So damn it, am I ever gonna try.
THE CAKE
One morning in that first year of separation, The Ex-husband comes over to my apartment to help me mount the TV on the wall. Birdie’s at my mom’s for a sleepover. After the TV is hung, we sit and work on the parenting calendar for September and October. There are a bunch of upcoming days that hurt just to look at — the day we got engaged, the day we got married, the day he says he first slept with her. I start to cry.
Usually this is the point where he gets defensive, or angry, and gets up to leave. Instead, he tries out this new thing he’s been doing lately — “I’m going to be a good ex-husband because I was such a shitty husband.” Good Ex-husband holds me. Good Ex-husband kisses me. Good Ex-husband lies down with me on my bed in the morning sun. I swore the last time would be the last time.
We still touch each other constantly. He looks down my top or grabs my butt, I run my hand under his shirt — all absent-mindedly. We hang out at his apartment, and I say something sassy. He chases me and I squeal, running, darting around furniture until he finally catches me and throws me on his bed, or couch, or just pins me against the wall and kisses me hard, like it’s 1999 again. Then we just pull apart and continue on like nothing’s happened. But I feel lighter, if only for another half hour.
One day at the end of this first summer, we’re swimming with Birdie, and the two of us splash and jump on each other in the pool same as we always have. Reflexively, I wind my legs around him in the water, and he swims around with me on his back, like always. At one point, he turns back to look at me and smiles. It’s the most real moment of happiness I’ve seen on his face in almost a year. I kiss the back of his neck. I’m the cake. But he’s my cake, too.
Yeah, The Cake. As in You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. In The Ex-husband’s case, he has it, he’s eating it, he’s king of the fucking cake.
“Don’t be the cake!” my friends keep telling me when I tell them I’m still sleeping with him. “I know, I know,” I say, but deep down I don’t mind being the cake. I want to sleep with him because I want to feel him close to me. His familiar scent, movement. It has nothing to do with getting back together, everything to do with the physical intimacy I crave. Also, it’s way too easy living across the street from each other. Part of me knows they’re right. He’s getting everything out of this arrangement, while I get the scraps. But I’m not ready to stop yet. So yes, I’m his cake and he’s mine. We can’t let go of the constant ignition that exists between us, regardless of the harm, the heartbreak.
Meanwhile, I continue to make my way through half the twenty-six-year-olds in this city. Twenty-six. The same age The Ex-husband was when we met and fell in love. Yeah, even without a degree in psychology it’s pretty obvious what’s happening there. But The Babies, they’re all over me! Maybe they can see that I’m a wounded gazelle easy for the pounce. Maybe that’s the same reason guys my own age don’t come near me. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is or what’s happening.
But I’m learning some things. I’m learning how easy it is to make shallow, sexy talk with a complete stranger. How easy it is to line up a time to meet for drinks and then how easy it is to bring them home with me, get what I want … and kick them out. When they leave I cry, but not for them. I cry for whoever this is I’ve become, this opposite of a wife.
CHAPTER TEN
HALF-LIFE
DUALITY
I’m going out tonight and packing my smaller purse. My “dancing purse,” as I call it. It’s the same items every time — lip gloss, cigarettes, gum, a couple of condoms. Who am I? When did I become this person?
The next day, before I go pick up Birdie at The Ex-husband’s place, I dump it all out onto my bed and get my bigger, non-dancing purse. I remove the cigarettes and the condoms, replacing the single-lady things with single-mom things: snacks, a pack of hand wipes, a bottle of water.
Duality. My new middle name.
CRAZY GUY (FORMERLY CUTE GUY)
Oh, boy. Let’s talk about him for a moment. Cute Guy is twenty-six, gregarious, ridiculous, hot-headed. A Scorpio like me. In every other way, not like me. We meet online, and we start a silly email exchange that goes on for days. His grammar and punctuation are awful, but the banter is charged and fun. Eventually, he suggests we meet at La Hacienda, an old dive bar on Queen West. I haven’t been there since my twenties. It seems fitting.
When I walk in and see him sitting there, my insides do a little dance, which is new. He is impossibly cute and tall, with big arms and shoulders that he instantly wraps around me in a big hug, even though we’ve just met. There is an instant spark, a real click. We sit on the back patio and drink and drink. We smoke cigarettes and laugh so much my face hurts. He can keep up with me, my digs and jokes, and it reminds me of The Husband and I when we first met all those years ago.
When we leave, we walk through the crowded summer streets, still laughing. We don’t say it but we are walking to my place. He puts his arm around me, and I’m surprised. I can’t imagine a guy like this would want to be seen with his arm around me — me, an old and damaged lady. I’m guessing you know what I’m talking about, the way we sometimes think the world can see the way we feel on the inside.
So it began with Cute Guy.
After our first fun night together, I actually do want more, I do want to see him again. So for the first time, I lift my one-and-done policy. As summer ends and into the fall, he comes over once a week, and at least there are those three or four hours where I’m actually having fun, feeling good, talking and just goofing around like I’m twenty again. He calls me kiddo, which I adore, since I love nicknames. He breaks into song at odd moments, his smile is great.
When I’m with him I forget all about The Ex-husband. But when he’s gone it’s no big deal either. I don’t even think about him until he texts me five days later and we repeat. Sounds perfect right? But it doesn’t last long. You know it doesn’t, since at some point Cute Guy becomes Crazy Guy. Here’s how.
One night, bored, I search his name on Twitter and find that he tweets at least twenty times a day. I scroll back to the dates we were together, and lo and behold, each time on his long journey home on public transit, he tweeted about me and the things we did. I chalk it up to typical millennial behaviour, and since he didn’t mention my name I figure what’s the harm? The tweets are complimentary at least, and make me laugh both for content and enthusiasm. But it’s still a little weird for me, you know?
I don’t bring it up. We go along as usual. And then he starts to get a little defensive, accusing me of wanting more from him, of liking him more than I’m letting on, of wanting a relationship. I don’t know why he thinks that. I love the arrangement we have. I adore him but only when he’s around. He is not relationship material for me. He’s a wonderful escape once a week, a respite from my crumbled marriage and my role as mother to a demanding five-year-old. I mean sure, I like him, in that he is so good to look at, to smell, to feel normal-ish with for a bit each week. None of that means I want anything more, but the cute starts to get a little crazy.
One night, after we text back and forth for a long time and the conversation gets confusing, I decide to just phone him. He doesn’t answer. But immediately he texts, WTF? Why are you phoning me? like I am a crazy person, like we haven’t been talking through texts for the past hour! He breaks it off with me. A week later I convince him to stop being an idiot and come back. He does come back one more time, then flips out again. He writes me a crushing email that says he has no regrets but that this thing “has run its course.”
I let it go, although I am disappointed. And, shamefully, sometimes I still scroll through his Twitter account. Look, these Friday or Saturday nights as a single parent are alienating. While everyone else I know is out having fun, or with their partners, I am just so alone, Birdie asleep in her room, me staring at the wall, or my phone. So I check out Cute/Crazy Guy’s Twitter account. Sue me.
And then I
realize that he has a blog. A blog where he writes, a lot, about anything that comes into his head. He writes about stupid customers that come into his store, or how he lost $100 at a blackjack game. He writes about women, women he names, and what they do together, and how they misunderstand him, the games these women play, the drama. My heart stops when I see the first post about me. There, on the internet, a fairly detailed description of me and my assets. What he liked about me, the things we did together. And how I was obviously in love with him, and how obviously messed up I was. He wrote that I was a walking contradiction and more trouble than I was worth.
For some reason, I’m the only woman he hasn’t named, which I guess should give me some solace. Instead, he’s given me a nickname, a thing I normally love, but in this case not so much. Because he refers to me as the MILF. It makes me feel a hundred years old. It’s like I get sober in that exact moment. I suddenly stop and question everything about myself and all my actions leading up to this point. All the drinking and sleeping around. What I’ve been through with The Husband has made me into the kind of woman that can now be reduced to an acronym — a joke — on some Baby’s blog.
I Smoked Six Cigarettes Today,
and ate a chocolate bar for dinner. God, it’s like I’ve become Bridget Jones or something.
RUDDERLESS
“Hi honey, I’m home!” I say to no one, any time I walk in the door of my empty apartment after a long day. It’s a little joke I have with myself now. I throw my keys on the counter and say it out loud to the nothing. And then I turn around and just head back out. Anything to not be in that cold, quiet space with its lack of living, breathing beings. I just get the fuck out of there as fast as I can.
“You do too much,” says my father, pretty much every time we speak. He’s right. I do a lot. I fill up every space with busy. Any moment without Birdie, any moment that is now the absence of what was once my little family, without the promise of a new one, I fill with booze or men or workouts or friends. I stay up all night writing. Reading. Moving furniture.
There’s so much space now so I fill and fill and fill it. I do too much and I don’t stop. I can’t stop. I know if I do I will stay frozen like that forever, unable to move, preserved this way in amber, a curiosity for future generations. I’m a woman out to sea, nothing solid to tether herself to for miles in any direction. Rudderless.
THE BEAR
We were on the edge of a cliff. This isn’t a metaphor for our marriage — we actually were camped out on the edge of a nine-hundred-foot cliff in the summer of 2004. Below us was the Atlantic Ocean, dotted with wild and beautiful things I’d never seen before — sea stacks, pillow lava. But I couldn’t see them. For the first time in my life, I was having a panic attack.
I’m an experienced camper, but I’m also from a flat place, so pitching our tent on this cliff with a raging sea below really freaked me out. Also, there were steaming piles of bear droppings, very fresh, all over the place. But there was no turning back. It had taken four hours to hike in and now it was getting dark. We were staying the night.
The Husband was a good husband back then, so he tried to calm my panic on the cliff. We’d been married for almost two years at that point. It was a beautiful time in our relationship — the time after the wedding but before we had a baby. We were best friends, we did everything together, and we hardly ever fought. This edge-of-a-cliff camping was in the middle of a month-long road trip in our little car from Toronto to Newfoundland, the island of his birth. It had been an amazing month, except for this panic attack, me standing frozen in the wind, breathing so heavy, eyes wild.
The Husband coaxed me to sit down. He got out my old transistor radio and tuned it to the only station we could get out there — CBC Radio, the public broadcaster I work for. He made a fire and cooked up some toutons, this traditional Newfoundland bread. He poured molasses on the warm bread and gave me a cup of tea. He tucked my hair behind my ears, kissed my eyelids, one, then the other, and then the first one again. He made jokes about “false advertising” since I was supposed to be an experienced camper. He had it all under control in this crazy place on the edge of the North Atlantic. My anxiety started to disappear, my breathing slowed. He made me feel safe.
That night, we slept in a tent that had to be tethered to a platform so we wouldn’t blow away. I slept hard. The next day when we were back in civilization, he told me why he hadn’t slept nearly as well. In the middle of the night, he’d woken up to the sound of loud sniffing at the wall of our tent. It was a bear. A bear so close he could feel its hot breath on his face. Slowly, The Husband turned on his side and put all six foot two, two hundred and twenty pounds of himself on top of me, completely covering me as best as he could. His heart was beating so loudly, he worried the bear would hear it or I would wake up. After what felt like an eternity to him, the bear eventually ambled away. I slept right through it all.
Five-year-old Birdie loves this story. She loves how he says to her, “Imagine the tent wall is right here,” and puts his hand in front of her face. “Now, I’m the bear, aaaand … snuffffff” — he blows a gust of wind into her face and they both break out laughing. This is the part where I say, “And your dad just put his whole big body right around mom’s body to protect her, so the bear would get him first.”
“That’s right, I did!” he shouts.
That’s right. He did.
THE SWINGS
I never feel more divorced, more alone, than when I’m at the playground with Birdie. Especially in this first year. It doesn’t matter which park I go to in this city, it’s always the same — each child seems to have two parents, one with another, smaller child strapped to their body.
Hon? Can you please get some sunscreen on Pilot or he’ll burn.
Banjo! Come here and get a seaweed snack from your mom.
God, I am being such an asshole right now. But honestly, sometimes I hate these people with their intact families. I hate that I sit here on a bench, alone, pretending to read a book while Birdie plays happily with the other kids. Every once in a while, she looks up from what she’s doing and gives me a wave. I wave back from behind my giant sunglasses, hungover from spending the previous night dancing and drinking and doing karaoke, only to make the sharp one-eighty to motherhood by this afternoon.
Here I am, sitting alone in this park watching blissful domesticity as it buzzes around me. Cool fathers with their beards and skinny jeans chatting easily with their lithe and stylish wives who hold lattes and complain about the quality of Mandarin being taught at the daycare. Why do they seem so effortless? Why are they just married and doing married stuff and that’s okay? If it really is that easy, why couldn’t my own husband do it?
I study them. These couples don’t look any happier than we did. Some of them look less happy even, and all of them look way less into each other than we were. I mean, some of the women sound brittle and exasperated every time they say anything to their husbands. Most of the men seem distracted and uninterested. Hang on, no, all of the men seem distracted and uninterested. Not in their wives necessarily, but in life in general maybe? They all look like they want to be someplace else.
I recognize these ghosts. I do not miss that part of marriage. The way you sink into those roles whether you ever believed you would or not. Now I’m sitting on this bench with less longing, remembering instead the fun I had last night, how I woke up giddy and satisfied this morning. How I spent the early part of today lounging around my apartment, reading magazines and making espresso, napping, writing … all before The Ex-husband dropped Birdie off mid-afternoon.
It’s not too bad a life. I may be settling into it even. But oh, damn them, shit, will you look at that couple? They’re sitting on two swings side by side, holding hands and laughing. They look so into each other, don’t they? And now everything inside of me starts to crumble, crumple. I miss The Ex-husband so suddenly, so painfully, so desperately. I feel the hot tears as they flash-flood my eyes. God, I miss the swi
ngs, the swinging part of love.
Just … Different
Before the breakup of my marriage, the number of men I had slept with, including The Husband, could be counted on one hand with room to spare. As you know, I was in a long-term relationship with each of them, so that means until The Year of The Bomb, I’d never had sex with anyone I wasn’t in love with and who wasn’t in love with me. But now I’ve forgotten what it’s like to experience it that way.
I’ll amend that: I haven’t forgotten, I just miss it.
It’s amazing how different it is when you don’t love the person you’re with. Not bad, just different. The term meaningless sex really does a good job explaining it. It just becomes a function you perform, a function with great immediate results, obviously, and it is fun and exciting, sure. But nothing beats that feeling, the one where you are so full of love and desire at the same time.
This is why when I meet The Man with the White Shirt, everything and everyone else becomes insignificant. When we’re together, it is finally that thing I crave, that thing I miss, that perfect, heady mixture. It isn’t just sex with him, it’s sex, the way it’s meant to be. Or, at least the way I want it to be. I can still have fun, exciting, excellent sex with others, but desire without love just doesn’t feel substantial enough. It leaves me hungry. Wanting.
Other men are just candy, but he’s an entire meal.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE SADDEST OPTIMIST
A PRETTY SAD GIRL
I’m getting an MRI. It’s midnight, in the basement of this old hospital, the one I was born in thirty-seven years ago. I’m alone, about to slide into a tube while magnets crash around me like a symphony of instruments all made out of garbage cans. There’s nothing more cinematic than this moment maybe, me walking down dimly lit hallways into a basement reception area at midnight to get my brain scanned for a stupid disease no one seems to know very much about.
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