My mother always wanted me to be a nun. Ha! Fat chance! I met Gary at age thirteen, Rick at sixteen, then Michael when I was eighteen and it was all down hill from there. I was good until I couldn’t stand it any longer. I became bad, which honestly, made me even better. Much to my parent’s relief, after high school I took a job as a secretary and moved into a third floor apartment in an old Victorian home. I soon started dating a nice Jewish boy whose parents wouldn’t allow me in their home. My Catholic upbringing apparently threatened their hold on their little boy so, to get even, I taught him to say the Act of Contrition. I made him say it every time, you know what I mean? He introduced me to bagels and lox and I educated him about cardinal sin. I went on like that until my biological clock starting ticking out of control at about age twenty-five. That’s when I met HIM; conservative, charismatic, highly educated HIM. My mother loved HIM so much I think she wanted to marry HIM. She prayed for me to settle down, keeping her rosary on the kitchen table as a sign. HE was almost ten years older than me and worked in advertising for a Fortune 100 company, made great money and had a wonderful sense of humor, but his sperm was the attribute I was most concerned with; tick tock, tick tock.

“Oh dear, God, please save Lois’s soul,” my mother would commune with God while dusting the furniture, sweeping the floor or cleaning toilets. I didn’t actually have to hear her say it verbatim; it was just something I knew. I could feel it. Her prayers were soon answered when HE and I were married, white dress and all. Nine months after the wedding our daughter was born. My mother was counting the months in case she had any explaining to do, and four years after that, my son popped out. I was happy, but my mother was elated. She was there every step of the way watching over everything I did and critiquing it all.

“Lois, why are you making HIM fold the laundry? After all, doesn’t he already have a job?”

The kids grew up and as the years teetered on. HE and I touched each other less and less. There were no hugs at the kitchen sink and no kisses good-bye when he left for work. Our love making became practically nonexistent.

“How is it possible for a person to be this unbearably lonely while living with three other people and a dog?” I cross-examined myself. It was beyond me.

“Get a grip, girl!” I even scolded myself, “Stop whining, your kids are healthy, you don’t have cancer, and you have the best damn shoes in town!”

I’m a traditionalist, a romantic. I can’t help myself. I yearned for those qualities in a relationship that my marriage was lacking; true friendship, trust, and intimacy. I was hurting. Honest to God, there were times when I could actually feel the pain in my gut. I begged him to go away with me, but his excuse was that he traveled so much he had no desire to leave the house. We had no alone time. I was a time bomb ready to detonate. I missed the old me, spunky, spirited and adventurous. HIS rejection emotionally ripped my heart to pieces. HE and I lived together for years without making love, not just one or two or three years, but nine fucking looooooong years without making love; day after day, night after night, hour after hour, sleeping with our backs to each other. One day I took a hard look at myself in the mirror. Was it me or did my face look lopsided? I leaned in and tilted my head from side to side under the light trying to get a closer look.

"Uh!” I gasped, “Definitely lopsided!” I concluded. I had been sleeping for so long on the left side of my body that I insisted HE switch sides of the bed with me so the wrinkles around my eyes would have some symmetry to them. This is true! I swear to fucking God! There is nothing as sad as watching a marriage fall apart piece by piece, crumbling like stale cake to the floor. You want it to taste like it did when it was fresh and moist and the frosting was soft not crusty, but you can’t save it. I struggled for years, an eternity, trying to figure out if I had the tenacity to venture out on my own since I had been “kept” for so long. I was afraid; afraid of losing my comfy lifestyle, afraid of the legacy of hurt it might leave my children, and afraid of what other people would say, especially my own sainted mother. I was too humiliated to admit I had failed to live up to not only her expectations, but my own as well. The guilt, the shame; it all scared the hell out of me. I was no longer able to live or breathe in the empty, hollow void our marriage had become. If I stayed any longer I knew there would be no hope, no hope for being happy, no hope of finding love. I needed hope. I lived for hope. Tears flowed every day of my life, unmanageable tears. I’d be doing simple tasks like driving home across the bridge, standing at the sink washing dishes or walking our dog, Abigail, and my heart would creep up into my throat and my face would be flooded with tears. I knew all this crying wasn't normal. Was I depressed I wondered, thinking of my friends, Sue, Barb and Laura, who all joked about their happy pills. Better yet, maybe it's "the change!" Maybe I was just slowly going crazy in my pre-menopausal years. I tried to laugh.

That chilling thought evoked my memory of Mrs. Rochford, the woman who lived across the street when I was in high school. I remembered watching Mr. Rochford as he stepped out onto his front porch, gently wrapping his arms around his wife’s shoulders and directing her back into their home. She’d been standing out there in a daze slowly disrobing and was down to her bra and panties by the time he found her.

“Some women just don’t handle “the change” well, dear,” was my mother’s explanation as she scooted me into our own home. I feared it was my turn now. But, I knew it wasn’t depression or menopause. I knew my emptiness had more to do with the Viagra I found in HIS travel bag and the e-mails I discovered on our computer. I’d lost my spirit, but I made a pledge to myself that I would get out into the world and find it again. I filed for divorce while HE was on a business trip. I walked into the lawyer’s office, took a seat in one of his fine leather chairs and wrote out a check for the three thousand dollar retainer fee. I instantly stopped crying. It was an act so empowering, I sensed it was magical. I left his office standing up straighter and feeling more confident than I had in years. The karma fairy had taken over and I was on my way to being single for the first time in twenty-five years. I drove home without so much as shedding a tear. I was a woman on a mission and immediately started packing my most cherished possessions: my grandmother’s Havilland china and Waterford crystal, my favorite jewelry, the children’s baby books and the French press coffee pot which I had actually purchased in France. I boxed them up and hauled them over to my mother’s attic because, at that point, I had no idea where I was going to land. I left HIM our wedding album, his mother’s silver and all of the Christmas plates his brother had given us. I even let him have the entire contents of the garage, which I lived to regret. The realization that I might need to caulk something or need a putty knife didn’t hit me until HE was gone, long gone.

My mother was shaken at first, but when I told her about the Viagra and the e-mails her reaction surprised me. She became so angry at HIM that she never once doubted my decision to leave him. She’d finally seen a side of him I’d kept hidden from her all those years. Her main concern now became her grandchildren. She instantly mailed each of them holy cards; one of St. Nicholas, Patron Saint of Children, and one of St. Joseph, for protection. I moved into a smaller home after the divorce. In the confines of my box, I was free, free to do as I pleased, come and go as I wanted and not be hurt by anyone any longer. I’d come a long way, but I knew the person I needed to learn to love the most was me. The year following my divorce was the worst year of my life, to put it bluntly. It was surreal. Have you ever been trapped in a downpour, unable to find shelter? That’s what it was like, I was caught up in a storm and there was no protection. I think back and really, it wasn’t the divorce itself that was so unbearably painful, but the aftermath that nearly did me in. It was like a trail of destruction, or as my dear mother would refer to it, “a valley of tears.” The divorce tore our family apart, literally scattering us all over the planet.

I filed for divorce in early February and by September, my divorce, our divorce, the entire family’s divorce, was final. Exactly two days after my forty-ninth birthday, with a heavy heart, I loaded up my car with suitcases, duffel bags and backpacks. I drove in the dark wee hours of early morning with my only daughter, twenty-one at the time, out to the local airport. I was reluctantly putting her on an airplane to West Africa. HE was waiting in the airport lobby when we walked in. While standing in line waiting to check her baggage, I held her in my arms and we cried. We’d laugh, and then we’d cry some more. I knew I probably would not see her for over two years, possibly the longest two years of my life. She decided her senior year of college to join the Peace Corps. Apparently since she couldn’t save her parent’s marriages she felt the need to try saving the rest of the world. West Africa seemed to me to be a very scary place; lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my! I cried for days. I cried for nights. When I stopped by my parent's for some coffee and some comfort, I noticed my mother's rosary was back out on her kitchen table.

Three weeks later HE took a new job, which unbeknownst to me, had been in the works through most of our divorce proceedings. The truth became clear to me now. I finally discovered the real reason he had been so agreeable to so many things. HE up and ran away to Asia, leaving our very pissed off eighteen-year-old son. It also meant leaving me with the difficult task of dealing with our son's anger over the divorce, plus his feelings of desertion by his sister and now, his father. The two people our son loved most had left him, moving to other continents entirely. Not long after my ex-husband’s move to Asia, just before Thanksgiving, I found Abigail lying in my back yard unable to move. She had been my faithful companion, my confidant for nearly fourteen years. I slumped down and knelt over her. She looked so beautiful, so peaceful. Every ounce of emotion I had left in my body came pouring out. All of the sorrow I kept hidden deep inside over the last ten years came retching up. I lost my best friend in the whole wide world; the only one who I knew loved me unconditionally. The process of abandonment was not yet complete for within six months it became my son’s turn to steal away and off he flew to Las Vegas to attend college. The penance I was paying for my divorce seemed never ending.

“Who goes to college in Las Vegas?” I questioned him wondering if it was even possible to graduate from college in such an environment.There was no holding him back. He, too, had suffered the agony of abandonment and now felt the irresistible desire to spread his wings. Again, I drove to the airport in the early morning hours, stood in the baggage line, and put my last child on an airplane. It was numbing. I could feel the hole where my heart was meant to be. What was I going to do now? The divorce had taken its toll, and not just on me. It had affected every member of our family in one strange way or another, and over a year later, it was still affecting us all. I was utterly and completely alone. I hunkered down in my box.

I would venture out shopping to the grocery store or the bookstore and run into friends and acquaintances who somehow missed the fact that HE and I had gotten a divorce. The scenario inevitably went something like this:
“Hi Lois, how have you been?”
“Good, you?”
"Oh we're good, how's the kids"
“Well, you won’t believe it, but…” I spilled, and the more often I did it, strangely enough, I started to take pleasure in watching their reactions. When I told them that in the last year my daughter joined the Peace Corp and moved to Africa, my son was living in Vegas and going to school, HE and I divorced after twenty-five years and HE moved his butt to Asia, and oh yeah, my dog died, their mouths would drop open.
“Yep, my sentiments exactly,” I’d nod and smile. What choice did I have? I began to adore the looks on their faces and wondered how their conversations went after I was outta sight. I guess I wasn’t embarrassed any longer. I was forty-nine years old when I filed for divorce and I had never so much as written out a check to a utility company during my entire marriage. I never had my own checking account, nor had I ever owned a home in just my name. I had never even lived alone. I hadn’t cleaned a gutter nor mowed a lawn. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to start a weed whacker or a snow blower. I catered to everyone’s needs, only I forgot to take care of my own. I thought that taking care of them was taking care of me, but I was wrong. I should have paid better attention to Oprah. I started seeing a spiritual therapist to whom I bared my soul. I quit smoking over twenty-three years ago, but this was the year I started again.

The first thing I did after my son went off to school, besides get a full-blown security system in my home, was buy a new seven-week old puppy; a darling silver-grey Weimaraner who I knew would, eventually, grow into his long, floppy ears. Before he bolted, my son informed me that if I wanted him to come home and visit, I needed a real dog, not just some “foo foo” lap dog. I decided I needed a Greek God in my life, so I bought one and named him Apollo. Weimaraners always looked so calm and demure in those William Wegman books and calendars, but this puppy certainly had a mind of his own. He jumped on and off the furniture at whim, slept in my bed whenever he desired and demanded constant attention, dropping all of his nasty, chewed up toys at my feet as much to say, “Well, get up off your ass because I’m ready for you to chase me, NOW!”

Still, every day Apollo badgers me, running circles around my house and nudging me with his nose while I sit at my computer, insisting I take him for walks, forcing me out of the house even in the blustery cold days of winter. This, I have come to realize, is a good thing. He has shown his dismay on many occasions at being left home alone while I am at work by tearing up magazines on the dining room rug, gnawing on all four corners of my coffee table and one fabulous brown, Italian leather pump. Apollo taught me to pick up after myself, put the toilet seat down and put all my bras, underwear and shoes where they belonged, which was not on my bedroom floor. He may not be the Greek God I envisioned, but he’s all I’ve got for now.

To be continued…