Pancakes Taste Like Poverty: And Other Post-Divorce Revelations (4 page)

Without chaos there cannot be peace, yes?

3) You don't have time to teach it all but
you have to get
clear
about what you
do
want to teach.

My generation, as parents, is inundated with
self-help psycho-parenting theories: Tiger Mom Parenting, Attached
Parenting, Crunchy Moms, Helicopter Moms, Authoritative Parenting,
Permissive Parenting - it goes on and on.

Many parents I know are constantly educating (and
berating) themselves on how to be an effective, loving, nurturing
parents. However, it still seems there are parents out there who are
just...doing whatever. Just doing what they feel at that moment,
willy-nilly, all the time. I don't really agree with that. Here's
what I think:

There are probably 50 qualities you would like to
really, deeply, teach your child. Respect, Integrity, Ambition, Love
of Nature, Grace under Pressure, etc. But you have
time
to
focus on, say,
five to ten
before they
are out on their own. It's as quick as a flash.

You and your partner in parenting have to get a
super clear idea of what traits are most important to you and you
have to discuss, openly, the Issues that both of you are dragging
from your own childhood experiences into your current parenting
practices.

Maybe you were given tons of gifts, but no
attention growing up. Or maybe you got neither, so you drown your
kids with both.

Either way, too many parents simply never discuss
it and spend the precious and terrifyingly brief
eighteen
years they have arguing and
second-guessing
and squabbling and then poof! The kids are gone and that's one more
parched, dysfunctional adult walking around.

It's work. It's hard, hard, hard thankless work.
Sometimes it's crazy hard and the hand drawn hearts and love notes
aren't cute enough. Sometimes you want to take a nice long bath and
let yourself get pulled down the drain, cartoon style - riding that
pipe to a new life in a new place.

But you can't.

This is the life you chose. You have to wear it.
You force yourself to enjoy it. You learn to find joy in the bad
knock-knock jokes and the school plays. But sometimes, when you're
not thinking about "the life you could have had" and your
guard is down, your son lovingly twirls his fingers in your curly
hair, and looks at you with his dreamy gray/brown eyes and says some
romantic nonsense like "Mommy, if you died the whole universe
would move because everyone would hear my sad love cries."

And then you realize that even though your life
is not particularly meaningful to you it's everything to someone
else...and sometimes that is enough.

Jesse/Jessica
I
actually wore makeup, like, four times this past week so pat me on
the back. I’m still having a hard time rectifying the really
tomboyish, masculine part of me with the female part of me.

I know what kind of girl I wish I was.

I wish I
were
the
kind of girl who got her nails done, who was smallish and smelled
good all the time, who wouldn’t think of leaving the house
without makeup, who cowered into some alpha-male’s side during
horror movies. But I am soooooooo not that girl.

I stink most of the time.
My nail polish is always chipped. I hardly ever leave the house
with
makeup. And I am pretty sure I have never dated a male who didn’t
secretly want me to be his mother, forcing me into the position of
protector and wound-soother. This wouldn’t be such a problem if
I actually wanted wounded-artsy-whiner boyfriends but I completely
don't!

I like alpha males. A lot.

And girly girls make me seriously uncomfortable.
I feel so awkward in groups of women as if I'm doing “being a
woman” incorrectly. The whole scene is just awful. I just have
a lot of residual masculine energy.

The combination of not having a male authority
figure growing up and my marriage to a feminine energy male has
caused that part of me to develop – that missing male part –
and the rest of me to take a back seat.

If there was a “How to be a Girl”
class, I swear I’d take it.

For now I feel like a really brusque, emotionally
detached, animalistic, bawdy enigma. Maybe, I’ll be able to
cultivate it into something really lovely and attractive one day.

Work

I'm not quite sure how
I'm supposed to make this work. The cost of after school care for
three children is about $900/month. How would I pay that and my rent?
Right now we are coasting on the hundred dollars here and there that
I get from my ex-husband. We eat a lot of beans. I actually
contemplated becoming an escort. I also thought about selling my used
panties on
EBay..
.
Things are
less than ideal.
Big Fat
Liar

I confess. I'm a big fat liar. I
do
want to get married again eventually...I think...

Maybe I just want another wedding - anyone who
attended mine can tell you it was a blast.

But I am so scared that no one will ever want to
date me so I keep lying and saying I "hate marriage"
because "don't get it" and "don't believe in it."
But the truth is that I have fantasized my wedding to various fantasy
celebrity boyfriends
at
least a dozen
times.

But I have three kids.

THREE!

FUCKING.

THREE!!!

I went out to eat the other day with his mom (I
didn't pay for it) to have a delish half sandwich and soup and the
little shit-head line cooks were like "Hey, check it out, that
girl's hot."

Then another one goes "Pfffft, three kids,
man. No way."

OH MY GOD!

Loser-ish line cooks at Random Sandwich Cafe
think I have too many kids to be dateable!?!?

NO! NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!

Not! Okay!

NO!

And then there's the other end of the spectrum.
Say I meet a guy and he's like "Three kids, wow, no problem. I
love kids. I can't wait to meet them."

Then I'll be scared that he's a molester! I mean,
this
is
Florida. I would be
so
suspicious of a guy who
was okay with my having three kids that I would probably turn him
over to the police within minutes.

Ugh, a conundrum.

But apparently, there
are
guys dating
single moms.

My single mom friends go on dates. Personally, I
don't have time to brush my fuggin' teeth let alone go on a date.
Plus I've only been on one that I can remember. The guy hit on me at
Barnes and Noble. We talked for hours after he gave me his number. We
went to dinner and saw a movie.

Then as he was driving me back to my car I
noticed the carseat in the back of his SUV. He had three kids,
apparently aged
eight
,
six
,
and
four.

"How old are you?" I finally asked.

"
Thirty-seven
."

Um...I was
fifteen.

Awkward.

And illegal and gross.

I'm lying again, that's not the
only
date
I ever went on but it was the first. I think my ex-husband took me
out a few times in the beginning.

But then there's that hideous single-parent
double standard.

Single dad =
Aww, how sweet, taking time for
his kids, dedicated father

Single mom =
Same ol' shit

Fuck my life. I think the ideal scenario would be
a long distance relationship that spans decades like in Brokeback
Mountain. Goin' on "fishin' trips" and making out in the
woods and havin' hot, dangerous anal.

(whoa, sorry...got carried away)

But, alas, I think for the next couple of years
my only romantic partners will come with batteries.

And another alas, actually, I can't even keep
those around because my kids are too damn sneaky and I wouldn't know
where to hide one if I had one.

U
gh.

. I miss makin' out.
Sequins and Leopard Print

I was folding clothes with my
oldest child, Jaya (rhymes with papaya, not that complicated) and she
dropped a knowledge bomb on me:

“Mom, all of your pajamas are really
colorful like pinks and oranges and yellows but your, like, real life
clothes are all black and gray and dark blue. It’s like you’re
secretly exciting but don't show it.”

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA?!?!?

Ugh, she’s right!

Sidebar: Am
I
ever right these days? Seems everyone else is.

In my head I am all sequins and leopard and red
and hot pink and punk rock and glam and nose piercing and more
tattoos. But on the outside I am Frumpty Dumpty professional mom in
discount jeans and a wide variety of black, gray or navy
V-
neck
twofer t-shirts.

Sometimes I get
crazy with
a flower headband - always in black though. What the hell is
that about?

I mean it, I’m not about to say something
really deep and inspiring. Seriously, what the mother eff is that
about?

I went shopping today to help look for a big girl
job. Any job that requires me to actually talk to people and actually
wear something other than yoga pants and flip-flops is currently out
of my reach. I’m pretty sure I haven’t had to wear heels
in over a year and I only recently started wearing clothes that
weren’t workout/pajama hybrids.

Anywho, I went to the Maxx – because that’s
what broke, er,
frugal
people do – and I got a cool
Calvin Klein suit. Then I went shopping for some shoes because I
purged myself of all sexy shoes sometime in 2008. I hit the DSW and
found some awesome mustard yellow pumps. They were so amazing. They
were also in teal.

I didn’t buy them. I was afraid to buy them
because I knew I’d be too insecure to wear them. Wtf?

Instead I bought some moderately interesting
yellow and gray leopard pumps – I know it
sounds
more interesting, but trust – they are not.

Guess what else? I wussed out on the red
lipstick, too. I bought several, all of them frightened me. I wear a
darkish mauve-ish color on the ONE day a month that I attempt to look
older than
nineteen
. Lame.

So all the balls and gusto and sparkle I
think
I have has apparently fizzled and I am not, at all, closer to putting
myself together than I was in Feb when I started this idealistic
attempt at reinvention.

Buh.

I need a RuPaul’s Drag Race drag queen
intervention.

A Different Boy –
April 2011
My
six
year
old son is a different boy.
He's still snuggly but he's also
angry. He hits his little sister and he destroys things. I woke up
late at night to find him burning black holes into the carpet of his
bedroom with a lighter he'd taken while his father was visiting. He
draws all over the walls and cuts his clothes to shreds. Thankfully,
at the very least, his behavior at school is okay.
He seems to be
saving all the anger for me.
We often end the evening in
screaming matches and I dig my nails into my palms to avoid spanking
or slapping him.
A few weeks ago he asked to be called by a new
name. He picked “Jacky Jake.”
“But what's wrong
with your name?” I asked.
“I never know when someone
is talking to me. Someone calls my name and I come and it turns out
they were talking to Daddy or Papa” he answered.
He had a
point. He was named after his father and
he
was named after
his father and
he
was named after his father.
My son was
the fifth with his name as if he was part of a monarchy. I never
wanted that to be his name and his father only halfheartedly so but
we felt obligated to and obligation is the love currency in his
family so like a good daughter-in-law I obliged.
“Okay,”
I said, “but Jacky Jake is a bit complex. Can we just call you
Jack? It's a very strong name. Kind of a hero's name. Or a
wily,
charming kind of character in a romantic comedy.”
He
considered it and smiled to himself.
“Okay. I want to be
Jack from now on.”
He paused and looked me in the eye.
“I
really don't want anyone getting me mixed up with Daddy
ever
again.”
My son is a different boy.

Mothers Day
Lamentation – May 2011

So last week was crazy emotional for me.
Specifically, Mother’s Day was a complete mind fuck.

This is the first Mother’s
Day I’ve experienced as a single mom. My ex-husband never cared
about Mother’s Day, so it’s not like I was missing the
attention and affection that most wives experience on Mother’s
Day. You can’t miss what you never had.

But, my ex and I had a really tumultuous week –
lots of drama and fussin’ and all that as we adjust to our new
roles.

Frankly, I really hated him last week. But I can
only spend so much time complaining about my ex before a part of my
brain says,
“Yeah, but YOU married him.”

The guilt and shame and embarrassment I feel for
having wasted the last
ten
years
–
all of my
twenties –
trying
to make a miserable, fear-based marriage work sometimes overwhelms
me. It became especially acute as Mother’s Day approached.

I wouldn’t
be
a mom had I not been
plagued with terrible self-esteem and an insatiable addiction to male
attention. That’s nothing to celebrate.

Yes, my kids are amazing and I can look at the
last ten years and be thankful for that.

But now that I know what I want, and I have
developed standards for what I want in a man – the man I want
may not want
me
—because I have three kids and I am
forever attached to the person who helped create them.