Stoking the Fire.

“Come on Mom, it’s not that hard.”

“Sweetheart, it totally is.”

“Mom … (whispering) … you are really good looking. I mean it. You really are. It’s not that hard.”

It’s come to this. My son, smelly and dripping wet courtesy of the rigorous hockey schedule that now consumes five days of our week, has become my wing man. And the man on the other side of the glass is in his crosshairs.

And my son has good taste. Very good taste.

“Sweetheart, this isn’t something I’m very good at.”

“What do you mean? Just go and ask him out. Like you did with Dad.”

With Dad. Except that I didn’t ask him. It was a standing joke between us that the only reason I got married was because he wouldn’t go away after invading my sweaty bubble at the gym on an early Sunday morning, and it was our standing joke that he was no good to me dead. But he did go away, and he is now very much dead. And has been for four very long years, the first two of which provided a seat front and center in Dante’s Inferno. And then the Ferryman, paid in tears and anger, let us cross back over to the land of the living.

And living includes dating. Which is like being tossed right back into the fire.

“What should I say?”

“Just ask … ‘Are you married?’ And if he says no, tell him you need a date.”

“Hmmmm. So what do men like?”

“They like girls like you, you know, ones that are in good shape. And they like when girls are fun. And pretty. Definitely pretty. Just think about Addie and what I like about her. That’s what men like.”

“What about clothes?”

“No dresses. Men don’t like dresses.”

“Jeans?”

“Jeans are good.”

“Can I wear my sandals?”

“Ooooh. That’s a hard one. Because men like girls like you that work out, so sneakers are good. But sandals are okay.”

“Makeup?”

“No makeup. Men don’t like makeup. Not good.”

“So, what do you think I should do?”

“Well, you need to go places where men are. But not really scrubby men. And not old ones. You need to go places where the ones, like, your age are. Like the grocery store.”

“The grocery store?”

“Yup. But are you ready for the most important part?”

“What is that?”

“This is really important. Are you listening? … Okay. When you are in the grocery store, just walk around and pick up your things. But don’t act like you want a date with them.”

“Maybe you should help me with this.”

“Mom, I’m sorry, but I can’t. I don’t have time. I’ve got hockey and basketball and school. You’re on your own for this.”

Yes. Yes, I am.

Making a Wish.

It’s almost here. A day intended to be mine and mine alone. The close of another year of success and wisdom gained, adversity triumphed over and growth both mental and physical. The beginning of a new one fresh with opportunity. A celebration of me. Happy Birthday to me.

If an asteroid is hurtling toward Earth I would like it to hit on Saturday.

For years, I have avoided my day. I avoid it not because I am a woman and because of that I am, according to gender classification, destined to watch the hands of time with dread. I avoid it because I am a woman watching the hands of time by myself. Alone.   

When you are alone, birthdays echo with reminders of singularity. It’s not that I don’t have well-meaning family and friends that I celebrate as individual gems in the treasure chest that constitutes my life. It’s that I am missing the crown jewel that is supposed to celebrate me. It’s not that I want to be lavished with gifts and flowers and chocolates and dinners, the year of the Jimmy Choo’s aside. I don’t need elaborate bows and little blue boxes, gems and designer purses.

I simply want someone who celebrates me.

The messy-Sunday-morning-hair me. The no-makeup me. The no-bra-laundry-folding me. The get-the-kids-to-school-and-me-to-work me. The tired-and-cranky me. The can’t-swim-can’t-cook-wine-loving me. The been-to-hell-and-back-and-never-gave-up-fighting-to-come-back me. The afraid-of-scary-movies-and-dark-hallways-but-loves-to-run-in-the-dark me. The flip-flop-and-peep-toed-heels me. The Websters-Dictionary me. The protective-and-nurturing-mother-of-two me. The if-it-is-implausible-and-outrageous-it-will-happen-to-me, me. The let-me-go-for-a-run-and-I-will-give-you-whatever-you-want me. The I-am-okay-with-your-smell-if-you’re-okay-with-my-subtle-irritation-about-it me. The content-and-loving me.

All of me.

But it doesn’t appear likely that the hand-carved wish box is going to deliver what I want by Saturday, despite the fact that I am on the cusp of crossing a milestone I didn’t anticipate celebrating alone. And I have yet to meet the man that wants all of me and not just parts of me, which is not an option I am willing to exercise. But sitting here looking at the Back 40, I can’t help but wish that on this birthday that I had someone.

Someone strong enough to take a fire extinguisher to the candles.

Daddy Dearest.

When a single mom goes out on a date with somebody new
It always winds up feeling more like a job interview
My momma used to wonder if she'd ever meet someone
Who wouldn't find out about me and then turn around and run 

– “He Didn’t Have to Be”

“Daddy would like this song.”

Looking at her in the backseat, surrounded by fluffy friends and related accoutrements necessary for a night of mommy-and-me time, I wonder if she understands the lyrics she is listening to. The woman inside me knows that she does, and I am caught between wishing she didn’t and welcoming the wisdom that is beyond her years.

In the nearly four years that I have navigated the murky waters that widowhood ignominiously landed me in, I have learned much about the annual calendar. I have learned that milestones, holidays and nondescript days all carry equal weight on the scale of pain.

In the first year each day seared, some white hot and others blue flame. Each milestone and holiday a test of endurance and resolve. But the days in between, when the air felt like a moment in time past or familiar musculature crossed my line of sight in passing, were as painful for their anger and loneliness as the unwelcomeness of the holidays that shone a spotlight on our void. As time passed, the pain dulled and each holiday simply became unwelcome. But the Hallmark-ed weeks of anticipation ensure that the ones most jarring are prolonged. And for an entire week I have been subjected to questions, conversations, dreams and dreads of paternal importance.

What he looked like. Was it burritos or nachos? The sound of his voice. His favorite color. The games he played. Did he like football or hockey best? Where we met and where we got married. Did he ever get mad, or was he always laughing?

When will we have a new Daddy?

Listening to the words of the song, she does not know that years ago we listened to the same lyrics. And in a moment of thoughtfulness, we wondered how hard it would be to enter a family that you did not start. To embrace children not yours as your own. For children to embrace a father that was not theirs as their own. And in that moment we promised that if it ever came to pass, we would honor the other by accepting no less than someone who would love us as if we had always been theirs.

And it came to pass, and Father’s Day became as much a day of remembering as it has become a day of wondering. It is equal part tears and dreams, a day of wishing for what was and what could be.

“Mom, I made a wish in the fountain but it can’t come true. So I wish you can find us another Daddy that is the perfect one for us instead.”

“Any chance you saw a frog near that fountain?”

Bedtime Stories.

I have broken my bed.

Right now those of you who bet the odds are questioning why it took so long to get to this point. If you have been a fierce advocate of my inner cougar, you’re secretly hoping for vindication. My mother is pretending she is uninterested in whether her only daughter will find happily ever after again, and you’re all waiting to hear what 50 shades of misadventure led to this little turn of events because, if there is anything we’ve all learned by now is that my life is nothing if not entertaining.

For you. Not necessarily for me.

Just so we’re all caught up, the lip has healed nicely. The doctor-prescribed vibrator to vanquish the unsightly scar tissue that required a visit to a not-to-be-named-lest-my-computer-contract-something-nefarious purveyor of such pleasantries, however, did not survive. Overuse, I assume. It’s not like I had plans for it afterwards but, just in case this whole dating thing doesn’t work out it, it would have come in handy. And for the record, it was never applied it to my lips in public.

But I digress.

For the past several years, I have methodically taken inventory. Of what I wanted and what I don’t and what stays and what goes. What is me and what was us. What is beyond salvation and what can be salvaged. What to do and what not to do. What to walk away from and what to walk toward. 

So one would think that the bed—the place where he died and where I slept unknowingly beside his lifeless body—would be first on the list of disposables.

But one would be wrong.

The bed is neither expensive, nor is it elaborate. Made from iron bands that gently curve, a single mattress sits above weakening wooden slats. For years, I have disappeared into its velvety winter layers and I’ve lain restless on its cool summer sheets. It gave me my children and it took away my husband. It swallowed my silent tears and embraced us in laughter. On a wooden platform that has weathered a lifetime.

With the mattress they took away its memories, leaving behind strong steely bands and weary wooden slats to be covered anew. A cold, empty platform covered with a warm, new foundation on which new memories will be formed. A shell to be filled. 

Just as soon as I figure out how to tighten the screws.  

Skin in the Game.

This is not what I had in mind. 

If patience is a virtue, I am clearly not in line for sainthood. I know instinctively what I want and what I don’t want, and rarely has the rational me chosen to go down a path that my instinct and elusive sixth sense hadn’t already embraced. And yet when it comes to matters of the heart and of the flesh, my impatient self is oddly patient.

I am … um … selective. Some might say picky.

But just because I don’t let every man who happens to wander by with a hoe to till the fields, doesn’t mean you don’t reach a point where the dirt needs to be turned. And turned. And turned. And turned.

(You get the idea. And my mother doesn’t need the mental image that goes along with this.)

When I pictured the next time a set of eyes laid eyes on my naked body, I imagined something more intimate and chemical. The hands touching me? A little demanding and a lot of caressing.

And yet here I am. Standing naked and cold while every inch of my body is poked, prodded and peered at from an uncomfortably close vantage point. With a magnifying glass. And a measuring stick.

Every year since college I have dreaded this annual review—like a final exam I haven’t studied for and for which there are no re-takes. But my options are this: have three holes carved into my left buttock or stand here naked once a year while the relative spread of my birthmark Bermuda Triangle is documented for posterity. And, frankly, three holes are not going to improve the view or the odds.

But my father hit the cancer jackpot. And then my ass was left abruptly on the line without backup. And then an annual inconvenience became an inconvenient necessity to save my ass. So as long as she doesn’t tell me that there has been an unexpected expansion of my back end, I quietly let her peer at every freckle and birthmark.

And look up and pray that the next time my ass has an audience … it isn’t wearing scrubs.

She's Lost her Marbles.

“Sweetheart, you’re going to have to help me out here because I can’t see it and I just don’t understand. How, exactly, did it get in there?”

This must be what it’s like to look down the barrel of a gun. Except that this is not a gun and looking down this barrel is about as inviting as a tomb sealed for centuries. Because I just know that cracking the seal is going to let something foul out and I am not particularly interested in seeing what’s inside.

But there is a marble inside my daughter.

“It hurts and I want it out!!!!!”

“Sweetheart, it’s okay. Things can go in and out of there without any problem. That doesn’t mean you should be putting ANYTHING in there, but I promise you’ll be fine.”

“What kind of things can go in there?”

When I planned on relaxing for Valentine’s Day, it did not involve my daughter’s (insert word that sounds repulsive and starts with “v”) nor did it involve a discussion about mine.

“NOT marbles. Little girls shouldn’t have marbles or anything else in there.”

Apparently neither should I, because as my friend Stephanie so bluntly pointed out, a crowbar might be necessary if it takes any longer to crack the safe.

“But you said things can go in there?”

“Things can go in there when you are bigger like Mommy.”

“Like what? Do you put things in there?”

I just know I am on some watch list somewhere. Because this is not the first time she’s landed us in an unusual spot, and I absolutely don’t want to have to explain how a marble got in there to the same emergency room technicians that stood dumbfounded while I explained how my daughter managed to give herself lacerations down there bouncing on a piece of furniture. At which point she started crying for her dead Daddy. Which is an effective and awkward way to stop all conversation, and leads to mumbled comments you really don’t care to deal with when a doctor is reassuring you that your daughter’s virtue has not been stolen by the couch, and you are reassuring them you had nothing to do with it.

And now this. I am fishing for marbles, and she is fishing for information about mine.

“Nope. There’s nothing going in there.”

“But what would you put in there?”

Something that fits just right. And it better not require batteries.

Concerning Cupid.

I get it. I really do.

If I was a vertically challenged man forced to flit around for eternity on a pair of Victoria’s Secret angel wing cast offs—wearing a cloth diaper and nothing else—I’d want to sling a few arrows, too. Because no matter what the art historians say, when I think of cupid … I see Kevin Pollak.

I am, admittedly, unsure when it comes to the all-important day of love. 

For a man, Valentine’s Day arm wrestles with prostate exams and colonoscopies for supremacy. For a woman, Valentine’s Day is rife with emotional turmoil, from pure bliss to lonely misery. Whether you are XX or XY, Valentine’s Day is the most pressure-laden Hallmark invention on the calendar.

Long before I met my husband, the bloom faded on the roses that are expected. My first Valentine’s Day gift from him smelled less like a floral shop and more like a temporary loan to pay Uncle Sam. And for the entire duration of our life together, Valentine’s Day was simply a bump on the road with small tokens to mark the day without breaking the bank. An inconvenient inconvenience that we were both content to acknowledge and disregard as insignificant in a life that was already fulfilling and frantic.

And yet the woman in me—the one that didn’t need the flowers, the little boxes and the chocolates—craved the very thing that I found so inconvenient.

I longed for the unexpected.

And suddenly a life defined by expectation became a life unexpected, and the woman that I was grew and changed in unexpected ways. I let go of a life planned and prepared, and dared to dream of a life unexpected and found myself longing.   

To hear my name whispered. To open my eyes to a sleepy smile. To lose myself to laughter. To melt into a kiss. To dance with abandon. To disappear into strong arms.

To love without expectation.