Practice. Practice. Practice.

Camel Pose:

My nemesis. When I am at yoga class, this is the pose that freaks me out.

Chaturanga? No problem. I love to move through sun salutations, starting in child's pose, my nose on my pink yoga mat, forehead to the floor, arms resting in front of me and pulling the knots out of my upper back. I move to table top, with knees bent, arms in front of me, everything in right angles, and into the first down dog of the practice. Our bodies pike in the air, hips raised, heels pressing to the floor, weight balancing between our legs and outstretched arms, evenly balanced between each of our fingers, spread wide, and the thumb. The instructor instructs us to breath and we do. Air fills lungs simultaneously before pushing through bodies and back out into the room.

From down dog, we step to the top of our mats, rise to flat back, foreheads reaching to the front of the room and backs flattening out along the spine. We tuck back down again and let our arms hang to our feet before tadasana, mountain pose. Our arms move in a circle to raise overhead as we inhale and look up, fixing our eyes on a point in front of us and slightly higher than eye level. Arms completely extended, we exhale and swan dive back to the floor, putting our hands on the ground as we step back in a straight plank before lowering down in a push-up, chaturanga, with arms bent to a ninety degree angle, tops of our feet on the ground, and then inhale as we move to up-dog, tops of feet on the ground, lower half of body straight, shoulders pushing back from our ears down our spine, and chest, neck, and head lifted. Eyes look up or are closed. Lungs pull in the air from the class. On the exhale, we move back into down-dog, toes flipping under, body piking, heels shooting back into the floor.

It all feels so good.

My body and breath work together. I know I will be stiff for the first two or three sun salutations but that I will get stronger, looser, more flexible. Each movement demands my happy concentration, my strong breath, my comfortable faith in the practice. Muscles heat with the effort. Knots loosen in my back.

This is my practice four years into my yoga hobby. So serene. So healthy.

Five years ago I tried to do yoga. I couldn't.

I was too bored. Too fidgety. Too restless. I wanted to do more exciting things, like run stairs and make my muscles hurt. Or twitch and jerk to the hip-hop beats of a dance class. I couldn't calm myself enough to slowly move through a practice. I didn't understand the point.

But my practice now is not without hiccups. There is still the dreaded camel pose.

I don't know what it is, but this pose creates such a strong sense of anxiety in me that I dread it every class.

The pose goes like this: you kneel tall on your mat and put your hands on your kidneys against the small of your back, then you walk your eyes along the ceiling as you look backwards at the wall behind you. Ultimately you release your hands from your back and put them on your heels.

The whole thing wigs me out. I feel so uncomfortable the whole time, or rather from the moment my head goes past the spot of looking directly up. Anything behind that vertical planes scares my body. I feel the anxiety well in my chest, down my neck, into my head. Panic flares. I start counting to ten rapidly. I forget to breathe. I quit the pose after 15 seconds and take a break, looking straight ahead while others in my class continue the pose.

I dread Camel.

What's interesting is that my instructors tend to say things during this pose like "This is a heart-opener, so it may cause you feel some discomfort. Feel the emotions that come up during this pose and then allow yourself to release them."

Having heard this so many times and having felt so anxious during the pose, I looked up Camel on the internet. I learned it opens up three chakras, or energy centers in the body, the root chakra, naval chakra, and heart chakra. The heart chakra, not surprisingly, is the center for love, compassion, and forgiveness.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised I have a hard time opening up my heart.

What would it take to open my heart?

In my last yoga practice, I felt anxiety when the instructor announced Camel pose, but then I decided to change my attitude. "I love this," I thought, "it's giving me a chance to practice a pose that's hard. What a great opportunity!" Of course I was half lying to myself, but also half allowing myself to change my attitude. I decided not to be fearful during the pose, to allow myself to be happy about however far I made it in the pose, to take a break if I needed to but feel joyful that I tried the pose.

I like this concept of working the body to open the heart.

Working the emotional part of myself to open my heart is a little trickier. I've been trying to be more pro-active about dating. Signing up for internets dating sites, going out for happy hours, trying out new possibilities, buying new "date" outfits. But I'm not sure that I'm really opening my heart during these outings. I feel like I'm going through the actions, but I don't know that I'm really open to romance at this point. I keep the walls up pretty well.

It's sort of a strange paradox where I complain about how nothing is working out, but I also am keeping every potential romance at arm's length. I don't even know that I'm doing it consciously. It's more like a subliminal red light preventing me from really plunging into a new relationship.

And I'm not sure how to change this. The emotional part, I mean.

I think the key is in yoga. For me, at least. I think if I keep working the physical body, the emotion will catch up. If I keep forgiving myself for my half-Camels, like I do when I cheat and go to my knees during Chaturanga, or when I am less flexible or strong for other poses, and if I can keep being open to that vulnerability, that exposure that comes from opening my chest and leaning back over my toes, I think the emotional part of my being will become more compassionate as well. I think I will be able to forgive the painful experiences of my past, the betrayals, the hurtful actions. I think I will be able to find love more easily, to feel more secure, to realize that opening a heart doesn't mean giving up control.

Like so many parts of my recovery, it is not knowing how that moves me forward. It is the desire to be healed.

Dear Inner Critic...

Um, hello. I am writing to address a few concerns with you:

1) Please stop editing my rough drafts. I notice you whenever I'm writing. The way I start to write a sentence, but once I realize it will end with a preposition I delete it. The way I use too many adverbs in my writing and you chide me for not being more concise. The way I use transitive verbs as main verbs and you delete the entire sentence. This is not helpful in the generative stage of writing. Please. STOP.

2) Please stop censoring my topics. You are forever challenging me lately about what I choose to write about. You make me second guess my ideas. Doubt my intuition. Step away from the computer. This is the biggest problem. Because of you I am leaving my work. I'm choking up at the keys, all because you are so judgmental about my ideas. Please. STOP.

I realize there's some benefit to having such a powerful inner critic. For instance, once I get to editing all my drivel and assembling it into a draft, you will come in very handy. You will have so much work to do that you'll be pleased for weeks and weeks. But you seem to be a little too eager, interfering with the rough drafts, jumping into your role before it's time.

Please. STOP.

Just wait your turn, inner critic. You will have more to do than you ever imagined. But I need a couple more months. Just back off until December, ok?

Thank you.

Respectfully,

The left side.

Getting to the end

Last night I dreamt about a cheetah locked in a basement, one I thought would eat my dog when he went flying down the stairs to investigate, but when I followed him, I saw they were playing happily.

I don't know what this means.

Maybe it means the things I am scared of are not as threatening as I believe they are.

Right now I'm scared of returning to the past. I'm scared of failing in the future. I worry about how it will all turn out. I worry about how I'll feel when I look back.

I can't wrap my head around the order of things and I don't know how it will all come together.

***

On Friday night I went running with a friend around the lake near my apartment for four miles. It was the first time I'd been running in weeks and I was not in as good of shape as the woman next to me who ran three miles every day.

At the end of the run is a hill that goes on for four blocks. Each step made me want to quit. My friend next to me was chirping away about life and the conference she had just been at for the afternoon, and all I could think was "don't quit; don't quit; don't quit." My lungs felt like they were recycling air without taking away any oxygen. I wanted the job to be over.

As I was contemplating quitting and pretending not to wheeze while my friend talked, I remembered running that same hill with another friend. She told me how her philosophy on hills was always to concentrate on the ground immediately in front of her, and not to look at how far she had to go, just to look down and keep moving her feet. One. at. a. time.

I stuck to this methodology and kept thinking about moving only one step at a time. Before I knew it the grade was easing. And before too long we were running down a small hill for the last two blocks of the job.

I had stopped thinking about the whole run and started concentrating only on what I was doing in the minute.

***

Last week at my COSA meeting, the first one I've been to in months, I flipped open the page of a meditation book to read an entry. It was on patience. On letting God work at a pace I didn't try to control or force. On allowing a process to work itself out in my life. One. step. at. a. time.

***

I don't know how this will all end up, but I know it will end. It will somehow get done and it will get done without me worrying about it. It will work itself out and all I have to do is keep pressing the keys.

One. step. at. a. time.

If you want to know what writer's block is like...

It's hard to write about addiction.

I want so badly to finish this project and be done with it. I want to stop thinking about my divorce and sadness and addiction and pain. My forehead itches to be done.

But I can't quit yet.

And I can't write this.

I'm totally stuck.

June Carter is singing on my speakers and I'm thinking of the 12th step. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all areas of our lives. I'm thinking of the promises: No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.

it helps others to share stories.

it hurts sometimes to revisit the past.

i know i will be done with this when i publish my book.

"Take breaks," said my instructor, "when it gets too hard."

But eventually the breaks have to end. There are deadlines. There is the need to be done.

Letters sit like bricks on my shoulders.

I don't know why I'm sharing this. It's not really a blog, more of a personal entry. Word documents scare me. It feels more comfortable to type in a small box. To post on a blog. Less permanent. Less threatening. There are only a handful of people who have this address. It feels safe and dark. Like a place I can confess that it's sometimes hard to write.

A confessional, says the lapsed-Catholic-girl. Duh.

It's just that I get bored of the trauma. I'm tired of telling the story. The only place it feels right to say it is out loud is at a COSA meeting or with friends. It feels current and important. In writing, it's feeling stale and repetitive. Like I've said this all before. Like saying it one more time is crossing the threshold, like forcing myself to eat everything on my plate, even the lima beans, and wanting to hide it all in a napkin or under the lip of my plate.

It's just that today I feel like I'm stuck in a small space with myself and I'm not really sure I like who I'm dealing with.

I don't know what it is that I'm scared of. I think it's that I made mistakes. I did things poorly. I didn't always communicate my needs like I needed to. That I sometimes end sentences with prepositions. That I snore when I'm sick. That I'm not perfect. That this chapter in my past was ugly and painful and messy and inappropriate and shameful and secretive. That I was weak and confused and sometimes at fault.

And this is step four. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

My problem, and I think my ex shared this problem, is that I so readily see the flaws. And it sends me into a rabbit hole. I fixate on the things I do poorly in life. I regret the bumps and nicks and chide myself for inadequacies.

I don't always do this.

Most of the time I realize there are two sides to the coin. I am compassionate, which is wonderful and amazing, but sometimes I am too compassionate and I sacrifice my own needs for others, which is troublesome. I am assertive about my needs, which is great, but sometimes I don't communicate that well- I explode or demand. I can't monitor the volume dial as well as I'd like.

I share my flaws with others, which makes me feel vulnerable, like an alien. Like a loner. I'm too exposed. I get hurt this way. I open myself up while others are building walls, storing ammunition, and plotting strategies.

Saying I have codependent tendencies. This feels like a strength in my COSA meetings. Outside of them, though, this feels like an admission to being a crazy bitch who will forever be trapped in bad relationships. My brain knows that's not true, but I am not Melody Beattie, I am not impervious to thoughts of my peers. I told a friend my therapist told me to buy a book called "Codependent No More" and she burst into laughter.

i feel insecure about saying it.

But the thing is-- most women I know have codependent tendencies. Especially those who would never admit it and who would judge the women who did. AND, to be honest, most "codependent tendencies" are actually quite amazing qualities-- to be compassionate, to care about others, to want to help, to put others before yourself... If you think about it, Jesus was probably the most codependent person in the world. Ghandi. Mother Theresa. Great people are codependent.

But, the problem, and I would suggest these great people never saw the problem, is that we cannot let other people's needs overwhelm our own. To be truly great is to be vigilant about one's self (no offense to Jesus, Ghandi, and Mother Theresa). But if you are staying focused on improving yourself, on taking care of yourself, your interactions with others cannot help but improve. You become more available by taking more time for yourself. You become a better partner by being honest about your own needs. You're a better lover when you say what you like, what you need, and what feels good, not when you pretend, you fake, or you do what does not feel right. When you set boundaries, you may lose people at first, but the people you later attract love you for your strength and feed off of that energy. You can still be compassionate, but you begin by being compassionate for yourself.

My biggest example of this is when I went through my divorce. I COULD NOT be available to my students every day. I called in sick more often than I'd like to admit (in order to deal with divorce issues, to grieve, to vomit, etc.). BUT, I was MORE PRESENT that year when I was dealing with my students. When I was in school I could give more of myself to my students and when I couldn't take it, I called in sick. It was the worst year of my life, but a turning point in my career as a teacher. Since then I think I've gotten even better, but it was the first year where I finally felt like I got it-- I got what it meant to be a great teacher.

And it was nothing I learned while getting my Master's.

To conclude--

Is there a conclusion? Is there a way to wrap up this messy essay of a post?

I don't know.

I don't know what will happen with my work. How it will turn out. If I'll be able to write the final chapters I need.

I don't know how it will all come together.

But at least I wrote. And I shared this with you. Whoever you are. My dear friends listening to me talk in the dark.

THANK YOU. xo

Barbie Doll Baggage

On Tuesday, the day after I returned to my apartment in Minneapolis after a three-week road trip out to Washington State, I decided I needed a haircut. It was August. I was going back to start teaching high school English in a matter of brief weeks. My hair looked droopy, shapeless, and both wilted and frizzy in the same minute. I had reached that odd point that occurs where I could go no further. I could not stand one more minute of my current hairstyle.

I made an appointment.

“So what are we doing?” asked Zach, the stylist available for my 2:00 appointment at Vizi’s salon just down the block. I had never been there before, but had passed the pinkish 1920’s style one-and-a-half story building on Hennepin Avenue many times. He looked at my reflection in the mirror while pulling my long blond hair down my back to see the ends.

“Well,” I said, “I’m considering donating my hair for cancer patients.” In fact, I had measured my hair at home with a tape measure by looking in the mirror and craning my neck to see where the blond ripples fell. My godmother died a year-and-a-half ago from Pancreatic Cancer and I had been growing my locks ever since. It was eight inches to just below my ear lobe, the bare minimum of donating

“But,” I paused, considering my personal life. “I’m recently single again, and, you know, the guys seem to like the long hair.”

The words sat like cold pieces of stone deliberately placed to line a walkway while I looked at the glare in the mirror that flashed at my eyes from the window behind me.

Zach shrugged and touched the top of my scalp, moving his hands down the blond threads. “That is true,” he said, clearly speaking for the heterosexual population of his gender. “It’s sort of weird, but true.”

I looked in the mirror at my wilted, frizzy, droopy, shapeless mass of blond almost-curls. And in this moment I had to face something other than my reflection.

I am a woman who has two master degrees. I read books. I believe in gender equality. I got a 30 on my ACT score, grew up getting angry with teachers who asked only the boys to carry heavy stacks of books back to the library, and never once hesitated to raise my hand during a discussion if I had an opinion on the subject. Both my parents were feminists. My mom worried about me watching Dukes of Hazard as a child because she didn’t want me to think that’s how women had to act, that all they had to offer was beauty. They didn’t buy me Barbie Dolls because, again, women are more than objects, more than beautiful playthings.

I am also a teacher. And I constantly encourage my female students to be strong and independent. I encourage them to think for themselves. It almost hurts when I see one who follows a boy around like an obedient robot.

“Really,” said the smarty-pants persona in my mind as I considered the eight-inch dilemma in front of me. “Are you seriously considering NOT cutting your hair just because guys like long hair?”

Despite all my positive feminist background, the truth is I was. The truth is I wanted very much to look pretty in my eharmony profile picture.

My background is not just the academic. There is a part of me that wants to be sexy. A part of me that wants to be attractive to men. A part of me that worries endlessly about my appearance, despite the fact that my brain realizes there is more to me than the image. It’s a dichotomy I have never been quite able to reconcile.

Which is perhaps why I married a man I loved and later discovered had a pornography addiction.

During the nine years of our relationship, our sex life went from hot to warm to tepid to lonely. Because he was my first love, first person I had sex with, I wasn’t absolutely sure about what was wrong. Perhaps sex-lives just slow down, I thought. Maybe this is normal.

When I discovered the truth, the hours of pornography on our computer, the $300-a-month cable bills, the nearly eight-grand spent on porn on credit card statements hidden from me for years, I realized it was not “normal.”

And I’d be lying if I didn’t say I wondered what about me caused it.

There is a voice inside me who worries about what men think when they look at her. There is a part that notes what they pay attention to, what they seem to love. There is a girl within who is forever worried about the mirror, a girl forever analyzing, and condemning what she sees.

“I love when you have your hair down,” said my husband, “you just look so--,” and he paused to shrug his shoulders, shake his head, and raise his eyebrows.

Another man I dated after my divorce would pause while we indulged in the sensation of being wrapped in each other in bed, looking at my hair, touching it, gazing. “Goldilocks,” he’d say, smiling back at my eyes and surrounding me with himself.

All of this I wanted to ignore as I sat in the salon chair trying to decide what to do. I wanted to believe me, with short hair, was enough.

Zach waited for me to figure it out, lips in a line, hands on his hips. It felt like weights were on my shoulders as I considered my fears. And then a counterpart to the smarty-pants voice in my head, the vixen within, suddenly piped up, “Are you kidding me? Like we can’t rock the sexy bob.”

I looked at Zach. “Cut it off,” I said. “I just heard what that sounded like out loud.”

He laughed and grabbed his scissors, “and you were like, Hmm- I don’t like that bitch, right?”

I laughed (though bitch had never quite been the word in my mind) and he bindered my hair eight inches up, ready to cut it all off in a neat little bundle.

I held my breath and he started cutting. “I’m so glad you decided to do it,” he said. “This is going to look great.”

I didn’t know if it would look great or terrible or frizzy, droopy, and shapeless still. All I knew was that I was feeling lighter already.

I left the salon and the only word to describe me in that moment is buoyant. I was full of light and air as I returned to my apartment, tingling with the uncertainty of this new look, this new persona. I didn’t know if the men on eharmony would like the change, but I did. I felt like I could make light bulbs glow when they weren’t even plugged into a socket.

Then I reached in my purse for the ziplock bag that held my hair. I threw it on the dining table.

It sat there. Blond and bindered. Didn’t move. Just sat on the table.

Gross isn’t the word, but it was completely uninspired. Lifeless.

“That’s not sexy,” I thought, considering this part of me removed that used to hold magical powers.

“That’s just hair.”

And like that I realized that I was what was sexy about me with long hair. I was this glowing, floating, electrical little entity walking down Hennepin Avenue and this was just a pile of dead cells sitting in a bag.

All of the smart-girl rhetoric, the knowing that I was more than an image suddenly felt true. And while it’s a lesson I learned only after turning 32, and one I imagine I will have to learn again many times, it felt like a change had happened.

Like I didn’t have to go to the mirror to see what I was like.

A LONG entry-- too long for a blog!

There are moments in your life when you stop and think- what the fuck just happened here?

I was reminded of these moments last night when I ran into a man at the Geo Duck bar. I had seen their signs during the past week for happy hour 4-6 as I drove back and forth from my Hood Canal cottage on various adventures on the Olympic Peninsula. "Geo Duck," I kept saying to myself- the reward for staying put for a day and taking care of the grading for the online course I teach, the one that pays the travel bills. It was a tedious process getting through the grading. I couldn't wait to go.

I parked my convertible at the Geo Duck and was eager to burst inside. I was missing my own local spot, the place where I happy hour with friends once a week. I missed being a regular. I was anticipating camaraderie, interesting stories, and fascinating characters. As I walked into the bar, though, I could tell I would not be taken in as a regular here. I wasn't sure how to register the looks and pauses in conversation as I went to the bar, but I decided just to cross my fingers and hope the wait staff didn't spit in my food.

Then I noticed the deck.

While the bar was a perfectly lovely dive, resembling many of my favorites, with pool tables and wrinkled men with long hair in tank tops lining the bar, the deck was lovely on a different level. The deck was in the open and miraculously sunny Washington air, situated on the canal, and I could see birds flying around the impending waters of the tide.

I went to the deck instead of the bar, watching critters moving around in the water. Otters? I wondered, but they seemed bigger.

I had the deck to myself and pondered the menu for a good fifteen minutes before going in to order my food (wait staff hadn't seen me) and ordered the Oyster Burger at the recommendation of the bartender. Another man had joined me on the deck about five minutes earlier and said to me when I came back to the deck, "Boy, I bet those waitresses must be swamped in there."

"Yep," I said. Of course I didn't want to be rude, but I could tell from the inviting way the man talked that he wanted to keep talking, and I was sort of content to study my phone, which finally had service, instead. He was probably 5'9" and overweight, maybe about 60. His face was as red as the plaid shirt he was wearing, and his rapidly receding hair sort of clung to his head. He wore green shorts and hiking boots over tall white socks.

I think I was nervous to engage with this man, not because of his looks, but because of the terse way he was trying to reach out. I couldn't imagine that he'd care to know anything about me but sensed that he maybe just wanted to discuss his own life for a living audience for a while. His first few comments were authoritative and decisive, sort of like the comments coming from a man who had already decided what was the correct way to live life.

But we chatted anyway.

He asked what I did, and I didn't hide it. I said I was a teacher and a writer, something that doesn't always go over well with people. Everyone tends to resent the fact that you have the summer off and then tries to figure out how you could possibly afford to travel on your salary (answer? lots of student loans and a part-time job in addition to your full-time career, plus no mortgage, no kids, and my hobbies are virtually free: reading and writing and running). I always have to bite back the fact that I spend part of almost every weekend on schoolwork, that Christmas break is a time for me to catch up on my grading, and that I take sick days in order to do my work. Never mind the week of training in the summer, uncompensated. Never mind the two Masters degrees. Never mind trying to do my writing. Never mind the other job. Never mind the fact that I used to clock in at 6:30 and leave at 5 each day, just to stay ahead. Not that it isn't good to work hard, just not for the amount I receive.

In any case, I didn't want to get into it with this retired state employee from Springfield, Illinois.

I tried to be brief, but he caught my attention when he identified the animals in the water ahead of me.

"They're seals," he said. "They like to swim in and rest in the shallow area."

Real seals? I thought. Not in the zoo? Not in a ginormous clump outside of the beaches of La Jolla? Just two or three adorable little creatures that had eyes like my dog? Perusing the canal on their own?

I let down some walls and began to chat in earnest, interested to hear about what else this man knew.

My oyster burger arrived and we were becoming friends from across the six feet separating our tables. Turns out he didn't judge me for being a writer, he instead recommended a book, written by the drummer in Genesis called Three Ways to Capsize a Boat.

"It's real exciting," he explained, "because he takes this job in the Mediterranean working for a sailing company without having any clue what he was doing, but then--" and here is the pause that won me over, "it turns into sort of a love story. He's got this gal back home and he starts to realize how lucky he is and that she is really a singular sort of woman. You know, since she puts up with all this, him running off for five months and all."

I perk up and we begin to talk in earnest and before you know it we are comparing divorce stories and our accounts with loss- he having just lost his daughter to a drunk driver and his 2nd wife in January to Cancer.

"You know, I knew it was coming," he said, "so it was different from Nikki (his daughter), but I don't know-- it was like walking out of a room and turning off a light. It was really something."

He paused.

He was no longer a red-faced retired employee from Central Illinois. Now I realized we were two people who had both been through the wringer. His story sounded a million times worse than mine, but I told him about my ex, about my cousins that died the same year, one of a blood-clot and another of Cancer, both well under 40. My godmother that died of Cancer later in the year. And I talked about my divorce.

"See, I think from what you just said, that there might be part of your story in mine," he said. "My ex-wife left and I had to go through all of that, wondering if I was man enough, trying to think what ways I failed. It was awful."

"There were just so many nights when I was on the bathroom floor, crying," I confessed.

"Curled up in the fetal position, right?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said, although really it had been more like being in a ball on my knees clutching the fibers of a red shag rug.

"See," he smiled, letting me know he had done the same, "and men aren't s'posed to do that."

For the first time in that moment I thought of the privilege of grieving. In my divorce I had hid the grieving from people, of course. I tried to function like a normal human. I went to work most days. I only cried in the bookshelves once or twice during computer lab duty. But I never felt like less of a woman for crying.

In this moment, it occurred to me that our society is really fucked up about grieving.

This man and I talked and he relayed how agonizing it was to deal with the legal system, like in the case of his daughter, when you are reeling from an unexpected loss.

"It's like, you walk outta there, and you ask yourself, what just happened? And you're angry. For like a whole day. You're just angry. And you take it out on the people around. And they have no idea."

I agreed whole-heartedly. When my split happened, not only was I reeling from the trauma of divorce, and reeling is really the only word for it, being led by your sadness in a whirling circle through the air pulled by your grief, your anguish, your hollow core, but I also had to learn the legalities of divorce on the fly, AND step up to an addict not pleased with the current situation.

"I watched my best friend turn into my worst enemy." I told the red-faced man.

In this moment I remembered a conversation with an old friend-- "One of the hardest things," I said to her, referring to the complicated way our divorce pulled at all of our mutual friendships, "is that no one knew what was happening. Nobody knew he was leaving pictures out from our wedding when it was my turn to stay in the house." I stopped, but I thought about the way he would also text me every night just as I was falling asleep. Messages of guilt. Pity. Love. The way he would be cruel when we met to discuss how we would proceed with the divorce. How he'd compliment me but then shame me. Blame me for caring only about money when we both knew it was the lies that drove me away. All of this in addition to the roller coaster of guilt I was putting myself through already.

I will always remember how a friend left a message on my phone after my ex decided not to move out of our house when I told him I wanted a divorce, forcing me to find my own place or exist in an impossible state of cohabitation.

"Hey Katie," she said over my phone, voice full of light air, casual. "Depending where you are and where you're staying, I thought you might want to carpool for Kat's birthday."

That voicemail sent me into a rage. Depending where I'm staying? Did she understand that I was homeless and still paying half the mortgage? That I went from being a woman to a child living on my parent's couch, or my friend's condo when she was out of town? Did she understand that there was a bag in my car full of clothing? That I showed up to teach high-schoolers pretending I had a stable roof over my head?

But how could she know? She was someone I used to see 2-3 times a week, but even so I had never shared with my friends what was really going on in my marriage. I had never shared that my ex looked at porn all of the time, probably every day, from the time I left for work until the time he left two hours later. This is only what I knew of his porn habits at the time. It didn't count the $300 cable bills each month, or the charges on his credit cards over the years. Or all the times he acted out while I was coaching or grading at a coffee shop. I didn't tell people my ex didn't want to sleep with me. I tried to figure it all out on my own. We continued to act like the perfect couple in front of our friends.

So why should I think she would suddenly be aware of the manipulation my ex put me through? Of the homelessness? The utter shock of having my life turned upside down?

***

I confronted my ex about his pornography addiction in June of '06. The lying had become too much. I was finding a slew of addresses hidden away in the back files of our computer and I was disturbed. One site was a database of any type of sex you could imagine, including things as "benign" as threesomes and blondes, but ranging to more explicit scenes with grandmothers and teens, peeping toms and rape scenes. Another site was a teen website-- Carrie Sweets. She offered birthday wishes to her most loyal supporters (the paying customers) and teased all of her "fans" by trying on new outfits, sucking on lollipops, and dancing in the corner of her bedroom. Based on our computer histories, my ex visited this site every day.

When I confronted my ex, he agreed that he had a problem. I gave him numbers for resources that might help. He nodded and said he'd look into it.

What hurt the worst about learning about his addiction, was learning about porn-addiction in general. I had never heard of such a thing. I had never thought porn could turn into an addiction. It was something I had protested at age 11 with my parents and fellow Catholic church parishioners when an "Adult" store came to our home town, but by college I knew it was something most boys had on the files of their computer. Some of my girl friends even got off on porn and watched it with their boyfriends or husbands.

I didn't know it could be an addiction.

And worse than that, all of the resources on the internet that I had found, save for a fairly straightforward website by the University of Minnesota's Center for Sexual Health, were religious websites urging me to be a good Christian wife, to believe the pornography had nothing to do with me. Urging me not to leave him, my marital partner.

"Fuck you," is what I thought when I read that. "You add up the hours your wife spends watching porn, compare it to a part-time job, and tell me it's not about your dick."

I was dealing with what you might call the "anger" stage of grief in this moment.

I couldn't stand that patriarchy in these websites. I couldn't stand the dismissal that was given to a woman's feelings. I couldn't help but believe that the men writing these sites would feel different if it was their wives who were bound by pornography addiction. NOW I believe that the pornography addiction had nothing to do with me personally, but THEN I felt hurt, betrayed, rejected, stupid, and ugly. And it hurt to hear a male voice tell me not to abandon my husband in this state. What did he know about it anyway?

***

The unfortunate thing now is I can't help but see how my own image of myself, my self-esteem, got tangled up in all of this.

I have never and will never look like a porn star. The girls in the computer videos had perfect hair and cute faces outlined in thick black eyeliner. They had impossibly long lashes and impossibly hard looking breasts. Their mouths were outlined and covered with a shiny coating that circled into a perfect "o." They were shaved and in stilettos all the time. They were eager and bouncy and sultry and coarse.

I am sweet and innocent and silly and even sexy at times. I wear eyeliner and mascara and even stilettos occasionally, but I will never look like a porn star, no matter how hard I try. And frankly, I don't want to try to look like a porn star. But even if I wanted to, I'd have a hard time converting my girl-next-door innocence into sexual prowess.

***

My biggest dreams in life are that I will high-five someone driving (slowly) from the opposite direction on the road; that I will be able to teach part-time, write part-time, and host fabulous dinner parties in the evening; that I will have a deck divided into three sections- screened office, outdoor office, and sunny lounge-chair central; and that I will no longer care so deeply about my appearance.

One of the things I hate most about myself is my hang-up about physical appearance. It's something I can't talk myself out of believing. I look at my online dating pictures and worry that now that I wear glasses all the time, my potential match won't like me. I see the cellulite dimples on the back of my thighs and decide I am un-marry-able. I can't pass a mirror without seeing something I hate.

***

When I was a freshman in college for the first couple months, this mirror problem affected me. I would look in a mirror and immediately see my flaws. As a result, I couldn't stop looking in mirrors and cursing the parts of me that I deemed flawed. There were mirrors in our study lounge on my floor freshman year.

One day a guy on my floor teased me about looking in the mirror. He was from the very small town of Albany, MN. After he caught me I blushed and he said, "Yeah, there was a really pretty girl back home who used to look at herself in the mirror all the time, too."

Apparently he thought I was pretty.

It's not a very likable position to complain about how men think you're attractive, but I will say that the drawback for me whenever anyone has complimented me has always been that I don't see it and that I live eternally in fear of when the magic will wear off and the man who once called me gorgeous will see all the things that I see: the cellulite, the bloated belly after eating, the occasional detestable hairs that materialize on my chin or my nipple, the snoring, the I'm-too-skinny, the I've-gained-too-much-weight, the face that doesn't seem as young as it once was.

I can't stop comparing myself to the cutest girl on facebook, or even to my own pictures of myself in the past. What I was then was cute and what I am now is not acceptable. It doesn't matter when I'm looking at pictures, or that pictures this year will be the ones I wish I looked like next year. This is always the thought: what I am is not enough.

"Have you worked on that with your therapist?" a co-worker and friend asked recently while we were jogging during some down-time on a work conference.

"We didn't exactly get there," I said. "That was more like the refining-stage and we were in the triage-stage."

***

Of course, being married to a porn addict did not improve my self-esteem complex.

But on the other hand, it may be that it's pushing me to deal with it. I grew up listening to my mom complain about her weight all the time, I remember when people stopped calling me "cute" and when it went from all the boys liking me in 2nd grade to only the weird kid liking me in 3rd grade (coincidentally, this was also the time when I got glasses). I worried that I wouldn't be able to kiss boys when I was wearing glasses in middle school. I believed brides didn't wear glasses, and I was reinforced in this theory when I had to take off my glasses to act the role of Laurie, bride-ultimate, in the musical "Oklahoma!" in 8th grade. Brides didn't wear glasses. Cow-girls didn't wear glasses.

Just before 9th grade I got contacts, but I also grew about 4 inches taller than I had been in 8th grade. My body didn't fit. I was a size 0 tall, practically an impossibility. Girls would harass me in the lunch line and ask how I could even walk on legs as skinny as mine.

I can remember only three time periods in my life when I felt confident about the way I looked. The first was any time before age 7. The second was a week camping in the Boundary Waters in norther Minnesota after 9th grade, when there were no mirrors to look at and the boys with us still flirted with me despite lack of make-up and showers. And the third was the latter half of my freshman year in college and the beginning of my sophomore year. I don't know why exactly, but I just suddenly realized I thought I looked good and any guy who didn't was missing out on his chance to be with me.

I don't know what happened to that woman. I'm sure the porn whittled against my confidence, and now that I'm dating again, I'm thrown once more into a state of uncertainty about what men think of me, but without the body I had when I was 18. It's not that I see no merit in myself, it's just that I feel uncertain about the way that I look, or more precisely, that any man would want to be with me based on the way I look.

***

This past weekend I stayed at a hostel in Bozeman, MT, and chatted with a French man named Jeff who was 29 and traveling with his father before reporting to Chicago to teach Utopian literature to college students at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He offered me a couple beers, we discussed 1984 and Orwell, I attempted to use the little French I remembered from high school, and before long, after heading out to the bars with our new friends from the hostel, this Frenchman developed a crush on me.

"But what do you like about me, really?" I asked as we were kissing in my private room later that night, before I kicked him out for the evening, and before things "got out of hand." He had just told me that he was surprised, he had never anticipated meeting anyone like me on his trip.

He ticked off a couple comments, saying he liked talking with me about books, he admired what I was doing, I looked gorgeous in a cowboy hat, I had been through tough times, and, he added "you're completely adorable."

"Not all the time," I responded, in a way that belied the truth of a few beers, "sometimes I snore."

He laughed at this remark and said it further proved my adorable-ness, but later I reflected it was sort of defensive comment. I get nervous with men because I don't believe they will accept my flaws. I want to offer a disclaimer on the first date: I snore, I have detestable hairs that pop up in unwanted areas, there's cellulite on the back of my thighs and it's bound to get worse, some day my boobs will be sitting next to my belly button. If you think you can handle that, then we can go on a second date.

I want men to see the worst before they start making declarations of affection.

***

This is funny to me because even though I married a porn-addict, he never said one negative thing about the way I looked. Furthermore, I never cared a bit how he looked.

He was not the type I was typically attracted to, to be honest. He was tall and skinny, I liked his broad shoulders, but he was not really muscular. In fact, when we got married he was probably 30 pounds overweight, had a belly, and the love-handles he's had his entire life. He had a great sense of style, delicate features, turquoise eyes, and I grew to love his height, but he was losing his hair, and didn't get haircuts regularly. He was pale. He wore glasses later in our marriage. He had blackheads on his back.

None of these things mattered. I can't think of one minute I wasn't attracted to him or one minute when I thought, this man is not good enough for me to want him in bed. On the contrary! I loved him, his body, his soft belly, his blackheads. It was a special delight of mine to pop his black heads while we lay in bed together.

So looks aren't that important to me. I mean, yes, there's a fundamental, requisite phase in which attraction is necessary (during this phase my ex was admittedly skinny, with great haircuts, and had exceptional taste in hats). But I never would have stopped loving him after that period just because he gained a few pounds, lost a few hairs, or grew hair in unwanted locations.

I don't know why standards for myself are different.

***

What I most hope for in this world (besides the office-deck, the high five, and the awesome work/dinner life) is that any daughters I have will not question their value based on their looks, and moreover, that they will not have me modeling self-destructive, hostile behavior about my own looks.

***

I have been trying something on this vacation out west. I have been avoiding make-up. And, when I pass mirrors, I look in them and say, "Maybe this is beautiful."

The Frenchman seemed to enjoy the make-up free version of myself, but it's not him that I'm worried about--it's me.

I had a silly fantasy when I was 15 or so that I would some day go to the laundromat looking totally disgusting and meet a man there who would tell me I was beautiful, that I was perfect just the way I was. We, of course, would live happily ever after.

Now I realize I don't need a man to fulfill this fantasy, in fact, a man never CAN fulfill this fantasy. What I need is for me to say I'm beautiful, that I'm perfect just the way I am... flawed, imperfect, and dotted with cellulite dimples.

***

I don't know how to get to this new realization, but perhaps the simple act of wanting it to be true will set the wheels in motion, moving the right direction.

***

When my ex and I talked about my his addiction, in June of 'o6, I actually had drawn out a list of pros and cons to our relationship. I knew we would be fine. I told him I loved him.

Two months later, I found out about the credit card debt while sitting in a mortgage lenders office.

"And of course, there's this 14,000 debt on this credit card," he said.

"Uh, no," I responded. "I didn't know about that."

We both paused and it was clear I had entered dark waters. The mortgage broker recovered in a manner that now makes me delete his group emails that show up in my inbox: "Oh, well, here's the number you can call to clear up any confusion." And he continued to tell me how much we could borrow towards our new home.

So there were issues beyond image. There were financial issues, issues with lying. Throughout the course of the fall of '06 and the spring of '07 we would move into a new home, and I would ask my ex if he was still looking at porn.

"No, baby," he would say, "I saw the look in your eye and I had to quit."

Or he'd get mad at me for asking in the first place, lashing at me with defensive hostility.

When I found another $1200 cable bill the first weekend of August, 07, I realized my gut was right. He was still lying. WE could not change if he could not help but lie about his addiction.

A week later I said I wanted a divorce.

***

"Well," I paused on the deck, turning to the red-faced man. "My story is a little different in some ways to yours," I said. "My ex was an addict, to pornography, but I think a lot of the elements are really the same. I went through that too, the rejection, wondering if I was good enough..."

He nodded and pulled a chair up to my table. Before the waitress could take away the remaining food on my plate, I was telling him about the whole thing.

"And, do you think he's doing better?" he asked me. "I mean, obviously you are. Or you wouldn't be doing all the wonderful things you're doing. (I loved the red-faced man for this.) But do you think he took advantage of this and changed?"

"I don't know," I responded. "But I don't think so. I did A LOT of work during our separation. I went to COSA..."

He looked at me.

"Codependents of Sex Addicts."

He nodded

"And I went to my own therapist once a week, and the two of us even saw a therapist to work through the divorce."

This part of my life that I usually keep intensely private came tumbling out of me. I was telling this man about COSA, about how I had slunk into the first meeting I attended, so ashamed, and thinking, how the fuck did this happen? How could I possibly be going to a meeting for co-dependents of SEX ADDICTS??! It felt so sordid. Embarrassing. Impossible.

But what I learned at that meeting is that there were amazing women going through the exact same thing as me, whether the sex addiction took the form of pornography, or paid escorts, or phone sex, or multiple affairs, or even child abuse. Amazing women married men who used sex to soothe the aching rage in their bones. Women like Elan Woods and Sandra Bullock. Women like me.

What I love about COSA and what I have learned about myself in being "a co-dependent" is that there are no absolutes. One of the promises in the program says "No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others." Nothing is absolute. There are degrees. There is a scale. Maybe I am a co-dependent, but only I know where that places me on the scale.

A codependent enables an addict. She puts others' needs ahead of her own. She might lie or cover up her spouse's issues. She might retaliate against her spouse through emotional manipulation, through guilt trips. She might be the bitter counter-part to the fun-loving addict who presents only his best face to the world. But there is a scale and there are qualities that merit consideration.

For example, typically co-dependents feel a great deal of compassion for someone. In my mind, genuine compassion is an extraordinary quality. It is good to be compassionate for people. It makes me a better teacher. However, the typical co-dependent ultimately lets this compassion turn into enabling. Kindness out of fear or shame are acts of codependency. When I let my 8 year-old brother choose Chuck E. Cheese for MY 16th family birthday party, this was an act of codependency; I put his needs for fun above my need to celebrate in a grown-up way.

I know I have a lot of compassion for people. I LOVE that I have compassion for people. What I do now is be careful that my compassion does not overrule my own needs. I watch out for my blind-spots.

There is a scale for every behavior.

I don't know how far down the scale my ex went. I know there was a lot of money being spent each month on porn. I know he lied to me nearly every day. I know he stopped wanting to have sex with me. I know unlisted number frequently showed up on our caller id. I know he developed a strong interest in running and going to the gym. Beyond this, I don't know where he was on that scale of sexual addiction.

I also know that addiction of any kind stems from pain. An addict turns to a source to soothe pain, and I know my husband had plenty of this growing up in his family, despite how kind his mother and stepfather were. I won't go into all of his details, the secrets he shared with me in confidentiality, but what is commonly known is that his biological father disappeared with no warning during his senior year, skipped every basketball game, skipped state, skipped graduation, skipped acceptance letters to a D2 school, and in my opinion, this was the least of his father-deficient offenses. In fact, in my opinion, this was almost a blessing.

I think that's part of why I fell for my ex. That was my compassion leading me to ignore certain issues, like my ex's silence when his father died a torturous death from cancer. Well-intentioned ladies from the small college town where his biological father ran a pizza shop and was beloved by the kids at the schools, would call our house and leave guilt-ridden messages for my ex. He never responded to them. We visited his dad. His dad mocked my ex and belittled him in front of me while he was dying. And then he died.

And my ex could never talk about this.

***

Years later, when I discovered the credit card bills were not just for my ring and college living expenses (as my ex had told me) I found out that there were pornography charges each month, but that they were highest around the anniversary of his father's death, which happened only two weeks before our first anniversary.

***

Once when I tried very hard to pry for more details, beyond what I knew about the emotional abuse my ex had suffered from his dad, I asked him if he had ever talked about the whole situation with his mom.

"No," he replied, trying to end the discussion.

"Not even now?" I asked, "now that he's gone?"

"No," he ended the conversation. "Sometimes it's best to let the dead stay dead."

***

This is what I mean about how our society is fucked up about grieving. The red-faced man felt guilt and insecurity about grieving, like he wasn't a man. I hid my griefs from my friends throughout the course of my marriage. My ex turned to sex, or pornography, as an adolescent to cope with his splintering family and the pressures he felt to win approval from his dad (I think).

If we could all just be sad when we need to, maybe these problems wouldn't get so big.

***

Addiction can happen to anyone. I will never be so naive as I was when I was in my early 20's as to think that what happens in the past stays in the past. It doesn't. We all have our issues to work out. Issues that can turn into opportunity or disease.

I just hope I have a chance to work all the way through my issues, that I can look happily at myself in the mirror, before I have children of my own.

***

The red-faced man and I became fast friends at the Geo Duck bar. I felt his loss. He felt mine. We traded book titles and wished each other luck.

He asked if I was publishing any of my material or sending it to magazines.

"No," I said, "I want to make sure I really like my material before I send it out. I've really just been working on my craft for the last few years, trying to get it right."

"The reason I ask," he said, "is that some of that stuff can really be helpful, you know, to read other people's stories, even if your craft isn't perfect."

He paused and looked at me, wiping his mouth, "It's the emotion that's really powerful. That's what counts."

Ok, I thought. Here goes. How can I set my compass to anything else?

And so it goes... (an homage to JT)

It is with some remorse that I'm writing this blog.

The circumstances are happy. I just had $5 mussels at my favorite place to write and Paula Abdul's "Cold-Hearted Snake" is playing in the air. There is a $4 glass of Sauvignon Blanc by my side and a kindly Somali math teacher who keeps trying to talk to me at the next table over. Not a bad evening as far as evenings go.

However, what was supposed to happen this evening was a date with the construction worker I wrote about two blogs ago. The one who was adorable and sweet and the opposite of a slimy banker I met through e-harmony.

Unfortunately, he is dropping the ball.

Despite the fact that he planned the movie night, and that he has been texting and calling me reliably and calling me baby and honey, I have a very ominous feeling that since nearly two weeks have passed since we hooked up, this movie night might not happen after all.

The problem isn't that I think he's rejecting me. The problem is, I'm feeling disappointed.

There may be any number of reasons he's dropping the ball, including the fact that he's been doing manual labor for 12 hours at a time in July heat and humidity, but at the end of the day, I'm not making excuses for him. Time will tell, I suppose, but at this particular time, I'm feeling disappointed.

What is just a little bit silly is that while I am certainly disappointed because of the plain and simple fact that I'm attracted to this man and would like to see what would happen on a second and third date, the main reason I'm disappointed is that it's just so anti-climatic. It doesn't make for a good blog. I was all set to thrill my audience (of four) with the wonderful details of a wonderful night with a wonderful guy, sort of the end-cap to a journey.

I was ready for my Eat-Pray-Love moment.

The beauty of the narrative arc. Coming full circle. Leaving one relationship, surviving the trauma, pulling myself out of the wreckage, and then-- poof! Adorable blue-eyed boyfriend at the end of the rainbow.

Damn.

Maybe only Elizabeth Gilbert is entitled to those endings.

But now Will Smith is singing Summertime, and there's a drop of wine left in my glass, so I guess I cannot complain too much. I can only keep going.

Maybe the truth is that whether there's a relationship or not, there are still questions, there is still uncertainty. Whether this man and I slid into a relationship or apart from each other and back into dating outer-space, we would both still have questions and issues and worries and needs and we would have to negotiate all those road bumps if we were together, just as we still have to negotiate them on our own. Life doesn't have happy endings. Life keeps going. And thank God that it does, if we're lucky.

A friend of mine posted on facebook that while he was going camping in the Boundary Waters but could not help thinking of a friend, a high school alum of mine whose 10-month daughter is battling for her life against a blood infection. He asked that we all "appreciate every breath we take and pray for her." Who am I to deny that request?

The truth is life is complicated. Life is beautiful. The truth is two servers are dancing to "Dance, Baby, Dance" David Bowie's song from the Labyrinth. The truth is I'm lucky to be here. Each breath is a gift.

There will be more dating adventures. There will be more stories. There might be some resolution, but there won't be happy endings. If I'm lucky, there are just more and more happy beginnings, happy moments, and happy dancing to silly songs playing on the radio in my favorite place to write.

Painting Lemons Gold

A list of dreams:

1. To high-five someone driving a car while driving my own car (slowly) in the opposite direction.

2. To own a convertible.

3. To teach part time, write part time, and host fabulous dinner parties in the evenings.

4. To one day be able to pay someone else to do my laundry.

5. To drive across the country on my own.

It is a great honor for me to share with you that I have recently made one of those dreams come true and am working on my second.

This weekend, I went back to my hometown, Fridley, Minnesota, a town that made into the top three in Minnesota for underage illegal alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use when I graduated back in 1996. I never loved my hometown in high school. There was a nasty vein of redneck racism that ran through the school for a year. Clothing, status, and popularity were as important there as they were at any school, and while I was voted Most Friendly my senior year (that's right, the Friendliest Fridlian), I still felt isolated and excluded most of the time. On the fringe of belonging to many groups, but still feeling lonely a good deal of the time. I had to work through my own teen angst and disliking my hometown fit in nicely with this mode of existence.

Now, however, I feel a certain sense of pride for my hometown. It's so much easier in hindsight to love and understand the complicating factors causing me to feel isolated but act outgoing, Kris G to walk around like a bad-ass with a chip on his shoulder, Erik W to be on a compendium of chemicals during art class, the "rat-pack" putting on a hyper-masculine appearance at all sporting events, sitting in the front row, and mocking poor little color guard performers who drop their rifles during the half-time show of the basketball game (me). All of these things make sense in hind sight.

In a way, I feel a certain amount of love for even the businesses in the area: Dave's Sport Shop, Miller Funeral Home (with its fluorescent pink neon cross hailing as a beacon from Hwy. 65, the highway that splits a shallow man-made lake into two boggy, weedy ponds), Biff's bar, and Friendly Chevrolet.

Ironically, I went to Friendly Chevrolet this weekend to scope out a convertible. I test drove a '95 Chrysler Sebring with a missing bumper. It was not my dream car. My dream car was written on a piece of paper in my purse: 4 door, V6, under $16,000, relatively new, front wheel drive. Turns out there was a two-door on the lot.

I tried to play it cool with the salesman, but he had my number. I saw the car and immediately thought of the Renee Zellwegger line from Jerry McGuire: You had me at Hello. You had me at hello.

I did manage to hold off on buying the car immediately however, and came back a whole two days later, met with their trade-in guy, who was surprisingly a Fridley alum, one who had graduated a couple years before me, a wrestler, I think, and had married his high school sweetheart.

"Yeah, we just bought a house out in Ramsey," he said, a suburb 20 minutes north of Fridley. "It's not Fridley, but we were able to get a pretty nice house for the money. Now's the time to buy."

Turns out it was the time for me to buy, too, though a much more impractical purchase.

The last thing I pulled out of my '01 Nissan Sentra was a sticker from one of my favorite white rappers, part of a group called Atmosphere. One of his albums came out in 'o8 and I still had the sticker from the packaging. It was a lemon and his album title scrolled across the back: "When life gives you lemons, you paint that shit gold."

I took the sticker with me. In '08 I was a wounded recent divorcee. I couldn't imagine making the best of the lemonade served to me. But I liked the saying--you were not simply "making lemonade", you were Painting that Shit GOLD. Emphasis on the verb. Emphasis on the noun. Capitalize the adjective. It seemed like such an active reaction to a difficult situation. It wasn't someone making do or trying to get by, it was someone asserting themselves, claiming a new version of the original. A saying to keep for the next car. My brand-new (one-year used) convertible.

In Minnesota, there are a million reasons not to own a convertible, especially if you are a teacher. I pulled up that day to my brother's house and he immediately teased me by saying, "Wow! They must pay teachers a lot more in the Robbinsdale district."

My mom began questioning me on where I'd park this car (since I didn't have a covered garage) and I could see her mentally observing the two doors and thinking that there was no room for babies in that car.

For me, though, driving the car was like being let in on secret. And the secret is this: one life--do it up.

It occurs to me that it's not so hard to have the life of my dreams. What is hard is deciding to make it the life of my dreams.

I have made a lot of decisions that the pragmatic folk in my life cannot comprehend. I took a year off of work to go back to school. I travelled to Europe on a credit card. I bought a convertible. I'm driving across the country alone and renting a cottage for myself for a week. A lot of people, people with IRA certificates, mortgages, and savings accounts, think that I'm being frivolous. They think I'm wasting my money or recklessly throwing it away.

I think I'm doing what I need to do to make this life work.

It's a different type of risk-management, one no banker would invest in, but here's the thing: I lived my life by the rules for 30 years. I got married, bought a home, sold it, bought a bigger home, saved money to buy furniture, gave up little indulgences to finance my husband's car, worked as a coach even though the hours pulled me away from my dream of being a writer. And what happened? It all disappeared. Any equity evaporated. The furniture sold on Craig's list for a fraction of the cost. I took on debt from a house sold in a floundering market. I keep putting money towards a retirement plan, but would I want to stop working? Not if working means teaching part time, writing part time, and hosting fabulous dinner parties in the evening. I think I can make my life what I want it to be. And so, with just a trace of guilt, I bought a new car, the one of my dreams.

"Fuck that," said my friend D when I told him people were questioning my judgement on buying a convertible, "if it's not their money they can't say shit."

We were drinking Jeremiah Weed and lemonade on his roof on Sunday afternoon, surveying the skyline of Minneapolis from atop his 7 floor building of sleek and trendy condos, discussing vocabulary lessons we would use next year, the men we had been trying to date all summer, softball, my car, among other topics, and swearing in a way that is delicious for teachers on summer break.

I couldn't put it better myself. Fuck that. One life.

Harmonizing...

This weekend turned out to be pretty interesting in terms of dates.

Eharmony-2 was nice but not dazzling. I met the crawfish-farmer downtown where he worked. I call him the crawfish-farmer because he attended a crawfish boil over the 4th of July and was raised on a dairy farm.

"He's a boob man," said my friend Jay while I was at a happy hour on Thursday with him, my friend Amber, and his partner Brian.

"What?" I asked. "Because of the udders?"

"Yep," he said. "It's just programmed. He can't help it."

"Well," I replied, laughing. "He's probably going to be disappointed then."

Disregarding the ominous premonition, I spent an hour or so getting ready for the date. I showered and primped, straightened my hair, and put on a cute orange v-neck dress (over my A-cup boobs), the turquoise-stone-and silver necklace my mother had bought me while on a cruise, and some cute peep-toe snakeskin heels I bought for ten bucks at Marshalls. I arrived 15 minutes early. Parked in a ramp. Bought my first beer. And after he arrived chatted for a couple hours while he drank three black-and-tans and bought me a Finnegans. I graciously thanked him for the beer and he said sure, it was fair. I had driven to meet him and parked, and so it made sense.

As it turned out, the crawfish-farmer was interesting and in fact, the nephew of one of my mother's best friends.

"Did she go to the wedding in San Antonio?" he asked about my mom, referring to his aunt's son's wedding.

"Yes," I said. "In fact, she did."

"Oh yeah," he said. "I heard the whole story, how [my aunt] moved back and was reacquainted with her high school friends. I saw some old ladies dancing at the reception and everyone was wondering who they were."

It was not a good sign that he called my mother an old lady, especially when I love the fact that she, at 60, still loves to dance, but the fact that he actually said the word boobs twice in our two hours and looked at mine about four or five times, made me think he might not be the man I next want to marry.

Oh well. It wasn't too bad. He was interesting and fun to talk to other than that.

The next date seemed more promising. Eharmony 3 was a man who loved traveling and working out and spending time with friends. He suggested we meet for brunch on Saturday, and I was optimistic that perhaps it was because he realized from my profile that brunch was one of my favorite hobbies.

I spent an hour or so getting ready. Showered and primped, straightened my hair, and put on a short denim sun dress and a pair of silver, low-wedge sandals. I walked three blocks to the restaurant where we were meeting and grabbed a spot on the roof.

"Running late," he said in a text. "Traffic on 94 sucks."

I didn't worry. I looked at menu and asked for a water.

A group of people arrived and sat at the table near me. An adorable blond man with thick muscles, short blond hair, and pointy teeth turned to me, "You look lonely," he said. "Why don't you come join us?"

"Oh, I'm meeting someone," I smiled.

"Well, we have two chairs," said his friend, fair-skinned and cute, with a mop of tousled brown hair and just a few freckles on his nose.

"Are you meeting a guy or a girl?" asked the first guy. And he scoffed when I admitted I was meeting a guy.

I laughed and we chatted. They were from Oklahoma. I asked how they were enjoying the city of Minneapolis and they told me they were scared of the sushi and going to a concert.

"At a church!" said Oklahoma #1.

"The Basilica Block Party?" I asked. "Fun! I wish I was going."

"Look," said OK#1 a few minutes later, "I think you should just come join us. Obviously, this guy isn't any sort of a gentleman if he's late."

"Oh," I excused my date, "he's coming. He's been texting me the whole time."

And eharmony-3 did show up. He was 20 minutes late. He was also hungover. He joined me in ordering a $8-bloody mary, but he said he wasn't going to eat. He had already eaten at the hotel this morning.

I nibbled my chilaquiles, feeling silly eating in front of him alone, and we talked. He told me, from behind his Ray Ban sunglasses, about his job, how enjoyed banking and "working with the scum of the earth" by arranging the loans used by car dealerships. Then he talked about how he'd love to have a house on Lake of the Isles or Lake Harriet, adding that he had always thought about getting a cabin but figured the upkeep made it a poor investment.

The check came and after a few minutes I pulled out my wallet. "Well, here," he said. "Let me put this towards it." And he pulled a ten-spot out of his Coach wallet.

"Put the ten towards the bill and the rest on the card," he said, handing the waitress the check.

"Did she just take the bill?" asked a woman at the table near us when the waitress returned and put the check on the table.

The whole table was silent as I picked up the tab and signed my name. OK #2 turned to me and looked me straight in the eye from under his messy brown hair. I blushed and looked down as I signed my name.

I knew what he meant.

I walked away from the date feeling irritated. I had put my best foot forward and he had bombed. I decided in that moment I could never marry a man who didn't buy the first drink. Really how much does a man have to give if he can't make a bit more effort, show up on time, and buy a lady one drink. Eharmony 3 had said in his profile that he didn't want a woman who wanted to be taken care of, but to me this didn't exclude common courtesy. Especially if he picked the place and the time and talked status and pulled bills out of a designer label wallet. At least toss in a $20, even if you don't want to buy the meal. I started to think chivalry was dead. Men didn't care. But the good news was neither did I. Sure that man doesn't want to take care of a woman, but the truth is I don't need him to do so. I'm not looking for a man to pay my way; I'm looking for a partner who is considerate and kind, like I would be to him. What did I need with this guy? Why should I bother to impress him or hope he would call again?

He did call, or at least text, telling me it was nice to meet me and to let him know if I was "out and about" next week. I said that sounded good, but secretly realized I would not be letting him know if I "was out and about."

I wore the date dress out later that Saturday night. I decided I needed to erase the stench of the bad date from its fabric. I added silver heels, my silver bracelet, and new flower ring to my outfit and took it out to my favorite local spot to celebrate my favorite local bartender's two-year anniversary.

One drink turned into several more and before I knew it I was sitting with three other regulars, my friend Amber, and three cooks from the restaurant in an apartment nearby, waiting for our favorite bartender to show up and playing dominoes. I was sitting next to a man I have been thinking was cute for the last two years, and he had just admitted he had always had a little bit of a crush on me.

I tried to play dominoes and he tried to play footsie. I ended up being much better at footsie than dominoes and he ended up coming home with me.

The next day this blue-eyed construction worker surprised me by making the bed and cuddling and holding my hand and telling me he liked the pictures in my apartment and smiling a lot and texting me later in the day to wish me luck in my soccer game, after I drove him home around 2 p.m.

Earlier, I lay curled up in arms that morning and the what-ifs and oh-dears started running through my head. I was surprised by the events, not unpleasantly, but worried. What would happen next? What was I supposed to do? Was this a hook-up or the start of something more? And would I even want something more? And on and on and on until a little voice in my head said Stop. Just stop. Enjoy this moment. Enjoy being an adult being affectionate with another adult who is happy to be spending time with you. Stop worrying. You were safe and smart about your actions. Enjoy the moment. Who cares what chapter comes next. You are strong and you know what you want and you will be ok. And even if he doesn't ever want to hang out again, you know he respects you.

Chivalry isn't about making financial gestures. It's courtesy. It's making beds and invitations. It's being interested in her life. It's giving him a ride. Offering food and shampoo, if that's what's needed. My ex-husband was great at courtesy. It was just that his addiction prevented him from intimacy. I was good at courtesy, too, but I don't think I knew intimacy, yet. My next husband will be good both at courtesy and intimacy, and so will I.

Life is interesting. I don't feel bad about my choices Saturday. I would much rather be with the considerate construction worker than the slimy banker, even if it was just for a night.

But my hunch is it wasn't. He already asked if I was up for a movie night later in the week. :)