“Then forget estrangement,” my shrink will say. “But you must make sure not to fall prey to emotional neglect or abuse in future romantic relationships. Just because it feels familiar does not mean it’s good for you. It’s okay to ask for help. And it’s normal to get it.”
One morning, my friend Cindy shows up with a craniosacral therapist, who practices what I can only describe as restorative dark arts on my skull, and when the two of them leave I make a decision: I need an actual caretaker. Now. All of this trash-lifting and dish-washing and dog-walking and grocery-shopping and camp-packing for my son are taking their toll. My body hurts, and I’m not giving it the proper time and freedom from chores to heal.
I look into the cost of a home health aid, but it’s prohibitive. I call Eddie and beg. What if I fly out to L.A. after my son leaves for camp, and you can help me recover during the four weeks he’s gone? The cost of a flight is essentially the same as the cost of one day of a home health aid. “I can’t do that right now,” he says. It would be too awkward if I stayed at his house, which is next to his wife’s, plus his son is out of school and about to head off to his first year of college.
Got it, I say. Totally understand. What if I come out for only a week or two then, and we can just hole up in a hotel in Ojai or something, chilling by the pool? I just need a chunk of time when I’m not doing chores. When someone else is scrubbing pots and taking out the trash.
“No,” he says. It’s not possible for him to be with me at this time, he’s sorry.
What I don’t yet understand is that there’s another woman back in L.A. Eddie and this other woman have planned a romantic weekend getaway to…Ojai. I do not know this at this point in the narrative. I only know that on the morning he left New York, three days after my surgery, he placed my hand on his penis. This felt…shocking? Yes, shocking. In my post-op, Percocet haze, still wracked by pain, I thought about saying, “Postsurgical hand jobs are not my thing,” but I didn’t.
I’m embarrassed by this version of me. Ashamed to even describe her. She is fifty-one years old and still putting up with quid pro quo caretaking.
Finn, the young Texan who used to live in China, calls me from Guangzhou, where he’s now based again, to see how I’m doing. I’m at a loss, I tell him. I can’t seem to take care of myself and recover simultaneously.
“Can you get to Nepal?” he says, and I start to laugh. Hahahahahahaha! Very funny. No, no, he says, he’s serious. If I can get to Kathmandu, he’ll take time off from work to be my caretaker for two weeks. Nice hotels run around $20—$30 a night. Nepalese food is healthy, delicious, and dirt cheap. The Nepalis themselves specialize in the healing arts: sound therapy, massage therapy, meditation, yoga, Reiki, hikes in the great outdoors. It’s the perfect place for him to meet me and take care of me and for me to heal.
“You’re serious?” I say.
“Would I joke about something like that?” he says.
No, I realize. He wouldn’t.
I’ll think about it, I say, and do the math: hiring a home health aide or even a housekeeper to help out with the chores will cost $200 a day minimum. I need to heal. The twenty-hour flight will be horrific in coach, but once I arrive, I can rest. Finn, I know, is a selfless caretaker. It’s part of his DNA. When his brother arrived home from several tours of Iraq and Afghanistan a changed and troubled man, Finn flew home to rural Texas to take care of him and to argue tirelessly with the U.S. government until they found him proper psychiatric treatment. When Finn’s brother was later thrown into jail, on a minor misdemeanor sparked by PTSD-induced rage, Finn flew back to Texas to bail him out.
Over the next week, he’ll send me eight gift packages, one by one, including a portable travel hammock and a slim book I loaned him, How to Love, by Buddhist Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, which he has annotated with memories of our time together. Each gift arrives with its own note: “Deb, Nepal is an excellent place to recover from surgery, or so I hear…”; “Deb, Roses are red, Violets are blue, Nepali foothills are waiting on you…”; “Deb, I hear there are great deals on international flights right now”; etc., signed with private joke nicknames.
I check my airline points and realize I can get to Kathmandu for free with a small service charge. I put a pin in this thought until I get through my custody hearing, which takes place six days after I’m sprung from the hospital.
THIRTY-TWO
My Day in Court (My Afternoon in Hospital)
JUNE 16, 2017
“This is taking too long,” says my still-not-yet-ex, in the waiting room of family court. We’ve been sitting in the middle of this fluorescent-lit holding pen for more than an hour, watching men and women who’d brought children into this world together acting worse than toddlers fighting over the one shovel in the sandbox. But I’d told him it could take all morning, and it’s already taken us four years to get from waving goodbye in front of our house in Harlem to this inner sanctum of family court, plus he’s not the one lying flat on a wooden bench to keep from passing out from pain.
“Excuse me, ma’am, get up! You can’t lie down like that!” shouts one of the bailiffs. I pick up my shirt, and show her the still-fresh incisions, the infected one still oozing. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. Sure sure, lie down, lie down. What is that, a hysterectomy?”
“Trachelectomy,” I say, “but same neighborhood.”
Today—on what would have been my parents’ fifty-fourth wedding anniversary—we are here, without lawyers, dealing with issues of child custody only. Child support will be determined on a future date, with a separate judge; and then the divorce itself will take place in a completely different courtroom with a third judge. Again, all without lawyers. This is all on the advice of Antoinette, a charity divorce lawyer with the nonprofit New York Legal Assistance Group. She’s a friend of a friend who told me, at a recent Yom Kippur break fast, that a pro se divorce (“pro se,” Latin for, “Fuck it, I’ll do it myself”) is not only possible, she has no idea why more people who are struggling financially but are capable of reading up on the law don’t do it. Once custody has been agreed upon, she explained, then child support is decided via a strict formula, and the divorce itself is then usually a piece of cake, particularly in situations like ours where there are no assets to split. Antoinette is not my lawyer. I wish she were, but she can’t be, because even though I’m currently unemployed and paying for rent, food, and health insurance out of my dwindling 401K, my 2016 taxes show too much income to be eligible for charity law services in 2017. Nevertheless, she is a font of good information and has been coaching me through the process via email. I’ve also been spending hours a day reading up on New York divorce law online and watching YouTube videos explaining the family court system.
I look around, wondering if anyone else is here on their own. But we seem to be the only divorcing couple in this hell pit of angry exes who are here by ourselves, without lawyers. Which means I have no intermediary as hand-holder, rule-enforcer, or buffer.
“I’m leaving,” says my ex. “This is ridiculous. I have to get back to work.” He’s now working at another start-up that will collapse in a few months.
“You cannot leave,” I shout-whisper, struggling to sit up. “Today is our court date. This is how family court works. We wait until we’re called in front of the judge, who has us on his docket today. If you leave, we’ll have to reschedule, and it could take another month or more. I told you we might be here all morning. Do you know what it took for me to get down here today?”
Several weeks earlier, in order to avoid paying child support, he’d made a fuss about wanting precise 50/50 custody, and now we’re here to have the judge sign off on our original agreement. I’d begged him at that first hearing: Please! I have surgery coming up that same week! Had we just settled on the custody schedule we’d already successfully had in place for over a year, since his return to New York, I would not have had to come down t
o family court less than a week after having my cervix removed.
I have custody of our son Sunday night through Wednesday mornings, plus every afternoon after school; he has him Wednesday and Thursday nights, then we switch off every other weekend. Our son’s bed sits in his father’s living room, so he prefers to come back to my place after school, as I also have snacks for him and either myself or a sitter to keep him company until dinner. He’s now eleven, so he does not technically need an adult to watch him after school, but study after study points to the adolescent’s desire to have a “potted plant” parent around in the afternoons not as a babysitter, but as a benign presence in the home between the end of school and dinnertime. So when my ex, at the last hearing, had suddenly and surprisingly announced no, he did not agree with the schedule as is, he’d changed his mind and wanted precise 50/50 custody, the judge had ordered a three-week trial run of a new—and logistically untenable—schedule.
You’re right, my ex had emailed me, one day after the new schedule was imposed. He couldn’t actually accommodate 50/50 custody. It was impossible with his hours and housing situation. He wanted to go back to the way we had it. That was working well.
At stake is $608 a month in child support, which will be calculated by a new judge, in another couple of months, as a percentage of our joint income. Until now, I have not received child support, though we’ve been apart for four years. Instead, I’ve been shouldering the burden of our children’s expenses: of having a large enough apartment for all three kids; of paying for camp and clothes and college and food and music lessons and shoes and health insurance and haircuts and uncovered medical bills and computers and MetroCards and all three of their cellphone bills, etc.
$608 a month, which in three months will be garnished from my ex’s salary and placed on a debit card, to be used for our younger son’s monthly expenses, will hardly make up for what I’ve already carried for the family and will continue to carry, but it’s something: a symbolic gesture acknowledging his fiscal and legal responsibilities as a parent.
I am not asking for alimony, although I am technically and legally owed it. Yes, I’ve had to continually adjust my career to be the default then-solo parent, and he hasn’t. Yes, this has hurt my bottom line, not his. And yes, women in America still earn 80.5 cents, in 2017, for every man’s dollar. But I am not—at least I hope?—incapable of landing a new job after recovering from surgery. More critically, I cannot stomach the idea of my ex-husband paying for any part of my personal living expenses or even believing that he does. This feeling is neither logical nor fiscally sound. In fact, it’s idiotic, as I could just use the extra money on the older kids, who have aged out of the child support formula, even though their college expenses (books, housing, clothing, food, tuition) are far greater than their little brother’s. But I value my financial independence more than I value whatever drops of blood I might squeeze from a stone. $608 a month in child support for our little one is a sufficient acknowledgment of a burden I’ve been bearing alone. It’s something. Replacing nothing. “Good,” said Antoinette, when I told her this. Forgoing alimony will make the whole divorce process simpler if I’m doing it without a lawyer. It’s one less battle to fight.
“Precisely,” I said. The less fighting I have to do to complete this divorce, the better. I just want this whole thing to be over. To fast-forward to the part where we might even be friends again. (This happens. Like a Hanukkah miracle, it happens. Within three years, each of us will find storehouses of goodwill toward the other we can’t, on this day, imagine we will ever be able to tap. I will even join him and our kids when he—having finally switched career gears, midlife, to computer coding, a job he loves—signs the lease on a two-bedroom apartment.)
My ex, tired of waiting, stands up and announces he’s leaving. But just as I lose it and shout-whisper, “Are you fucking kidding me? Sit down!”—hardly the worst utterance we’ve heard in this waiting room today—the bailiff calls our names, and we are ushered into the courtroom. Or, rather, the bailiff calls the married name I no longer use but to which I must still officially answer, as my ex still hasn’t notarized the paperwork granting me permission to change it back. The entire process in front of the judge takes less than ten minutes, after which my ex zooms out while I wait another hour for the final documents to be drawn up. By the time my no-longer name is called to retrieve them, my still-infected incision is now bleeding on top of oozing, and I’m feeling something else inside my vaginal canal: a painful tugging, if I had to describe it. The pain is so intense right now, in fact, I can barely stand up. “You don’t look so good,” the bailiff says, helping me stand. “Do you need help getting downstairs into a cab?”
I wish. Alas a cab home will set me back at least $40, if not more. “Nah, I’m fine, thanks,” I say, but when I exit the courthouse and start walking to the subway, I feel like I’m going to pass out. I hail a taxi and tell him to take me to the nearest emergency room, which is luckily only a $7.50 ride from family court and in the same hospital group as the one in which I had my operation.
Because I look basically fine on the outside—the curse of womanhood, with all of our ladyparts neatly tucked inside like Marie Kondo’d T-shirts in a drawer—I’m placed on a stretcher in the hallway of triage in my courtroom clothes and ignored for four hours.
“Hey, sweetie,” I text my son, at the end of the first hour. “I might be late coming home today. Just fix yourself a snack, and I should be there by dinner, okay? Sorry.”
I use these hours on the stretcher in the triage hallway not to sleep or rest, as I should, but to answer emails. There’s no such thing as sick leave or disability when you’re out of work. Since having been laid off from the marketing and PR firm, I’ve managed to cobble together a few gigs here and there, but nothing permanent. I’ve been emailing everyone I’ve ever known or met tangentially who might possibly have job leads, alerting them to the fact that I’m available to do any work at any time, no matter the scope.
One of the dozens of people I emailed that week before surgery was my sixth grade boyfriend, David. David is now a successful TV executive. When he comes into New York for work, we have dinner. “Do you have a script that needs to be written, polished, or given a new draft?” I wrote him. “Do you have a show that’s staffing up? Do you have an idea for a show you’d like to see implemented in an outline or script? If so, I would really appreciate having the opportunity to do any of these tasks.” If I can earn $38,302 in screenwriting income from a WGA signatory company this year, I can re-up my low-cost union insurance instead of paying $2,349 a month out of pocket for COBRA. “Not asking for a hand-out,” I wrote. “Asking for honest wages for honest work.”
Unfortunately, he wrote back, he knows of no job or script opportunities right now, although he’ll keep his ears open. In the meantime, he said, he and his wife Andrea are sending me a check for $10,000 to cover my COBRA payments for four months. “Please accept; it’s really my pleasure to give it.”
Wait, what? What?
I bawled when I read this. He was a kind and mature sixth grade boyfriend, it must be said, putting to shame many if not most of those who followed. In fact, we never officially broke up. The school district lines sorted us into two separate junior high schools, and that was that. Our mothers remained friends, and his identical twin sisters kept passing their hand-me-downs to my identical twin sisters, but I would not actually see David again in person until I was living in Moscow with my soon-to-be-husband in the early ’90s, and he was also passing through. Then he met and fell in love with Andrea, my close friend and former ABC News colleague, and finally I had the good fortune of having David back in my life.
David and Andrea’s generous gift out of the blue will help me survive my recovery from surgery, until I land a new job with health benefits as head writer at the World Science Festival: one of the hundreds of jobs to which I will apply, both from this hospital gurney
and afterward. “That’s a…truly life-changing gift, David. Thank you,” I’d said to him on the phone, immediately after receiving his email. Just imagine, I joked, if the U.S. government would step in when its citizens got sick, like they do in nearly every other first world country, so that friends and GoFundMes didn’t have to.
“Yeah,” he said, “that would be nice, but in the meantime please. Take care of yourself! Andrea and I are worried about you. We wanted to take at least one burden off of your plate.”
Hopefully, I told him, I’ll be in L.A. in a year or so to thank him in person, as I’ve been asked by Darren Star to help him flesh out a new show.
I spot a nurse rushing by. “Hey!” I shout. “Do you have any idea when I’ll be seen? My son is at home by himself.”
“We don’t have a room for you yet, sweetie, so sorry,” and she rushes off before I can ask a follow-up.
I dive back into my phone to apply for more jobs on the LinkedIn and Indeed job boards and to see if there’s any news from Darren on the show. He’d invited me to see a production of Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 on Broadway two nights before my surgery, and it had rattled me. A follow-up to Ibsen’s original, it takes place fifteen years after Nora slams the door on Torvald. In this version, she’s back, a successful feminist novelist, but she needs Torvald to sign their divorce papers.
“What’d you think?” Darren asked afterward.
I shook my head and laughed. “I mean, I loved it,” I said. “Obviously. But it also hit a tad too close to home.”
Our plan is to start working on a pilot for the new show in earnest again after I recover.
He’d come to me with his proposal soon after I left the PR firm. He’d sold a concept for a show to Paramount about a young American woman who moves to Paris, but in the present day, he was quick to add. Not 1988, like Shutterbabe. And she’d have a normal nine-to-five job in marketing or something like that instead of being a war photographer. He asked for my help with the pilot—since I’d both lived in Paris in my twenties and worked in present-day marketing—in exchange for $5,000 out of his own pocket and a promise that, should the show get made, he would guarantee me a job in the writers’ room and a script of my own. Both were critical, I knew, to landing another job in scripted TV, which is my goal.
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