When I told Hettie about the time that I’d turned down Michael’s request that I walk in his charity walkathon, I expected her to sympathize with me, pat me on the head, and tell me that I was right not to let a man take advantage of me. Instead, she said that I was confusing selfishness with strength. She calmly pointed out that that’s how I kept him and everyone else at arm’s length. I made it clear to him that I was absolutely determined not to be Mrs. Traditional Somebody. But meanwhile I was expecting the guys I dated to be Mr. Traditional Somebody. My message to them was: have sex with me, take me out to dinner, but don’t ask any deep questions, and don’t ask too much of me, period.
On the one hand, I was deeply insecure—afraid that guys just wanted to date me for my sexy job and who I could introduce them to. On the other hand, I was subjecting men to the same superficial criteria. I wasn’t interested in digging deep to find out their hopes and dreams, strengths and weaknesses. I probably would have been horrified if they’d tried to tell me any of that stuff. I was so used to staying on the surface in my relationships with men that even when I was with someone who deserved more from me and whom I really loved, I just … couldn’t … do it. It felt a lot safer to sit on my fence, never committing to one side or the other. It would take a long time before I had the courage to stop my balancing act and make a decision to really commit and work at something.
Sometimes I think that all those hours I spent in therapy were actually harder than the years I spent doing the wrong things. It’s sort of like the way diet and exercise are a lot harder than overeating. I’d been hiding beneath my layers of scar tissue and self-deception for years, and it wasn’t an overnight process to unload it all. Often it would feel like one step forward and three steps back. A lot of times I felt worse walking out of Hettie’s office than I had when I went in. It was like going in for a massage and getting beaten up instead. I couldn’t believe I was paying good money to feel so terrible. But then one amazing day, I started to walk out feeling better.
Recently someone asked me if there was one moment during my time with Hettie when I discovered that I had it all figured out. But I don’t think that’s the way therapy works, even if it might feel that way sometimes. Instead, I think it’s more like an archaeological dig. At first you’re using a pickax and a shovel, pulling up rocks and boulders, and not really feeling like you’re getting anywhere. Then you get down farther and you start chipping, chipping, chipping until you’re gently peeling away the layers, finally dusting off the last bit of debris until something gorgeous emerges. It’s a revelation, and it seems sudden, but it hasn’t been sudden at all. It’s been a lot of dirty, sweaty work.
Hettie was an amazing woman, and truly a godsend to me. That sentence is in the past tense because she passed away a few years back after battling MS. I still miss her, and after she died, I really wasn’t sure I could go on without her. But then I looked inside myself and I discovered something amazing. She had left me with a treasure that she and I had uncovered together. After all those years of feeling lost in the woods, looking for some magical compass to show me the way, Hettie had taught me how to follow my own lead.
These cookies are so easy to make—unlike therapy, which took a lot of work and tears. They’re also incredibly delicious—rich, moist, and fudgy on the inside, and with a thin layer of crispness on the outside. They are bumpy with chocolate chunks, which sort of reminds me of therapy—because I definitely hit a lot of bumps on the road to happiness. Really, I can’t imagine my life without therapy or these cookies, so I think they are the perfect combination. Go to therapy, have some of these after. Or make these for a friend (or boyfriend) who could use a little sweet therapy themselves.
CHOCOLATE THERAPY CHUNK COOKIES
⅔ cups semisweet chocolate chips, divided
¼ cup (½ stick) unsalted butter
¾ cup packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
½ cup flour
¼ teaspoon baking powder
1½ cups semisweet chocolate chunks
Parchment-lined cookie sheets
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Microwave semisweet chips on high for 1 to 2 minutes. Stir chocolate until smooth.
In a separate bowl, mix butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla until incorporated well. Pour in melted chocolate. Make sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl.
In a small bowl, combine flour and baking powder. Add to chocolate mixture and mix well. Now fold in remaining chips and chocolate chunks.
Using a small ice cream scoop, place scoops of dough on parchment-lined cookie sheets, 1 inch apart. Bake 12 to 13 minutes. Cookies will puff up a bit and look set when done. As with almost all cookies (especially chocolate), it’s better to err on the side of caution and pull them out sooner rather than later.
Cool on cookie sheet for about a minute, then transfer to rack to cool completely.
Makes 60 small cookies.
CHAPTER 15
LATE BLOOMER
My biggest life epiphany came at the oddest moment. It wasn’t a dramatic scene. Nothing extraordinary happened. But the moment hit me like an avalanche and made me rethink once and for all what I was looking for in life.
I was casually dating someone much younger than me. Tyler was a nice guy, but not someone I was having deep, meaningful conversations with. And he was not the kind of guy I should have been spending time and energy on anymore—definitely not after all the therapy I’d been going to. I should have known better, and I suppose I did, but getting a concept intellectually and really internalizing it are two different things. It should have been obvious to me that a young, fancy-free guy was not a marker on the road to happiness for me at that point in life. But no one could have convinced me of that—not my friends, and not even Hettie. I think on some level I believed that if I dated this young, silly guy, then that meant I was still young and silly, too.
One night Tyler invited me to a party at his apartment. So I went, even though I really didn’t know anyone and it was definitely not my scene. It got late, the apartment was stiflingly crowded, and it became crushingly obvious to me that I had zero in common with anyone there—including Tyler. Finally, I thought to myself, What am I doing here? He’s not even my boyfriend. Why am I wasting my time?
That was not my big epiphany, though. What really smacked me in the face occurred a few minutes later when I walked out of Tyler’s building onto the dark city street. As I stepped off the curb to hail a cab, I saw an SUV pull up in front of a nearby building. Out of the car stepped a man around my age—I don’t even really remember what he looked like. Nothing about him was exceptional; he was just an average-looking adult male. He opened the passenger door and his wife emerged. Then he opened the back door of the car, reached in, and after a moment I saw that he had pulled a baby out of a car seat.
Wham. There it was.
No, I did not suddenly hear wedding bells tinkling in my ears. Nor did my ovaries instantly explode with longing to have a child. That was not what the universe was telling me in that moment. Instead, the message I got that night was something much simpler: what I really wanted was to be a responsible adult—someone who loved and cared for myself as well as others. Someone who had responsibilities to people outside of work. Someone on whom other people relied, and who had people to rely on when I needed them, too. Because that’s what an adult is.
That’s when everything finally clicked into place—the years of crying in Hettie’s office, the momentary flashes of insight when I ended it with one guy and decided what I was looking for in another. Click, click, click.
I had just grown up. Congratulations, Lisa, you win a cookie.
IT’S KIND OF EMBARRASSING to be such a late bloomer. Shouldn’t I have felt like an adult at least twenty years before? But I guess it would be worse to be one of those people who thinks she has it all figured out at age twenty-two, at which point there’s nowhere to go but down. So I choos
e to look at it optimistically—I am definitely one of those people who learns something new every day.
Of course I still had my ups and downs in romance after that. It’s not like I decided one day that I was going to grow the hell up and then poof, Prince Charming walked through the door and I was ready to embrace him with open arms. And it’s not as if I immediately, miraculously struck the ideal balance between work and personal life. I had some tough times adjusting to this new version of myself.
My first attempt at putting aside foolish things was really not so auspicious.
I met Gavin at a college reunion. Enough said, right? I should just stop right there. But I was trying to be different, and not to judge men based on flimsy assumptions. I decided to be open to second chances and second meetings. He was a really nice guy, a hard worker, and a great conversationalist. There was just one problem: he kissed like a snake. This is no exaggeration. He had this sharp little tongue and it would dart into my mouth, and it simultaneously freaked me out and nauseated me. It was so pointy that I didn’t know if he was kissing me or flossing my teeth.
Despite this, I kept trying to make it work with Gavin—I couldn’t believe that I was going to break up with a guy over something so seemingly trivial. So I kept trying, and I even gave Gavin subtle lessons. “Hey, babe, how about we try it this way … I’ll put my tongue in your mouth, but you just relax yours … relax. No, relax. Um, could you try relaxing your tongue?” Nothing worked. His tongue was absolutely impervious to instruction, and when he kissed me, I felt like I had a floundering goldfish trapped in my mouth. No matter how hard I tried not to be disgusted, I wanted to hurl. Finally, I was so distraught that I actually prayed at the end of my bed. I’d never been to a mass in my life, but I got on my knees like a Catholic schoolgirl and I begged God to teach me how to love this guy.
My prayers were not answered, and finally I decided that a mature adult does not lead a man on this way. If I couldn’t kiss Gavin, then I couldn’t love him, and therefore I needed to break up with him. So I did. I was really upset about it though, and I confessed the whole thing to a girlfriend, certain that she would tell me that I was a terrible person for ending it with Gavin. Instead, she told me that she once had a boyfriend who kissed like a cow (big, thick tongue), and she broke up with him, too. Then another friend told me she broke up with a guy who kissed like a hairy bison. Every time he kissed her she’d have long red scratches on her face from his coarse soul patch. I was very relieved to hear that I was not alone in dating a man who kissed like the resident of a petting zoo. Old MacDonald had a farm, ee i ee i … eew!
I WAS STILL WORKING at WOR when my producer walked over to my desk and said he had an e-mail for me that had come into the morning show’s general address. Normally listeners who wanted to reach me directly e-mailed me through my website, so this was unusual. And it also wasn’t private—now multiple people had read this e-mail before it ever even reached me.
The e-mail was from a guy named Adam. His mother listened to WOR in the morning. Something about my personality, she told her son, convinced her that he and I would be a good match. So she urged him to write to me.
This all might sound a little stalkerish if it weren’t for the fact that it was one of the sincerest, most thoughtful e-mails I’d ever received. Adam was also open and up-front about his intentions. “I’m a normal guy from Long Island,” he wrote. “Why not take a chance?”
Why not? That was a really good question. I was trying to open up more, right? Here was a person who seemed like a genuinely nice guy, who simply wanted to meet me and see if we hit it off. So what was the harm? Before I jumped at the bait though, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t completely losing my mind. The staff at WOR was very much like a family, and since everyone knew about this e-mail already, I decided to show it to my coworker Mara to make sure she didn’t spot any latent serial-killer tendencies. She was single and had spent enough time on JDate to be able to read between the lines. She read the e-mail and thought it was sweet too. Meanwhile, everyone else at the station seemed sincerely happy that I might actually meet a listener who’d written to me.
And okay, I should also add that in the e-mail Adam included a photo, and I couldn’t help noticing that he was handsome and had great, sparkling eyes.
So I decided to call him, and we hit it off right away. He was recently divorced and he had a young child. Instead of running for the hills like I might have done before, I thought, Great. Hadn’t I wanted to be with a real adult with adult responsibilities?
Adam and I met for a drink soon after our first phone call. Those sparkling eyes weren’t just a photographic trick, because he still had them. He also had a great smile and thick, dark hair, which I liked.
On our first date, Adam looked at me like I was Angelina Jolie. And just like his e-mail, his attention to me seemed utterly sincere. I didn’t think I’d ever been with a man who made me feel so fully appreciated, like he felt lucky to be with me. Maybe some of the men I’d been with over the years really did feel that way—and maybe they even showed it. But either I had been oblivious or I had been so terrified of intimacy that I had purposely looked the other way. As Adam looked at me with stars in his eyes, I felt complimented and unsettled all at the same time. But I forced myself to stay open to whatever might happen with him.
Still, there were a few things about Adam that concerned me. He had been divorced only for a few months. He’d also recently moved into his mom’s finished basement. That last part wasn’t a deal breaker—he was in transition and I knew he’d eventually get his own place. But the first part was troubling. It didn’t bother me that he was a dad. I felt like enough of an adult at that point to at least consider having a relationship with a man who had a child. No, what worried me was the recent divorce. I’d always heard you shouldn’t date a man until he’s been out of his marriage for at least a year. For God’s sake, I was even working with radio relationship expert Dr. Joy Browne, and her mantra was … Don’t get involved with a recently divorced man! I didn’t want to ignore my standards—or my smarts—with Adam, but I had also come to realize that there is no such thing as Mr. Perfect. The bottom line was that Adam was a good man, and he seemed worth taking a chance on.
Because I really liked Adam, I didn’t want to jump into bed with him right away. I wanted us to get to know each other first, take our time. I’d suddenly gone from a Sex and the City character to a Jane Austen character. Not that things were boring. We went on a lot of fun dates, and he loved city nightlife. So he was always eager to come in for whatever events I was invited to. I hadn’t always been comfortable including men in that part of my life, but I was very pleasantly surprised when Adam showed up at one of our first big evenings together dressed really sharp, right down to his choice of denim. He might have been a dad, but he didn’t wear dad jeans, thank God. And Adam didn’t just fit in visually, he was also charming and could talk to anyone. It was amazing for me to be with someone who could blend so seamlessly with my life, without wanting all the spotlight for himself the way some of the other guys I’d dated had—this was definitely a first for me.
Once the weather got nicer, Adam invited me out to his mother’s home (I brought my chocolate chip cheesecake bars, always an easy hit). Adam’s mom was so excited to meet me. Not only did she feel partly responsible for our meeting, but she seemed thrilled that her son was happy again. When we arrived, she was preparing dinner and the house smelled delicious. Our first course would be chicken soup, and when I went in the kitchen to offer her some help, she pulled me aside and said, “You’ll have to learn how to make this. Adam loves it.” I think I gulped. I hadn’t even slept with the guy yet—it felt a little premature to start learning family recipes.
Coincidentally, our physical relationship was just about to steam up. The days were getting longer and the weather was warm, so Adam and I decided to take a walk around his neighborhood before dinner. We took a stroll past the local elementary school that looked a l
ot like the one I attended. A single-level building with a big playground with swings, a jungle gym, and picnic tables. Such a sweet, innocent scene—that was just about to be violated by our raging hormones.
Adam and I settled at one of the picnic tables and before you know it, we started making out. Soon we were actually lying on top of the table. It was getting dark, but it wasn’t that dark and there were plenty of streetlights, so I kept one eye peeled for anyone who might see us. At one point I sat up and tried to bring some sanity to the proceedings. “What are we doing? Kids eat lunch where our asses are right now!” But then Adam started kissing me again and I stopped caring. Adam definitely knew what he was doing, and it was exciting to let loose a little bit. There’s nothing like doing something forbidden in a public place to get your juices flowing. The risk that an unsuspecting dog walker—or God forbid, the cops—might walk by just added to the thrill.
After twenty minutes or so, we called a time-out and fixed ourselves up as best we could. I checked my jeans for pizza and chocolate milk stains, felt for splinters in my butt, and then we walked back to his mom’s house for dinner. In a bit of surreal timing, that was when I met Adam’s daughter for the first time. She was too young to put two and two together and realize that I was dating her dad. This took the pressure off things—I could just be a nice lady, instead of some scary specter of a stepmother. Truth be told, that would have been a frightening prospect to me, too. I was just learning how to take care of myself, much less taking on that kind of responsibility. Maybe eventually I would be ready to embrace it, but not quite yet.
Adam and I finally had sex the night of my cookie party. This was going to be one of my biggest bashes ever—celebrity chefs, press, a huge invite list—and I was eager to show off Adam. I was also excited to show Adam my new outfit—a black sequined top and tight satin jeans. Some couples might have discussed when they were going to have sex the first time, but I didn’t tell Adam that I’d already decided that was the night. So when I basically ripped his clothes off after the last guest left, he was a little surprised. He got over the shock quickly, and I learned that our picnic bench wrestling match was just the prelude to the main event. Dr. Joy Browne may be right that you shouldn’t date a recently divorced man, but you should definitely date a man who’s already spent years perfecting his craft.
Sex, Lies, and Cookies: An Unrated Memoir Page 14