Pancakes Taste Like Poverty: And Other Post-Divorce Revelations (3 page)

I want to be a chick who is good at poker. I want
to be more versatile with my hair. I want to speak
five
languages - at least. I pick them up easily, why the hell not? I want
to wear red lipstick, like, every day. I want to learn how to drive a
stick, just in case.

However, due to my staggering poverty I was not
quite sure how I was going to afford
five
copies of Rosetta Stone software so I turned to the interweb
and
Voila!
I found everything I needed to learn everything I
want!

Free Guitar lessons on YouTube
,
fr
ee language buddies via Skype
.
You can literally learn anything.

But all of those things, while neat party tricks,
are topical. What this conversation with my friend really did was
force me to deal with my Self.

With everything upended and so logistically
difficult I have become near-obsessed with figuring out what in my
soul was so parched that I chose
that
man, chose to marry
him
,
chose to stay as long as I did and now find myself single with three
kids with no education and no job.

About a year ago when I first moved into the
apartment, my stepmom offered me the chance to go to one of those
spiritual, deal-with-your-issues kind of retreats. I went and did
more healing, crying in a room with strangers, than I had in the span
of my life. Issues I'd had for as far back as I could remember
vanished from my spirit. The whole experience was painful and
intense but I loved it because it’s so satisfying on the other
side and it makes me feel like an emotional archaeologist.

I really like analogies and I thought of this one
last night:

Digging deep into your subconscious mind and
heart is like digging for bones.
You see something jutting out
from somewhere deep, curiously dust it off to reveal it. You didn't
know it was there before...and now you do. So you
keep
digging, looking for clues. You know you'll find more.

Eventually you unearth the whole monstrous thing.
It’s the skeleton of a T-Rex. It's massive but it's not whole
so now you have to reassemble it.

You take your time, painstakingly recreating the
monster it once was. Only now it is not a terrifying, menacing
monster. It is inanimate. It is just a shadow of its formerly
life-threatening self. There’s nothing scary about it. It is
not alive
now
. You are not in danger. You can stand there,
with your head right inside the jaws of this once bone-crushing
dinosaur – and feel absolutely no threat. You can
intellectually respect its former potential to kill but time has
destroyed this monster's power.

That
is exactly how emotional archeology
works.

Things happen in life
.
Bad Things. If you experience those Bad Things first hand, there is a
good chance you have to adopt some sort of emotional shield to
protect yourself from complete annihilation. Then you bury the Bad
Thing and still carry the shield just in case.

The only way we can drop the shield is to dig and
find the bad thing – reassemble it, name it, examine it –
and only then we realize that it is no longer a threat. It can no
longer hurt us. It’s friggin’ dead. As a matter of fact,
they are all dead. The
threat
is in the past. And I am
here
,
in the
present
, safe and alive. I can take the armor off. I
can drop the spears. I can drop the shield.

That
is why I love doing this emotional
work. It’s amazing how placid and static your issues can seem
when you realize they are no longer doing you harm in the
present...except in your own head.

The Hole In The Wall –
March 2011

A year later
there is still a hole in the wall. One day when he came over, he was
doing some sort of goofy zombie walk to make the kids laugh and he
tripped over his own limbs and fell into the wall, his shoulder
leaving a massive hole.
The kids scolded him, exasperated that
we'd just moved in and our space was already soiled. He promised he'd
come back and fix it.
But as time passed I no longer saw it. It
was just the state of the wall. The kids stopped caring. And it never
got fixed.
That's the way it is, isn't it?
He is destructive
and we adjust to the chaos until it's so normal we don't even see
it.
Red Lipstick
I'd
always wanted to be one of those women who wore red lipstick. It
seemed powerful and brave and bold and like you didn't have to do
much else to be “put together.” When I decided I was
going to “reinvent” myself after my divorce I made a lot
of noise about how I was going to start wearing red lipstick.
Now
that I have publicly declared that I am going to start wearing red
lipstick all the time, the pressure is on. Many people are curious
about my feelings, assuming I am sporting my red lips, and I hate to
admit – I have yet to start wearing makeup.

I KNOW! It should be the easiest resolution,
right? And yet, I have attached a mountain of excuses not to do it.

“I need to get my eyebrows done first.”

“I can’t wake up early enough.”

Those are my two favorites.

But the strange thing is that I am completely
terrified and I am not exactly sure why.

Let me explain my Red
Lipstick Theory.

Red lips are synonymous with a lot of things:
glamour, power, sex, classic beauty, elegance, Gwen Stefani, Dita Von
Teese…

I’d have to say that lately my Self as
“Mrs. ______” is
not
synonymous with any of those
things.

However, “Jessica Vivian” apparently
was.

Case and point, my senior year quote, under my
thin and beautiful and glowing and hopeful
eighteen-
year
-
old
face was:

“When in haste, walk slowly and make
sure everyone can see you.” —Marilyn Monroe

I. Shit. You. Not.

Seriously NOT the kind of thing a pudgy, mom of
three would say but a sexy ass
eighteen
year old with an ego the size of Kazakhstan? You bet!

But here’s the deal:

I’m divorced. My name is no longer
hyphenated. I am just “Jessica Vivian” again.

So why don’t I feel Jessica Viviany? How do
I get that ballsiness back?
I’m gonna start with the Red
Lipstick. I capitalize it because it deserves that much reverence.

So here’s how it goes, in my head at least:

Red lips are slightly high maintenance and I am
trying to dive into the
I-give-a-damn-how-I-present-myself-to-the-world lake head first. When
one is wearing perfectly lined Red Lipstick, one cannot also wear
one’s pajamas and house slippers to CVS pharmacy
–
like I did this afternoon – without looking
slightly unstable.

Taking the time to make your lips pretty, means
you have to make your face pretty and if you’ve gone that far,
you might as well pick out a decent outfit.

See how that works?

Now, makeup and I have a really spotty past. I
wore it to the prom. I wore it at my wedding. I had to wear it when I
worked at the shady “modeling school” I was working at
when I first met him. I stopped working there about seven years ago.

Since then I have worn it sporadically to work. I
usually avoid it because when some well-meaning member of my family
happens upon me with my face done they usually make such a big,
ridiculous deal about it and fawn over me like I’m an effing
show dog with their high-pitched “Oooooooo, don’t you
look pretty?!”

Gag me.

A few of my friends have said that for them
makeup is a mask from the world. I
wish
I felt that kind of
solace and safety in it. I feel the exact, polar opposite when I’m
wearing makeup. I feel like I am under a spotlight. I feel seen and
exposed and vulnerable. I feel like everyone is looking at me, and
not in the way I like.

How odd.

I am a hammy stage-hog and I don't mind being the
center of attention if I’m cracking jokes but not when people
are noticing the way I look. I wonder what that’s all about…

Anyway, I feel like I have to push through this
blockage.

Nowadays I am beginning to feel that nothing is
as simple as “I’m lazy” especially when there is
this much resistance. You know how much I love emotional archeology.

So I think Red Lipstick is the key to examining
my unwillingness to be seen, my fear of vulnerability, my disdain for
being told I’m pretty. And to put even more pressure on myself,
I am hereby declaring that once I throw on said Red Lipstick, I will
make it my Facebook and Twitter profile pic.

This is a big deal for me because there is not a
remotely recent picture of me anywhere on the internet.

D
eep
breath

Exposure therapy, here I come

Parenthood Is Overrated

Yeah, I said it.

Yeah I got three kids and I STILL SAID IT!

No, but really. I think it's overrated.

I know, as a mom, I am not supposed to say that.
But frankly, most days I don't see what the big appeal is. I don't
see what the appeal is of a lot of things. Marriage, for one.
Parenthood, for another and I've gone and done both.

Now let me sidebar for a minute...

"I'll eat you up I love you so"
is quite possibly the most accurate line ever created to describe the
primal, obsessive love a mother feels for her children.

I sniff my children, constantly, literally
intoxicated by their little dirty sweet stink, each so unique I'm
sure I could smell my kids, like a lioness, if I were blindfolded and
made to identify them.

Sometimes I look at them and the wind is knocked
out of me, I find them so beautiful and so golden. And sometimes, I
squeeze them desperately in my lap knowing that one day they won't
fit, or they won't want me to hold them telling myself
"remember
this size, remember the little hands, remember the feel of the little
skinny arms because they won't be here forever."

That being said: Parenthood is not fun.

How something can cause such feelings of failure
and dissatisfaction and simultaneously be everything you live and
breathe is completely beyond my comprehension. I'm not sure if there
is anything else as maddening.

I've been a mom for eight years. I think I am
doing a good job, mostly. But here are some things about parenting I
have come to realize.

1) The scariest thing about becoming a parent is
not how it changes you, but how it
doesn't.

People enjoy rhetoric, I've noticed. Some people
more than others. It's not hard, here in suburbia, to find a gaggle
of ladies saying things like "Parenthood Changes Everything.”
Well yes, parenthood does change a lot of things but it's doesn't
change as many as you would like.

I have always cussed like Sam Kinison - from the
time I was about
eleven.
Terminator 2
came out and little Eddie Furlong with his floppy, 90s hair was the
cussin'-est little, scooter-riding bad boy. I thought he was awesome.
I started cussing at will. I even remember the group of kids I hung
out with in elementary school, all the kids whose moms actually had
jobs, who had to stay in after school care - all delighting in this
new form of expression I had made available to all of us. It wasn't
long before we were all exclaiming "shit!" during dodgeball
and calling each other "jackasses" on the monkey bars.

That didn't change as I grew up. And now I have
kids and I am a cussing mom.

I don't cuss
at
them, typically, but I
cuss around them. And now, they have potty mouths. Case and point:

Child #3, my mini, keeps climbing out of bed with
reason after reason to NOT go to bed. Exasperated, I exclaim:

"Young lady, I don't give a damn, you need
to get in your bed!"

To which she responded, "I'll give YOU a
damn!"

Parenting fail; yet funny
nonetheless.
And thankfully none of them do it in public or at
school and know not to cuss around their conservative family on their
father's side...shit, I could only imagine.

So you see.

You're a mom. You still cuss. You still have a
short tempe
r,
maybe
even
shorter. Or you are not as
active as you said you would be. Kids don't come out and wave a magic
wand that completely changes your personality or your husband's. Just
FYI.

You're still lazy. He still watches porn. You
still smoke. He can still spend
six
hours playing X-Box. Come to terms with this now.

2) Almost every mom as had an "Angry Mom Dr.
Phil Hidden Cam" moment.

It is unnerving watching those shows, with the
screaming moms throwing tantrums. But here's what people don't
realize:

Sometimes the mommy meltdown is an effective
strategic
ploy. Here's how I use it:

The kids are fighting like crazy. I have tried
every legal discipline strategy imaginable: time outs, quiet corner,
writing "I love my sister" 100 times, moving a paper clip
on a naughty chart - all that obnoxious, exhausting crap. But still
it continues:

"He took my toy!"

"She called me stupid!"

"She hit me first"

"I hate you!"

"I HATE YOU!"

That's when I cue the mommy meltdown. It usually
goes like this.

“YOU ROTTEN CHILDREN ARE DRIVING ME UP A
GODDAMN WALL!!! EVERYONE GET IN YOUR ROOM! DO. NOT. MAKE. A. SINGLE.
SOUND! NOT ONE! NOTHING!!! UNTIL TOMMORROW!!!"

Then I hear them all gasp and giggle and whisper

Mom has gone mad
, they think.

We should do something nice so we can get the
hell out of this room
, they plot.

Usually at this point, they work together to
clean the room to perfection
–
a
love offering to buy their freedom. Mission
doubly
accomplished. The kids are friends again
and
they cleaned
their room.