend some car time working on his conversation skills. The therapist said he needs to learn to express “Yes” and “No” and I could help him with that by asking simple questions. We also want to increase his “mean length of utterance” to an average of 3. So I asked him, “Is your name Carlos?”

His reply? “That’s funny, Mommy.”

Then he started saying his colors in Spanish–he LOVES Spanish. I pointed to my shirt and asked, “Que color?” He said, “Wojo!” I said, “Si! Mi camisa es roja!” Then he said a few more color words. I was at a stop light, so I picked up my knee and pointed to my black pants. “Que color, Carlos?” I lifted my knee higher and waggled the fabric.

He caught my eye in the rear view mirror and said, “Drive car, Mommy.”

I Should Have Slugged Him: My Husband Confesses to an Affair

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This story contains scenes that some readers may find disturbing. It contains strong language, mild violence, and mockery of a Braves legend. Baseball fans and cuckolds are strongly cautioned. Intended for immature audiences only.

Here’s the story of the April night in the year 2000 when I found out why Fartbuster had moved out of our house. We had been separated for three weeks. I was parking my car in the middle of the garage and already cooking for one. He and I talked every day and cried just about every day. I just couldn’t get it through my head WHY he had moved in with his friend downtown when he was telling me every day how much he wanted to be back together.

So one night he came over for dinner and drama. We were sitting on the couch with our dogs–pretty normal night. He started crying first, which usually meant that I would end up crying most.

“I’m not good enough for you. You deserve better.” He sobbed. I patted his knee and assured him that that was not the case. He was a WONDERFUL person. Ominously, he peeped at me out of the wet corner of his eye and said, “You don’t know everything.”

I didn’t say a word. My heart stopped then raced to catch itself. “What don’t I know?”

“I had an affair.”

Well. What’s a wife supposed to say to that?

This wife, being a bit of a codependent class clown type, made a joke. A bad joke. The dissolution of our marriage happened just a few months after the public meltdown of Chipper Jones’ first marriage–when he confessed to fathering a child with a Hooters waitress. I don’t follow baseball, but Chipper had been married to a girl I knew from college. I had felt so awful for her when he was busted–the situation was terrible enough, but imagine having the world discussing your cheating husband on drive time radio shows and Entertainment Tonight? So to lighten the mood in our living room that night–oh, when will I ever learn???–I said:

“At least you didn’t get a Hooters waitress pregnant, right?”

He froze.

I froze.

Holy shit.

I lifted my hand off his knee. He hopped up off the couch and got a safe distance away before he turned to face me. “Not exactly…but pretty close.”

Every sound in the world was replaced by the buzzing inside my head, a metallic hum that seemed to begin deep in my bones and rattle through my body. “Ah,” I whispered. “She doesn’t work at Hooters.”

“Yeah.” He stared at me to make sure I had put two and two together. Or one and one and gotten three.

He started babbling about how he had cheated but knew it was wrong and he had ended it but then she had turned up saying she was pregnant and that was why he had moved out–to clear things up with her. He planned to come back to me as if nothing had ever happened. As if. His fancy German therapist had pointed out the problem with this logic and had suggested that Fartbuster come clean to me if he ever hoped to patch our marriage back together. I had to know the truth.

And now I did.

Like you might expect, I stomped and screamed and shrieked while he stood there with a hangdog expression in the middle of the living room. The dogs hightailed it for the bedroom. I tore off my heavy gold wedding band and beaned at his head, but I telegraphed my pitch and he had time to dodge it. He scooped the ring from the floor after it bounced off the fireplace and held it between his hands. He was still crying.

I dropped into a chair as my fury dissolved into anguish. It was my turn to cry.

He approached me hesitantly. It’s hard to know if you can comfort someone when you’re the one who dealt the blow.

“Don’t you dare lay a finger on me,” I snarled. Then I hung my head and sobbed. He knelt on the floor before me, so still and just a foot away, my wedding ring still in his hand.

We sat frozen there for a long time, like some mockery of a marriage proposal–him on bended knee with a ring and me weeping.

He reached out slowly and touched my hair. I let him.

I whimpered, “This hurts so bad. …. I want you to hurt like this. ….I want to hit you.”

He stretched his arms open wide and smiled. “Do it! Hit me! I’d feel better if you did.”

We both laughed as he continued to encourage me to punch him. “C’mon…this is your chance…”

“No. I’m not going to.” Laughing with him like that, like old times, minutes after he confessed to pulling a Chipper? My fury flamed back. “I don’t want you to feel better. I don’t want you to think that makes up for any of this.” I snatched the ring out of his hand. “And I’m keeping this. I can always melt it down and make a pair of earrings.”

Well. That was the beginning of a long journey–a year it took us to finally go our separate ways. I think back sometimes to that moment, that choice I made to withhold my fist and not beat the shit out of him. I didn’t want his atonement to be that easy. A punch in the face was nothing compared to the punch in the gut that he had dealt me with his confession. I took the high road that night, but there were many many times in that year when I wished I had walloped him. Swung for the fence. Smashed a tater. Blasted a homer. Belted him. Slugged him. Knocked a four-bagger. Hammer time.

But if I had, I would have chipped away at the awful burden that he had to carry. If I had hit him, he would have walked to first.

P.S. – The ex-Mrs. Jones, Karin Luis, has flown far far above where she ever could have gotten with that turkey. She’s a therapist, author, and speaker who focuses on women’s resiliency and spiritual development. She is co-auther of the book The Fatherless Daughter Project. Check her out on Facebook as “Dr. Karin” or on her website.

Goals, Outcomes, and Daffodils

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As I left my office yesterday afternoon to walk to the car, my heart was equal parts heavy and joyful. Heavy for a friend whose life is in a tangle right now. She’s sad and confused and overwhelmed. I remember those sunless days in my own past and ache for her. I know she’ll figure it out and find herself on the other side of this, but right now she has no place to rest. The path ahead seems so long and dark and she’s having a hard time believing that she will find her way.

The other part of my heart was joyful, because yesterday I reached a goal I had set for myself a few months back. February 4th marks the one year anniversary of Baddest Mother Ever. I wanted to reach 100,000 page views on the site in that first year. That happened yesterday! Thank you so much for reading and sharing and building this community. I feel great joy that I have stuck with this and it is growing.

These are the thoughts that were on my mind when I looked down into the snow and saw green shoots of daffodils peeking up into the frigid air. Those shoots took me right back to a time in my life when I had no idea what my future would look like. My birthday is in late October, right around the time you plant spring bulbs so that they can sleep through the winter and surprise you in the spring. I got a big bag of daffodil bulbs from my mom for a birthday present about a month after Fartbuster came home with lipstick on his collar that first time. I hadn’t told anyone about our situation because I was ashamed of my husband’s behavior. One bright Sunday afternoon, I took my bag of bulbs and a trowel out to the backyard and started planting them around the pine trees and along the fence. On my own and with time to think, my thoughts gravitated back to our marriage, my trust in him, and whether we would ever get back on track and feel normal again. With each bulb that I tucked into the earth, I wondered, “Will I still be living here to see these come up in the spring? Will I be married? Will we make it?”

I tried to bury my fear and sadness with the bulbs. I committed to a goal–I would be in that house in the spring to watch these flowers bloom.

Well, I reached my goal–I was in that house in the spring when the daffodils bloomed, but Fartbuster wasn’t there. My marriage was gone. That’s the difference between a goal and an outcome. A goal is a milestone along the path. An outcome is the result of all those goals…with a measure of dumb luck thrown in. So yes, I reached my goal of seeing the daffodils bloom, but the outcome wasn’t what I had imagined. Simply achieving the goal didn’t predict the outcome.

We don’t always get to control the outcome. We control the goals. I planted the daffodils at just the right depth and I added bone meal. I tucked them into the warming red dirt and I covered them with a layer of pine straw. But that’s as far as I could influence the outcome. Floods or freezes or insects could have taken it from there and the outcome would have been out of my hands. Same thing with my marriage to Fartbuster. My goals, like going to counseling and working on my own self, were reached. Instead of saving my marriage, I saved my self.

So if you’re walking briskly through the cold wind, with your chin tucked to your chest, look around for that little shoot of green. That daffodil has something to tell you.

Sunday Sweetness–Your Wings

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There are going to be times when the place where you were resting safely falls away beneath you. Your job disappears in a reduction in force. He comes home late from work with lipstick on the collar. The doctor calls you personally with some odd test results. You hear, “We did everything we could…”

Or it just dissolves. One day the branch is there and the next day it’s not. Gone.

Those moments are going to happen. But your wings will be there in that same moment.

Wordless Wednesday–Wherever You Go, There You Are

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No matter where you go or what you do in this life, there will always be one person that you keep running into: yourself. You’ll spend every second of your life with YOU, so why not invest all that energy and effort into getting to know yourself?

Fartbuster and the Dustbuster Dustup

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This sucks.

A few weeks before our wedding, Fartbuster and I met with the minister for some perfunctory premarital counseling. In other words, we met her for dinner at Cracker Barrel so that she could put names with faces–it was not a highly formal religious service. Over our chicken and dumplings and mason jars of tea, we swapped small talk. Then I pulled out a copy of the ceremony that he and I had written so that we could run it by her.

She held up an elegant hand and said, “Let’s do a little bit of talking about marriage before we talk about the wedding per se.” OK. She asked us about trust and partnership and fidelity and communication styles. We had been together for five years at that point, and sharing an apartment for two, so this wasn’t new territory. He and I were MATURE–26 and 27. Well, at least we seemed to be in our own minds.

The minister buttered her corn muffin delicately and asked, “Do you feel comfortable when you fight with each other? Tell me about a time when you disagreed on something.”

Fartbuster and I swiveled our heads around to look at one another face to face, and in unison said, “The DUSTBUSTER.”

A few months earlier, Fartbuster had come home from the store with a Dustbuster. I was delighted at his determination to wage war against the cat hair tumbleweeds in our apartment. He unpacked the Dustbuster, showed me how it worked, and I rewarded him with a kiss for his efforts. Then it came time to charge it up. While I was putting the Dustbuster in the living room window sill, right next to an empty outlet, I heard him bumping around in the galley kitchen.

I poked my head into the narrow kitchen (there wasn’t room for both of us) and asked, “What are you doing?” He had a couple of screwdrivers and a mounting bracket laid out on the counter….right next to the stove top.

“I’m putting up the thing so we can hang the Dustbuster in here.”

“In the kitchen? Right next to where we cook? It will be dripping dust and cat hair all over the place!”

That’s when he presented his rationale: “It’s a small appliance, and small appliances go in the kitchen.”

I spluttered, “It’s a vacuum cleaner and vacuum cleaners go in the laundry closet! Or the pantry! We can even leave it in the window behind the curtains. But NOT next to the STOVE.”

And that was the moment that things took a turn for the…mature. He slammed the tools down on the counter and shouted, “IT ALWAYS HAS TO BE YOUR WAY!!! WHY DO WE ALWAYS HAVE TO DO IT YOUR WAY? I’M HANGING THIS DUSTBUSTER RIGHT HERE. PERIOD.”

Oh. Hell. Naw.

“My way?” I screeched. “I’ve given you three different options and you’ve given me ONE. One that’s STUPID. So who’s really insisting on having it their way?”

We glared at each other like it was high noon in a spaghetti Western.

That fight went on for DAYS. Sniping, carping, bitching and moaning. That was the way we did things. After a while, we forgot to stay mad about it but the issue never got resolved. The Dustbuster and its charger stayed right there in the window sill until we moved six months after the wedding.

Now that I’m older and wiser, I know what I should have done. When a man gets into that “You’re not the boss of me” zone, there’s not much way to argue him out of it. Even with three well-reasoned alternatives, an installation diagram from the manufacturer, and a copy of Better Homes and Gardens “10 Clever Places to Hang a Dustbuster BESIDES the Kitchen!” you’re not going to win.

I should have kept my mouth shut, let him hang the Dustbuster over the stove, then served him plate after plate of spaghetti and hairballs until it was HIS IDEA to move the damn Dustbuster.

My wise friend, Susan, shared a great piece of advice about getting husbands to do stuff around the house: “You can either tell the TO do it or HOW to do it, but you can’t tell them both.” Of course this might be why there is a stack of lumber in her dining room.

So…I’m dying to know. Do any of you have a Dustbuster hanging over your stove?

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