Life Choices

In 1985, in a "Superstars of Rock" interview, the great philosopher Steve Perry, said "I guess it is safer to be lonely, sometimes."

He didn't say it's safer to be alone. He said it's safer to be lonely. The connotation is there is a longing to not be alone. That says so much.

For me, the statement "it's safer to be alone" would be more accurate. After my divorce I walked away from an engagement and have never married again. It's not like there have been a bunch of proposals thrown in my path since 1995. But my Mom was married and divorced twice. My dad was married 3 times, divorced once, widowed, and then he died. My brothers have both been married and divorced twice, as has my sister.

Maybe being the youngest, I am the one to break the chain. Married once, divorced once. I mean - who wants to be a statistic, anyway?

Although it would be nice to have someone to lift heavy things and fix stuff. And I don't give a rat's a$$ whether or not that's sexist.

Snapshots

There is a snapshot in time of my going outside to play with other kids for the first time since being told about my parents impending divorce. Kim from down the street had come over and we were walking on the curb in front of my house, balancing so as to not step off into the water in the gutter. I can see my sun-browned feet and feel the quiet between us, yet hear the roaring in my ears. No one told me not to say anything, but speaking it aloud was somehow scary, shameful, and would make it real. So I was silent, and felt alone even with a friend by my side.

I don't recall ever speaking about it with my friends, it just was. My life changed in an instant, the whole world looked different to me, everyone knew - but I never spoke of it.

Life went on, scar tissue formed, and I turned inward. It wasn't like today where people are hyper-aware of how hard divorce is on kids, and it's certainly not unusual anymore. But back then, in 1970, I was 11 years old and the only kid out of my group of friends whose parents were divorced. For some reason this one snapshot in time is stamped in my mind, representative of a broken, sensitive, child who didn't know there was anywhere to turn.

It was all so unspoken back then. Or was that just my family? I honestly have no idea.

Divorce is serious. business

But .. consciously uncoupling?

REALLY, GWYNETH?????

Some celebrities are so much more enlightened and evolved as human beings than the rest of us, they even divorce better than we do!

Gag.  Just gag.

Catnip makes it all better

I needed to take my crabby old man cat Riley, to the vet today. I take him to a cat clinic so there are no run-ins with dogs or ferrets or any other manner of pets in the waiting room. Other cats are bad enough. Turns out he’s older than I thought. I thought he was 13 years old but according to the records at the vet, he’s 15 years old. “He is?” I asked.

*blink blink*

“That’s what it says here on his chart.”

*blink blink*

“Oh.” Long pause … “Um, okay.”

There are things in my life that I figure out the timing of by how it correlates to when I was divorced. BD (before divorce) and AD (after divorce). Except there is a difference between when my now ex-husband moved out – and when we were actually divorced.

Apparently though, I don’t delve too deeply into anything from around that time of my life. I’ve blocked things out. When I was going to a therapist in the midst of it all - I had a lot of confusion about the timing of things. My therapist said it was because I was “emotionally divorced” long before I was ever legally divorced.

I’m also one of those people who moves the time on my alarm clock forward because it fools me in the morning when I am just waking up. But I digress.

Here I was thinking my cat was 13 years old because I got him the year I got divorced. But really he’s 15 because I brought him home the year my ex actually moved out of the house. It’s funny the way people protect themselves emotionally like that but sometimes I find it unnerving. It never bothers me for long though because I just shove it in the back of my mind and move on.

Instead, I worry about the cat and his slight heart murmur, his weight loss and his constant hunger. The doctor took blood and urine and we will find out what’s going on in a few days.

Waiting to pay my bill I grabbed a little catnip toy they were selling, pulled the tag off and tossed it inside the carrier with Riley. Nobody even noticed, I could have just walked out with my $1.99 freebie. But, I gave the tag to the girl behind the counter and paid for it. It kept Riley happy and quiet on the ride home.

When we got home I set the carrier down and opened the door. I love how the other cats looked at Riley like he was a stranger because he had been out of the house for an hour. He stepped out of the carrier with his little heart-shaped catnip toy in his mouth and proceeded to lick it and roll on it for at least 45 minutes after we got home. Now he is sleeping next to the soggy mess.

He’s happy. He doesn’t care if he’s 13 or 15 or if I knew which it was. He doesn’t know why I brought him to that place that smells like hundreds of other cats, he only knows that I brought him back home and I gave him a new toy. Ah-h-h, to be a cat.