It’s not that I don’t love them with all my heart, I do. And it’s not that I won’t miss them, in that Stockholm syndrome kind of way, because I will. But I will have no problem finding other ways to fill my time besides being a maidservant to the whims of three needy, egocentric midgets. I am not being nasty here, just stating a fact. Children are by nature self-involved, as they should be at this time in their lives, before they are forced to learn the definitions of words like responsibility and independence. And I am not complaining about a mother’s 24/7 subservience, either. I am happy to be a servant, as became my obligation the moment my husband’s sperm burrowed its way into my egg. I am just saying that when this whole slave labor thing is over, I won’t shed too many tears about it.
I have a couple of friends whose children have gone away to college and, although they have read the books and, in one case, even undergone therapy, they still can’t come to terms with the fact that they are no longer needed on a moment-to-moment basis. They complain about the echoing silence that bounces off the walls of their empty houses as they wander aimlessly through their days. I would like to offer them the following advice: Turn on the TV—you get to watch whatever you want, girl! Crank up the stereo with that 80s pop music that your kids thought was crap! Dance naked through your living room—yes, naked! Make a dinner that consists only of pâté and smelly cheese! You can do it! You have the freedom to do anything you want now! Grasp that freedom with both hands and run with it.
Oh, and by the way, your kids still need you. You’ll see them every weekend when they bring home four sacks of laundry and a raging appetite. (Unless they’ve moved to another state, in which case they’ll call you to send them money for books—yeah, books, right!) I don’t think we ever stop needing our parents. Even at my age, my mother always gives me the best advice, the best support, the best encouragement of anyone in my life. A few years ago, I even recorded her talking, just in case something happened to her, so that I would always be able to hear her voice when I needed it. So stop pacing your empty house and bemoaning your children’s absence. They still love and need you; they just do so from the lovely distance of their own, grown-up lives. Stop crying and go do something! Get a job.
And by the way, according to a recent census, a great number of children are returning home after college, so, probably, by the time you have settled into your new life of emancipation, they’ll be knocking on your door with their suitcases at their feet, calling you Mommy even though they are now the proud bearers of university diplomas.
My own kids are on a trip with their dad for six whole days. It’s not a permanent situation, but I intend to milk it for every dancing-naked, stereo-cranking, favorite-show-watching moment it’s worth. When they return, I will welcome them with open arms and celebrate their presence in my house, but within days, when the sounds of screaming and fighting swirl around me, and the mounds of laundry pile up, and I am told on a weekly basis that I am hated for one transgression or another, when I am spread so thin from racing from one activity to another that I wish I had a couple of clones, a small part of me will mentally count the months, weeks, days, and hours before I get to send them on their way again.
Empty-nesters, you don’t know how lucky you are.
After posting my blog, I spend the rest of the morning ransacking my closet, the first job on my list because it is the hardest for me to tackle. It is far easier to go through my children’s closets with a garbage bag, mindlessly chucking out anything I haven’t seen them use/wear/play with for the last year. But my own closet is a different story. How many times have I withdrawn that size six pair of Calvin Klein jeans I wore on my honeymoon and set them on the pile meant for Goodwill, only to return them to a hanger and place them between the size six cocktail dress I wore to my wedding rehearsal dinner and the size four capri pants I fit into just after a particularly nasty bout of salmonella? For me, letting go of those jeans, and the dress and the capris, signifies letting go of the woman I used to be and accepting the fact that I will never be that woman again. I liked her. She was recklessly optimistic about life and its possibilities. She knew what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to do whatever it took to get it. She was sure of herself and secure with her place in the world. She was young.
With my hands on my (size eight) hips, I stand and gaze upon these items that have had an almost magical hold on me. For a long time, I believed that if I could fit into those clothes, I would be that Ellen again; by buttoning up the fly, or easing the zipper into place, I would suddenly cast off the ravages of time and be transformed. Slowly, as I run my fingers over the familiar fabric, it dawns on me that my beliefs were merely illusions birthed by a woman who had lost herself and wasn’t sure whether she would actually like herself if she was ever found.
One by one, I ease the capris, the cocktail dress, and the Calvins off their hangers, carefully fold them, and set them into a half-filled box labeled Goodwill. I wait a moment, anticipating that twinge of regret that will cause me to grab the clothes and return them to the safety of my closet, but I find that I have no urge to rescue them this time. It is not because I have let go of ever becoming that woman again, but because I now realize that I am that woman. Older, certainly more rounded, a few battle scars here and there, but the same woman nonetheless. The wrinkles and pounds may blur the image, but they do not erase the person at the core. I now know that being optimistic, having self-confidence, knowing what you want and getting it are choices that we have to make every single day.
My reinvention, I finally understand, is not about becoming someone new. It’s about taking the Ellen of yesterday and the Ellen of today and blending them, so that the Ellen of tomorrow will be the best of both. This knowledge doesn’t slam into me like an epiphany, just eases through me like an IV drip. As I lift up the box, my eyes find my reflection in the mirror on the back of the closet door, and to my delight, I like the woman I see staring back at me. She looks confident. She looks strong. She looks like me.
It may well be that this new round of self-assurance and self-love is the result of endorphins, but what the hell? I’ll take it where I can get it. Besides, endorphins are a lot cheaper than Lexapro.
Just as I start down the stairs with the Goodwill box in tow, I hear a familiar voice call out from the entry hall.
“Hell-ooo! I’m home!”
I reach the landing just in time to see Mia, a vision in purple, disappear into the kitchen, singing an old blues number with her rich contralto pipes. Her arrival is not unexpected, even though we have not had so much as a phone conversation since book club last Friday. Every year, from my first boycott of the Arizona trip, she drops in around noon on the day my family leaves with a picnic basket full of grown-up food and chilled wine. I am glad that I finished my closet and did my run already, as I will be useless by the time she leaves.
I set the box by the front door, then follow the smooth sound of my friend’s song into the kitchen. I stop for a moment at the doorway, watching her as she unloads her bounty from the wicker basket onto my kitchen table: a loaf of French bread, a triangle of Brie, a container of paté, some olives, and, of course, the Chablis.
“’Cause any place I hang my hat is home,’” she sings. Mia’s voice is butter-rich, sultry, and mesmerizing, and I have often told her that she could have been a star. To which she always replies that being a star would have meant starving herself, and she likes her fat ass just fine, thank you very much.
The ass in question is currently enrobed in a muumuu the color of a Pleione orchid, which actually makes it look larger than normal. Mia is a big woman, almost six feet tall, and carries around about sixty extra pounds. But she is more secure with her body than any woman I know. She doesn’t even mind that her husband is always on her case about losing weight, which would inspire nervous breakdowns and relationship implosions with any other couple.
“Oh, that’s just him,” she says, defending her man. “If I did go and join Jenny Craig and turned into s
ome skinny bitch, he’d just find something else to harp on me about. That is, as they say, married life, girl. Still, he doesn’t complain at all in the sack, no. I give him a good whole lotta to hold on to, know what I mean?”
She turns to me now and smiles that teeth-whitening-commercial smile of hers. “There you are!” she says, rushing over to me with open arms. “Congratulations, girl. You’re free!”
We embrace like we haven’t seen each other in years, as that is Mia’s way. She embraces everything, for better or for worse, but good friends especially. She releases her hold on me and steps back, her smile suddenly absent, replaced by a pensive expression.
“Damn. You look good, Elle.”
I feel my cheeks flush at her praise. “Thanks.”
“No, really. I thought you looked different at book club, but you look even better now. Okay, girl, level with me. You go under the knife?”
“No!” I exclaim, shocked.
“It’s Mia, baby. Come on. Give it up. A little nip here, a little suck and tuck there. Right?”
“I swear to you, Mia. I’m just making healthier choices, that’s all. Treadmill. Low fat. Face creams. Like that.”
“Damn,” she repeats. “Well, it’s all working.” She glances over at the table and frowns. “You better not tell me you’re bowing out of this fine picnic,” she says sternly.
“Hell, no,” I assure her, because fighting with Mia is a losing proposition. “What’s life without a little cheating?”
She smiles, relieved, and ushers me to the table where we begin to feast.
We are a third of the way through the bottle of wine, a quarter of the way through the duck liver, and midway through a story about Mia’s college-aged daughter and her first serious relationship when my cell phone rings. I almost let the call go to voice mail, as Mia has me in stitches with her retelling of how Lettie reacted when her new boyfriend farted for the first time in front of her and she almost broke up with him on the spot. But I assume it’s Jonah calling to let me know he and the kids arrived safely, so I reluctantly push back from the table and head for the counter, telling Mia to hold that thought.
I glance at the clock. It’s not yet one o’clock and unless Jonah drove like Mario Andretti, there’s no way he can be at his parents’ by now. I pick up my cell and glance at the Caller ID, and my breath catches in my throat. My hands tremble so much as I fumble to answer the call that I almost drop the phone into the sink. “Hello?”
“Hi. Ellen?”
“Yes. Hi.”
“It’s Ben. Ben Campbell?”
“Yes. I know.”
“Is this a bad time?”
Yes. “No. It’s fine. How are you?”
“I’m good,” he says, then chuckles. “The kids just got whisked off by their grandparents. Linda’s at work. I’m just, sort of, basking in the silence of the house.”
“I did that all morning,” I confess. I can feel Mia’s eyes on me and I put up one finger. Just a minute, I am telling her. Jonah? she mouths, and I shake my head. She narrows her eyes at me, then cuts into the Brie and slathers a huge chunk over a piece of bread.
“When did they leave?” he asks.
“About seven.”
“So you’ve been basking for what, six hours already?”
“I’ll have you know that I’ve been very productive,” I say.
“Spring cleaning, huh?”
“Exactly.”
For a moment, neither of us speaks. Finally, his voice breaks through the quiet of the phone line.
“So, I, uh, I’m heading over to the marina in about an hour.”
“Stand-up paddleboarding,” I say.
“Right.” He hesitates for just a second. “Are you sure you don’t want to come? I mean, you seemed pretty definitive yesterday, but it is something new.”
“Just for future reference, the something new I tried did not require me to even leave the house.”
His throaty chuckle makes my knees go weak. “That sounds fun.”
“And,” I cut him off before he can do further damage, “it didn’t require me to wear a wet suit.”
“You only need a wet suit if you fall in the water,” he jokes, and I laugh. In my peripheral vision, I see Mia lumber out of her chair and head in my direction. She makes a show of grabbing a glass out of the cupboard and filling it with water, all the while giving me the fish eye.
“Thanks for the invite,” I tell him. “But I can’t.”
He is silent for another moment. “Okay. But if you change your mind, I’ll be at the kids’ beach next to Pier Three.”
“Have fun,” I say, then quickly disconnect the call. As I set the phone on the counter, I hear Mia clear her throat. Loudly.
“Okay, Miz Thang. What in the hell was that? Or should I say, who?”
I wave my hand dismissively at her and head for my seat at the table. “No one.”
“No one, huh? That’s why your face is the color of a burst pomegranate seed?”
Without thinking, I raise my hand to my cheek and find it warm to the touch.
“You will tell Mama Mia what’s going on, girl.”
I glance over at her and see her dark brown eyes boring into me, her left eyebrow raised in a question.
“He’s this…soccer dad I know and we keep running into each other. He’s just a nice man.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah. He’s nice to everyone.”
“And he calls everyone on their cell phones?” Her left eyebrow descends just as her right eyebrow rockets upward.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I think of Nina Montrose and mentally cross my fingers that Ben is not, at this moment, calling her as a consolation prize. Then I find myself hoping that I was not the consolation after a prior phone call to Nina.
“Oh sure,” Mia says sarcastically. “He calls all the soccer moms and makes them laugh and blush and cross their legs.”
I look down to see that, sure enough, my legs are crossed. I quickly raise my head and shrug my shoulders casually.
“Maybe he does.”
“Bullshit,” she counters, then sighs. “Good looking?”
“Uh, yeah,” I answer slowly. Mia would sniff it out if I lie to her.
“He text you?”
I open my mouth to answer, but cannot expel the word. I nod a yes.
“Oh, girl. You in a world of trouble.”
We sit at the kitchen table and finish the bottle of wine while I recount the story of Ben Campbell. Mia doesn’t interrupt, just listens, rapt. As I tell her, I worry that I am giving the situation too much power, that I am making a big deal out of nothing, that I have created this imaginary precipice in my mind and that even if it were real, there is no way I would jump off.
I finish with his invitation to go paddle surfing, then sit back against my chair and drain my wineglass. Mia is no longer looking at me but instead at a spot just over my head. Her expression is contemplative, and I suspect she is trying to choose her words carefully, just as she does with a student who has been sent to her office. If anyone is going to give me a lambasting, it’s Mia. She adores Jonah and is very protective of family values, having witnessed as a social worker far too many families destroyed.
“It’s nothing,” I insist before she can start in on me. Because, honestly, if you look hard at the facts, it is nothing. Everyone, at one point or another in their lives, has to decide exactly what constitutes cheating for them. Some people would say holding hands. Others might say swapping spit. And there are those (men mostly) who insist that everything up to penetration could be considered platonic (“It was just a friendly blow job, honey, didn’t mean a thing”). At some point in my twenties, I decided that touching tongues was an adulterous act because it required effort. Anything before that could be written off as mindless flirting. So, yes, I am guilty of flirtation, but according to my personal cheat-o-meter, I am innocent of the big A.
“I cheated on Sidney,” Mia says. Her voice is so soft and her ad
mission so implausible that I think I have misheard her. I have to concentrate to keep my jaw from hitting the table.
“What? When?”
I have known Mia for seven years now, and our friendship was instantaneous, like the immediate reaction you get when you pour baking soda into a bottle of Coke. A mutual friend of ours, Julia Simpson, had started a book club and had invited us both to attend. From the moment we found ourselves seated next to each other, and discovered that we both were bored to tears by Pride and Prejudice, a bond was forged. After a couple of meetings, Julia informed the group that she was joining AA and would no longer be serving alcohol. At which point, Mia and I seceded and formed our own book club faster than you can say twelve steps.
She has never mentioned an affair to me before, not even the time we drank too many margaritas and shared our fantasies about the perfect seduction scene, substituting fetching men we knew for our husbands.
“A long time ago,” she murmurs. “Before I knew you.”
She takes a sip of her wine, sets it down and runs a finger around the lip.
I am so stunned by this revelation that I am hardly able to speak. “Wh-who…who was it?”
Her eyes fog over with memories and for a moment, I think she may not answer my question. Then she takes a deep breath and sighs heavily. “His name was Peter Stormcloud.”
I cover my mouth with my hand to keep from laughing because I can tell by Mia’s expression that this is no joke. She catches the gesture and furrows her brow, reprimanding me with a frown. Then she shakes her head and the corners of her lips curl up into a grin.
“I kid you not. That was his name. Actually, I think his full name was Peter Gathers Mighty Stormcloud, or something like that. We worked together at family services in San Bernadino. He handled most of the Native American cases. He was…he was a beauty.” She looks past me again, a dreamy expression washing over her face as if Peter Stormcloud were standing right behind me. So vivid are the memories surfacing for her at the moment, so intense is the look of rapture those memories are painting on her face, that I almost turn to see if he is really there.
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