One-Eyed Men

In a land full of blind men the one-eyed man is king, isn't that how the saying goes? People, this sorry State is a land full of blind men, and it's looking more and more like I am going to have to settle for someone with one eye.

I am on match.com. Yes I know it's stupid. But what the hell. There is no one I want to date at work, and I don't do anything BUT work, so how am I supposed to meet anyone? But the pool of men even on this online site is pathetic. I keep getting "winked" at by men in their 50's, or boys under 26, or guys with missing teeth and all over body tattoos. Or nice looking guys with a high school education and a job in construction. Or even slightly compatible guys, except for the fact that reading their profile is like chewing cardboard it's soooo boring.

I'm good looking, I have an interesting job, I'm smart, well-educated, well-traveled, and well-rounded. Am I not a catch? Is there no similarly interesting man out there for me?

I decided to go out with this guy who seemed alright. We went out for a beer at a local pub, and from the instant he walked in the door I was certain the night would end with a handshake. Thank God for the Beer.

And the thing is, it's not like there was anything specific that was wrong with him. I mean apart from the fact that he didn't make eye contact, didn't seem to like his job or know what he really wanted out of life, and he hadn't had a serious relationship in five years. We made small talk, but it was uncomfortable. He just wasn't my type AT ALL. I really hope I don't have my standards up to high. But then again what's the point of divorcing your husband if you are just going to lower the bar?

A few weeks ago I had two dates with a cute and rather successful guy, who frankly wasn't really up to my level intellectually (And that is not a snotty comment - he saw the books on my bookshelf and said "have you actually READ all of those?" I mean, come on.). But the deal breaker was not a lack of enthusiasm for books, it was his lack of finesse in the romance department. What good is a cute one if he can't kiss?

I was talking to a friend the other day who also got divorced. She lives in Las Vegas now, where she is a lawyer. Funny huh? Law in that lawless place? Anyway, she told me that she is incredibly happy, but that she has seriously lowered her standards. And I just wanted to scream. In what way should I lower my standards? Should I shoot for older, less attractive, less intelligent, or less considerate first? If I lower the bar in one category significantly can I keep the other ones high? Ugg.

I am starting to think I would be better off investing the same amount of time in a marriage counselor a psychotherapist and a box of nicorette (my husband smokes which is a disgusting filthy habit that absolutely turns me off). Or maybe a sex therapist is all we need. Hmmmmm.

Diary of the Anti-Mommy

I don't think it would be fair to say that I never wanted to have children, but I definitely resisted and rejected the mommy label for most of my adult life. I always found all the swooning of my female friends over new babies to be nauseating. It seemed to me that feminism had amounted to nothing, if the only thing bright, and over-achieving women really wanted was to do was watch baby Einstein videos and subject all their friends to unrelenting descriptions of their child's perfection and brilliance. While everyone else was goo-gooing and gah-gahing, I have been rolling my eyes.

I like kids, but isn't it possible to have an identity that is more than just a future wife and mother? Isn't it possible to have a child eventually, and still be true to who you were before you and hubby made a mini version of yourselves?

This attitude has generally earned me the reputation of the anti-mommy. Baby hater. Nanny-Nazi. Whatever. My mother and everyone else decided long ago that just because I refused to start buying baby clothes and toys and furniture in my 20's for a child I had not yet conceived, or planned to conceive, that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, and that I would inevitably be one of those pathetic and lonely career women who never become fully-fledged females through the miracle of conception.

Little do they know that I have conceived not once, but twice, with two different men.

The first time I was 25. My husband and I weren't yet married, but we had been living together for several years. I had been on the pill since the first time I had sex at age 18 – but my Aunt had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer, and I suddenly became very worried about what all those years of hormones might be doing to my body, and I decided to go off the pill. I figured we could use condoms. That did not go over well.

This is something that I really do not understand. Some men have absolutely no problem using a condom. It's the most natural thing in the world. They keep a few on hand, they know how to put them on and take them off without a big to-do. An then there are other men who would rather forgo sex altogether than allow a micro-thin layer of latex (or whatever they are made of these days) to separate you. All I want to say is, REALLY, is it that bad? Can it possibly feel that different? And if it desensitizes you enough that it lasts a little longer, is that such a bad thing??? I think not!!

Anyway, the man who would eventually become my husband fell into the latter category. He wouldn't even buy the damn things because he said it was too embarrassing. So I went and bought them, and reminded him, that it must have looked far worse for me, a single girl, to be buying the jumbo pack of condoms at CVS than him. Still he resisted. Putting it on was a process. He didn't like the interruption. I insisted a few times and then they sat in the drawer unused. Our de-facto birth control became the withdrawal method.

Now if there is anyone out there reading this who is under the slightest misconception that you can successfully use the withdrawal method for any real length of time to avoid getting pregnant, let me clear things up: It absolutely does not work. Little sperm leak out before the big moment and find their way to your eggs. It might not happen the first few times, but eventually, it will. It happened to me.

I remember wondering what the hell was wrong with me. My breasts were incredibly sore, and I suddenly had the worst heartburn I have ever felt in my life -- all the time. I wasn't nauseous, but my whole body felt sore. My skin hurt all over, like I had the flu, and then suddenly I realized I was late. I home pregnancy test later left no doubt.

I cried at first. I had all these big plans. I was in graduate school. This was not the way I wanted to begin a family. I had always been a little self conscious about my origins – so many of my friends from high school already had children, many out of wedlock. I thought I was better than that. I didn't want to conceive the white-trash way. I wanted a wedding, and a family I planned.

But at the same time, I wanted my future husband to want it. I wanted him to tell me he would love to have me have his babies. I wanted him to encourage me to keep it. I know that sounds crazy and stupid, but if there was one person I wanted to have tell me that this was not the end of the world, it was him.

However, he felt differently. He had just started a new job. He had plenty of ideas about how he wanted to use our new financial resources, and raising a baby wasn't one of them. Terminating the pregnancy was actually his idea.

It's not like he really twisted my arm or anything. I knew this wasn't the right time. I knew I wasn't ready to be a mother and we weren't ready to be parents. But I think I felt like he should have been ready to shoulder the burden, since this "mistake" was his fault. He pressured me into being careless. He took no responsibility for preventing this child from being conceived, and now he wasn't ready for the consequences of his actions. I felt hung out to dry, and I suddenly realized how when it comes to a woman's body and her fertility, there is no one looking out for it but her. That in the end, even the most well-meaning and loving men can't think farther then the tip of their penises. And now I had to have an abortion. All because HE refused to wear a condom.

There was not that much to the procedure itself. He came with me. He held my hand. I was sedated, it was over quickly, and there was some bleeding and cramping for the next few days. I didn't have any complications. I didn't have any horrible and lasting guilt over what I had done.

But what did leave a lasting impression on me, was the shame and the secrecy of the whole thing. I always imagined that women who had abortions could just go to their doctor. That the procedure would be treated with integrity and respect. That it was a choice every woman had a right to make, and would be treated that way. I was in for a very rude awakening. The clinic I had to go to was only open for a few hours on certain days, and the protesters knew the schedule. They greeted you with guilt at the door. The waiting room was cold and sterile, and the doctors tried not to smile. I remember trying to lighten the mood a little and joking to the doctor I said "Well I guess this isn't the happiest thing you get to do." He looked at me very seriously and said, "Well someone has to." He was right. A lot of doctors won't do it. It was nearly a new millennium, and yet when it came to getting an abortion it was clear we weren't that far away from coat hangers and illicit midwives in back alleys. It's a knowledge that has haunted me ever since, and I am grateful that I still had the power to control my own fertility.

It's fair to say that that experience put the first kink in our relationship. I went back on the pill and less than a year later we got married. There would me no more babies for us, and perhaps it was a good thing. From that point forward the relationship began to unravel. And then ne day I realized I wasn't 25 anymore. I am nearing 35, and the window of opportunity was closing.

Now perhaps it's nothing more than age and the ticking of the proverbial biological clock, but lately, an affinity for Desitin, pastels, and talcum powder has begun to assuage my aversion to childbearing. I am suddenly looking at rocking chairs and wondering where they would fit in my apartment. I find myself admiring vintage highchairs in antique stores. I wonder what it would be like to feel a baby summersault in my belly, or to have an infant instead of a man suckle at my breast. I look at women with infants and toddlers and find myself longing for one of my own.

The irony of the fact that I now have no one to have this would-be child with has not escaped me.

The transformation didn't happen overnight, but a pivotal moment occurred when I discovered I was pregnant with Berlin's baby. That conception was the result of complete and utter carelessness on our part. I had stopped the pill again altogether years ago when my husband and I stopped having sex. When I sought affection outside our marriage, I used a combination of a diaphragm and condoms (without fail). But Berlin and I were careless from the start. That first night we didn't use any contraception – not even the faulty withdrawal method. I had started my period that afternoon and when things got heated that night I had to tell him maybe the timing wasn't the best for a first encounter. But we were both rather keen on each other, and it sure felt right. When I disclosed the reason for my hesitancy his exact words were "we can work with that." I guess we both knew that chances of babies were very low given the timing and so we took the risk. After that I insisted we be more careful, but then, one night, exactly 11 days later, in the throws of passion we threw caution to the wind once again.

It was nothing short of idiotic. It was exactly what we would have done if we were trying to get pregnant. And the next day I just knew. The timing was too perfect. The night was too perfect. I knew I was going to get pregnant.

Now here's where I have to admit, that there was a part of me that did not think this was entirely a bad idea. There was a part of me that had already decided, perhaps even in the heat of the moment, that having a baby with Berlin would not be the end of the world. It might even be nice. Yes, so I had known him 11 days. So what? The sex was great. He was great. I really liked him. And you know what? I was ready to have a baby, even on my own.

But I also knew that this was insane. And I felt like maybe this would be unfair to Berlin, who while an equal and enthusiastic partner in this irresponsible sex, might not want to have a child as much as I did, and he would not be around to be a father to it, seeing as he was moving to Germany to chase after Marion – who I still believed to be more of a casual infatuation than an actual girlfriend. I reluctantly suggested I get a prescription for "Plan B" – otherwise known as the "morning after pill," which is basically a big dose of birth control hormones. Supposed to be something like 60% effective if you take it within 3 days, it seemed like the prudent thing to do. But getting it proved more difficult than I anticipated, and I when I finally took it on the third day I looked at the pills and thought, "I don't really want to do this." I sort of wish I would have listened to my instinct instead of the rational part of my brain that said to be responsible. I took the pills and waited.

The next several week were torture. I immediately developed sore breasts, and some nausea and heartburn. I was pretty sure it hadn't worked. But I took three home tests and they all came back negative. And then I got my period. Or what I thought was my period. I figured it must have been the hormones making me think I was pregnant. Phew. Crisis averted. It wasn't meant to be.

But a week later after the initial bleeding had stopped, it started again. I knew something was wrong. I took another pregnancy test, and this time it was positive. Shit. What was going on? Berlin was gone to Boston. I decided to wait and be sure before I said anything. I made an appointment to see my doctor.

A few days later I had the pregnancy officially confirmed. But because of the bleeding, she had me go in for an ultrasound. It was really at this moment when I realized I was happy about the possibility of bringing a child into the world. I was lying there with the ultrasound wand inside me, about to hear the heartbeat of the 6 week old fetus. How cool is that? The heartbeat of your unborn baby? I smiled at the thought of the little jumping bean. But the ultrasound remained quiet. The technician was quiet and didn't look at me. Finally she said, "OK we're all done. I'm sorry dear, but I don't see a baby in there. It could be that you are miscarrying. I'll let you talk to the doctor and she'll go over the results with you"

I felt a wave of sadness come over me. No heartbeat. No baby. I'm having a miscarriage? But that would have been easier than what was to come. In an exam room down the hall, the doctor told me the ultrasound was inconclusive – first we had to get some blood tests – test my pregnancy hormone levels over the course of a few days and see what was going on. If the hormones rose, we could rule out a miscarriage – but it they rose too slowly it would indicate the pregnancy was lodged in my fallopian tubes, not in my uterus where it was supposed to be. I went downstairs to have my blood drawn. I had hope. Perhaps this baby was conceived after the initial scare. Maybe this was really early. Too early to see on an ultrasound. The first results showed really low hCG levels. Consistent with a very early pregnancy. Maybe it was all Ok after all.

In two days I came back and had it drawn again. I was hopeful. If the levels doubled, it was a healthy pregnancy.

I was at work when I got the bad news. The levels barely climbed. This was an ectopic. Still I was skeptical. Couldn't there be some mistake? Why didn't they see it in the tubes on the ultrasound? I had read that sometimes the levels are unreliable in the very early stages. "No," the nurse assured me. I should make arrangements to get a shot of methotrexate to terminate the pregnancy.

I hesitated. I decided to get a second opinion. But he confirmed the earlier diagnosis, and even insisted that this was a matter of life or death, not to be toyed with . Many women he said waited too long and nearly died from a ruptured fallopian tube. I cried. I had already decided I wanted this baby. I had already made up my mind that being a single mother was OK. I had already imagined the ultrasound pictures and the birth, and the little tiny fists gripping my pinky.

Berlin was still in Boston. Did I tell him? I decided not to. Maybe later. When it was over. I still couldn't bring myself to admit it was over. I cried the whole way to the hospital. I cried waiting for the shot. It hurt like hell, and I cried some more. I could tell the nurses felt sorry for me. They asked me if I wanted a counselor. I told them no thank-you, and practically ran out of the room, limping from the pain where the shot was still burning and throbbing in the muscle of my right butt cheek. When I reached the parking lot I broke down completely. I couldn't drive. I just sat there in the car sobbing. Sobbing for this lost life inside me. Sobbing for the end of a marriage, the end of my dreams of a family. The idea of a pregnancy – even an accidental one had given me a hope that I could make a family on my own. It might have been unconventional, ill-timed, and perhaps even unwise, but I would have loved this child. I would have loved it and cared for it, and I would have been a good mother. Now who knows when I'll ever be a mother. If I'll ever be a mother. Maybe this was my only chance. I cried.

Eventually I did tell Berlin. I told him in the letter I wrote him. The letter he didn't respond to until I became a nasty unreasonable bitch. But how could he not understand? How could he not want to comfort me? How could he be so dense as to not understand what a profound effect this experience has on a woman? Oh wait, I forgot – even my own husband had been incapable of looking past the tip of his own penis. Men did not get it. They simply do not understand. And the truth was, until that moment in the ultrasound, and in the parking lot neither had I. I had not realized how I could discover I was pregnant and instantly fall in love with a ball of cells. How that, which was not yet a baby, could still be a baby in my mind, and I could already love the potential of it. No man was going to understand that sort of logic. The sort of logic even I had rolled my eyes at all my life.

Feeding the Passion

Last night my husband came over with the dogs, a routine that is becoming more and more common. We hung out and watched TV. I made dinner. Duck with orange glaze and homemade cranberry passion fruit sauce, roasted purple potatoes, saffron rice and black beans. Yum.

One of the things I particularly hate about living by myself is cooking for one. I love to cook. I love food. In my family food is an important sign of love, and I always envisioned I'd have a big family with rowdy Sunday dinners, and a house full of friends and neighbors who would feel welcome in my kitchen and my home – to visit or to stay.

Even though many a conversation in my family was centered around planning the next meal, I never quite had that house full of guests I dreamed about growing up. My life was always a little chaotic on account of my parents divorce and my mom's downward decent into a sort of self-centered narcissistic despair. As a result we didn't really have the sort of home one entertains in.

To be frank, our house was a mess. And I don't mean a little cluttered. I mean filthy. The shower tiles were ancient, a number were missing, and the rest were covered with mildew. The glass on the shower door had been broken – probably in a fight between me and one of my brothers, and was held together with masking tape. There were holes in the doors from fists or other objects being punched through them. The 1970's blue speckled linoleum and baby blue walls were stained and dirty, and almost never washed. The walls were covered with hand-prints and paw-prints, remnants of spills, and childhood artistic exploration with felt pens. The carpets were threadbare – likewise the couches and drapes, which had been purchased before I was born, were tattered showing their stuffing. The furniture had rings.

The refrigerator was always stuffed with a mixture of fresh and rotting food, and the kitchen floor was rarely if ever mopped- perhaps because it was covered with bags and boxes. Every cupboard and closet and countertop was overflowing. Our house was literally filled floor to ceiling with stuff – most of it we didn't need, and if we did we couldn't find it. My mom would go grocery shopping and have nowhere to put the food, so she would leave it (the non-perishables) in the paper bags on the kitchen floor, or in the garage. We had mice.

The biggest problem was that my mom refused to throw anything away. You know that story by Shell Silverstein, the one about Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout? She would not take the garbage out? It was one of my favorites, and I can still see the towering piles of garbage overflowing from her house in the illustrations of that book. That was pretty much my life.

My mother hoards. Pathologically. She saved my baby clothes, my dolls, and all our old toys. She saved piles of children's books we had long since out grown. After all she said, one day, we might want them, perhaps for our own children. The closets were overflowing with threadbare towels and sheets. She would buy new ones, but keep the old ones too. She saved every photograph, and school art project, all the broken and mismatched dishes. She saved old shoes, mismatched socks and mittens, broken alarm clocks and Tupperware without lids. She saved popsicle sticks and baby food jars for future art projects we never did. It didn't matter what it was, it could somehow, someday, be repurposed and therefore was not going to be thrown away. She saved and saved until every space in our hose was filled with crap.

All this saving and mess had a profound effect on me when I was growing up. I rarely brought friends home. I was embarrassed to have my boyfriends pick me up at my house, and usually met them on the front porch.

To make matters worse, my mother was constantly blaming my brothers and I for the mess. She would say how tired she was from work and how if we would just help her out – take out the garbage, empty the dishwasher, vacuum the carpets once in a while, the place wouldn't be such a mess. And we bought it – all of us – hook, line and sinker. We believed that none of it was her fault, and that if we just tried harder, kept our rooms cleaner, helped out more, we might one day live like normal people.

I tried to clean up after myself, but the task was too overwhelming. On the occasions when I did a major cleaning, there was always an enormous fight, as a result of the things that inevitably were thrown away. I remember once I spent an entire day cleaning and scrubbing the kitchen. I wiped out all the cupboards and re-organized them, got all the clutter off the counters. Scrubbed the sink and stove until it shined, and cleaned out the refrigerator. For the first time the kitchen didn't make me lose my appetite.

But the first thing she did when she saw it was go through all the drawers and look for things I threw away. Then she went through the trash and retrieved it all. Then she took everything out of the cupboards I had so carefully organized and made it a big jumbled mess again. She couldn't find anything she told me, and who did I think I was afterall, reorganizing HER kitchen? It was perfectly fine the way it was, and I was one arrogant child if I thought I knew better. That was the last time I ever cleaned the kitchen. In fact I wouldn't even empty the dishwasher after that. I pretty much just gave up and accepted that this mess was my life.

She didn't seem to think the way we lived was abnormal. She still invited out friends in. She suggested we have parties. It was a constant source of shame and humiliation, and she simply didn't get it. As an example of how deluded she was, my senior year in high school, the minister of my church youth group thought it would be funny joke to take a video camera into the bedrooms of different kids when they weren't home and see how neat and tidy they were. Though I was generally fairly organized, my mom let him into my room on a day when it was a disaster. I learned of this little prank when he played his video at baccalaureate in front of the entire class and their families – and used me as the butt of the joke. In contrast to the straight-laced boy with a perfect family whose socks were neatly folded at the foot of his bed, were the piles of clothes on the floor of my closet, the unmade bed, and the desk overflowing with papers. I was, needless to say, mortified, and I have never forgiven this minister, or my mother.

I suppose that makes her sound rather evil. My dad used to tell me that she was sick, and at the time, as a teenager I would get incredibly angry at him for saying that. But he was right. She used clutter (and still does) as a way to remain a victim and avoid having to confront the difficult parts of a normal life. By surrounding herself and us with chaos, she had an excuse not to date again, not to make new friends, not to face the pain of the divorce. The clutter and mess were a distraction that she found comforting – but it also kept her so preoccupied with her own self-pity that she rarely had time to consider how her four children were faring.

Don't get me wrong, she did her best to make sure we were fed and clothed, but beyond that, I don't think she spent much time worrying about my emotional development – and frankly she missed a lot. She missed my having what I now can only describe as a complete nervous breakdown at the age of 10 and beat my 6 year old brother and my dog with my fists in a screaming hysterical fit of rage. She missed it when after a spat over a boy, a girl in my eighth grade class single-handedly managed to turn all my friends against me. No one spoke to me for weeks, and I remember really and truly wishing I could die, and figuring that no one would even notice. She missed it when later that year I become so distraught that I couldn't to my schoolwork and I dropped out of the honors class because I couldn't finish a report on how Alaska and Hawaii became a state. She missed a lot.

Eventually I stopped looking for someone to notice my teenage anguish. I pulled myself together and learned how to take care of myself – since it was apparent that there was no one who would come to my rescue. But admittedly, one of the things I always hoped for was the adult life I never had as a child: A loving family, a warm and cozy home where people would always be welcome, food would always be offered. A place that is clean, comfortable and inviting. I don't have the big house anymore with the guest room, or the happy family, but I still can cook a nice meal.

Still, it's pretty hard to cook anything interesting if you are the only one eating, unless of course you don't mind eating it at very meal for a week straight. And since my husband is still the best friend I have, I like to have him over and cook for him. It's something I know he appreciates, since I am acutely aware that he eats spaghetti almost every night now that I'm gone. It also seems that he is a bit lonely too. He works from home, so he can go days without human contact unless he seeks it out. Over the last several years of our marriage he really began to isolate himself – and it was one of the behaviors that lead to our undoing. He stopped calling his friends and family, and often didn't return their emails or calls. I was always making up excuses for his rudeness to other people. He still has friends, but in terms of day-to-day interactions, I am pretty much it.

So from time to time he comes over and we have dinner. On occasion I will stay at his place or he will stay at mine. Mostly this is platonic, but last night he stayed and well – it wasn't so platonic.

I wish I could say that it was good. It wasn't terrible. But something was missing. There was no passion. No moment of wanting each other so badly we couldn't help ourselves. It felt forced. And the truth is that I just sort of went along with it because I wanted to see what I might feel. I wanted to see if being with him physically could help reignite the emotional fire. Because the truth is I do love him, and if I thought I could make this work, I would. I want him to be happy. I enjoy hanging out with him – and lately he has been more fun. At least I can see he is trying, and that's a start. But what do you do when you love someone, and you are no longer attracted to them? Does attraction come back?

I mean, the whole time he was on top of me I was thinking about Berlin, or William, or anybody else I have been with who absolutely made me lose my head. I was thinking about how I felt something with them that is completely absent from what I feel for my husband now. But I still feel such tenderness toward him, and I at least want to feel passion for him. I want to have all that again – but I don't know if it's possible. And it worries me, if I ever choose to go back to him, will I be giving up passion and good sex forever? Can I do that?

And how is it that sex can be so good with someone you don't love, or who doesn't love you, and so mundane with someone you care about deeply? What the hell is wrong with this picture?

Tonight he made me dinner. He went to some trouble to make eggplant parmesan, which was surprisingly delicious. This is something he hasn't done in a long time, and I know required some planning on his part. I was touched. Really. But when he asked me to stay, I decided to go home. I don't think I'm ready for this yet. I still need the passion.

A funny thing happened...

I got a mysterious facebook email yesterday. It was a name I didn't recognize: Laiali Singh. There was no picture, and virtually no information. The person wanted to be my friend. I started wondering if Berlin had caught on to my little stalking ploy, and was playing the same game. I was determined to outsmart him.

I emailed back.
"I apologize for being so rude but can you remind me where we know each other from? Was it through work? Sometimes people I have met through work contact me on facebook, but its something I prefer to keep personal."

A little later I got this response:

"Actually we did meet through work, but I understand you wanting to keep your Facebook personal, take care."

Now I am absolutely certain that I never met any Laiali Singh. Something is definitely up. And I didn't feel like letting it drop that quickly.

"Gosh, I really feel terrible, but I simply don't remember meeting you. And your name is so unusual I feel certain it would have stuck. Where do you work?"

To which Laiali replied:

"Oh this is so embarassing, but I think I must have mixed you up with another writefromtheheart. Take Care."

AHA!! Trying to back out of this aren't you?

"Oh no worries. I guess I like to think that I am the only writefromtheheart out there! I do have a friend named Belinda Singh in Berlin though - but I guess that's not you. Good luck!"

Now you might not know my *real name* but let's just say it's fairly unique. I can count on one hand the number of other women I have met face-to-face who share my name. I NEVER get mixed up with someone else. EVER. I also do not know anybody named Belinda Singh. I made that up. The point was it sounded a lot like the female version of Berlin's name, who is - as you know- living in Berlin. I figured if it was him he would realize that I had caught him.

The final reply:

"LOL. Take care!"

Ohhh. I so caught him. What else could he say to get out of this gracefully? Every word was digging him a bigger hole.

Now just for fun (and because I cannot let this go), I decided to send him an email from another fake email address that he doesn't associate with me. His email is just his initials followed by a number, so if he really had nothing to do with this, it would be easy to apologize, say I mistyped, and the email was meant for someone else. BUT I made sure, that if he really was the face behind Laiali, he would know it was me.

Belinda-
It was great to reconnect with you. Please tell Laiali I said hello! Hope all is fabulous in Berlin!
Solana


CHECKMATE. Do you think he'll ask for another game or throw the board at me?

Single Momma

Today I have custody of the kids. My husband has finally entrusted me to watch the girls. Yes. Nunu and Aggie are spending the night! Of course Imus is far to attached to Dad, and trotted off behind him back to his place. But my girls were more than happy to stay snuggled up on the couch with me.

You have no idea what a big step this was for my husband. He is unnaturally attached to these dogs. He worries about when they eat, how much they eat, when they, poop, how much they poop, if they have slept enough, played enough, if they look lonely, or sad, or depressed. He takes anthropomorphism to an new extreme.

It's touching really - his devotion is adorable. But it also borders on insane. After he left, he called me on the phone.

"I just wanted to remind you to take their coats off, they don't need to sleep in them."

"No, really?"

"And Aggie didn't want to eat today, so she is probably hungry, so make sure you pick up the cat food so she can't eat it. It gives her diarrhea. "

"Don't worry. They'll be fine."

"I know. I just wanted to remind you."

"Thanks for thinking about us."

"I'll be back at 7:15 to get them."

"OK."

So now we are snuggled on the couch watching the comedy channel. And my kitty Marrian is snuggling with us. She get jealous of the dogs and want to be nearby. Normally she would be off licking herself in the corner and ignoring me, but when the dogs are around she suddenly desires nothing more than my undivided attention.

Life is good.

And it all becomes clear....

SO IT WORKED!!! Marion added me as a friend. The irony. I can't believe how easy that was.

Of course, the first thing I did was check out her birthday. September 1979. 1979!!! I was right. She is 29. Not even 30 yet. A Child.

Can I just say -- WTF!!!???

What's even more hilarious here, and really very deceptive on the part of Berlin, was the fact that on our first meeting, in an offhand remark, I told Berlin that I couldn't even imagine dating someone under 30. He laughed and nodded in agreement.

It went like this: Somehow the discussion came around to children - I don't really remember how, but it may have been that he asked me about my marriage, and I said that one of the reasons I finally decided to leave was that I realized that I couldn't imagine starting a family with him.

"Do you think you will ever want to have children?" I asked.
"One day," he nodded, "eventually."
"Well I guess you'd better get to it, or start thinking about dating someone a lot younger." I laughed.

Remember, at this point I thought he was 38, just four years older than me, not 41. If I had only known.

"The thing is, I can't even imagine dating anyone under 30," I said. "I mean really, what on earth do I have in common with someone in their 20's?

He sort of gave a chuckle. A snort of sorts. He nodded his head and made a noise which I took to mean that he AGREED with me, that he also wanted a partner somewhat closer to his own age. I guess it wasn't an agreement. It was a smirk. It was him laughing to himself and thinking "if she only knew that I am really 41, and dating a 29-year-old."

He NEVER ONCE, in two whole months, mentioned that she was nearly 13 years younger. Because of that first reaction, I always assumed that she was in her 30's. I simply assumed that she had her Ph.D. and was here on some sort of post-doc or sabbatical or research grant. Jesus. When I found out that he was 41, I even wondered if that was too old FOR ME. My husband is 44, and I always thought that the 10 year age difference was perhaps a part of our troubles. That maybe he hit the milestones of his life at points that were out of synch with mine. That perhaps I would be better of with someone whose musical influences were Michael Jackson, The Bangles and Madonna - instead of Pink Floyd, The Who and Queen. Someone who grew up in the 80's, and not the 70's.

But Marion doesn't even remember the 80's. She is a child of the 90's. What am I saying, she is a child.

From what I could tell, it looks like she has her medical degree from Germany, and is doing her residency in Berlin. Interesting. Berlin (the person, not the city) is planning on going to medical school there. He barely speaks German, and yet he knew an awful lot about the German medical school system, and seemed oddly confident that it would not be a challenge to get accepted to this fairly prestigious European medical school.

I mistook this confidence for arrogance. I didn't know he was sleeping with one of that schools doctors. A man sleeping his way into medical school. Hurray for the feminist movement. Europe really is much more progressive than America.