It’s hard to know exactly if this is the end,
because we’ve been here eight or twelve
times, depending on how one counts these
things. But maybe I should backtrack. This is
a story about the Big Bad Wolf, whom I met
shortly after the demise of my twenty-year marriage, and my subsequent attempts to
eradicate the beast. I’d lived a sheltered
life and had no idea what a wolf looked like,
so I fell into his clutches quite unwittingly.
OK, maybe there were a few warning signs,
like over forty and never married. (My sincere apologies to those who just haven’t
met the right one, but no absolution for
Wolf.) In short, I hadn’t even been around
the block once and he’d been to Singapore
and back. Like ten times. But I didn’t find
that out until later. He gave me quite the well-rounded education and I think kind of
fell for me too, but he preferred the taste of
wild game, lots of it. So little Red Riding Hood
(me) decided to head back to civilization. It
wasn’t easy.
Apparently, with the getting over it part, it
doesn’t matter who ends it, because I’ve
been going through so many mood swings
that I realized I needed to take action before
my friends, family, and sanity all deserted
me. Today I read an article called, “12 Steps to Break Addiction to a Person,” and
put one of them into action immediately.
It’s the old rubber-band idea, where you
put a rubber-band around your wrist and
when you have thoughts you shouldn’t,
you snap yourself. It started out pretty well, but then I started to think I needed to vary
the snaps, depending on the thoughts I was
having. Passing thought, like his touch, his
scent, one snap. Favorite memories, like him
writing me poetry, or hiking at Point Lobos,
two snaps. Kissing under my diaphanous leopard scarf while sunbathing at Stinson
beach, three snaps. And I think we’ll stop
there, as you really don’t need to hear
about my ten-snapper. Within two hours I
had a nasty welt on my wrist. Then I got thinking about the stages to
recovering from this thing, from sadness,
and thinking of our happy times, to anger,
and listening with my fifteen-year-old
daughter, Belle, to Taylor Swift songs, like,
“I Knew You Were Trouble,” “Should Have Said No,” and “We Are Never
Getting Back Together.” Belle and I belt
them out at full volume at every
opportunity, because coincidentally, she is
going through a similar breakup. We’ve
even thrown in a Pink song, “U + Ur Hand,” with Belle doing a rude hand
gesture. I didn’t reprimand her. Am I a bad
mom? Snap. But these songs are also a
reminder about how universal this is. Next phase I think is revenge, which I’m
proud to say, I skipped over. Lucky for him
that I never ever, even once, thought about
pulling a Carrie Underwood on his car. And
no, writing about him doesn’t count,
because I didn’t include his name, which has three letters and starts with J, and ends
with m, and his last name rhymes with…
oops! Have I gone too far? Last step is recovery. Every once in a while I
catch a whiff of it, so can tell a little about it.
I’ve started to do a systematic exorcism of
all “our places” so that they no longer
contain that pang of heartache and longing
when I enter them. For example, I took my friend Chris, who was visiting from the UK,
to one of Wolf’s and my favorite places in
Marin. Chris is happily married with two
kids, but while we were ordering he
convinced the waitress that he was my ex-
husband who came here just to see me and talk me into getting back with him. The
waitress was cheering for us to get back
together, and the ghosts of the past flew out
the door with our laughter. I think I need to
take Chris to all our other places. For now I’m trying to fill the void with lots
of exercise, activities with my girls, and
taking out my aggressions on the yard with
the chainsaw and pickax. I have to admit
though that I do miss Wolf’s companionship
and his fuzzy face. Oops! Snap!
