Single Married Widowed Divorced

Am I Ready to Date? An Analysis of "Urinary Stream of Consciousness"

by Carolyn Alfvin
Excerpted from "Two is the New Three"

The first time I saw him
Roger
Outgoing, outdoorsman
Roger
Lifted his leg
And peed on mine.

I wrote this poem, Urinary Stream of Consciousness, one evening while walking through the park. Just an hour earlier, Jingles and I had gathered with other dogs and their owners to mix and mingle in the park’s doggy zone. It was there that we met Roger, a chocolate lab, and his handsome owner, named...hmmm. I was working up to flirting with the owner when Roger indeed had urinated on my leg.

The poem was a way to laugh off my puzzlement. But after I wrote it down and read it over...and over... that night, I recalled that Roger’s wedding-ring free owner had never so much as asked me my name. And then I began to wonder, and analyze.

Twelve words: childishly simple on the outside. But are they really the Cliffs Notes to my attachment issues with men? Do they hold the answer to the question: “Why am I not in a healthy relationship?”

Alone, in my flannel pajamas, I read the poem again.

The first time I saw him
Roger
Outgoing, outdoorsman
Roger
Lifted his leg
And peed on mine.

Without warning, the themes of my romantic life sprang out. It was all here, in these 12 words.

Fantasy fulfillment: Curious how I attributed only positive traits to Roger, whom I had known for a mere ten minutes upon writing this poem. Outgoing? Outdoorsman? Based on what? Watching him sprint from one dog butt to the next, thrusting nose under tail in a doggy handshake? It was as if I wanted Roger to possess these traits, and so had filtered his personality through a sieve.

Guilt: Did I look like a fire hydrant? Was I to blame for my own wet leg? Did I brush against something tree-smelling? Was I standing too still? But why was I blaming myself? Repetition compulsion. That’s why. I was transferring my past onto my present in an attempt to restore, then correct, an earlier state of being. Only a week later did I consider that Roger’s misguided urinary output was not my fault. Even if I had worn tree-colored pants, glued leaves to myself, and stuck a squirrel in my hair, Roger was still accountable for his self-centered actions.

Victimization: Why me? Why, out of all the people in the park, did Roger pick my leg when I did nothing to deserve it? Psychologists refer to the Victim-Persecutor-Rescuer Triangle, and how certain individuals perpetually and subconsciously vacillate between these three archetypes. Was I locked into this triangle? Was that why I was not dating/engaged/married to Mr. Emotionally Healthy? Was I instead doomed to be a victim, a seeker of revenge, or a co-dependant to the Rogers of the world, spending my days mutually enmeshed in dysfunction? When would I learn that the Rogers must save themselves? (As must I.)

Matches made to fail: Here, Roger lifts his limb to my limb, voiding his accumulated acidic waste. This act represented a failed relationship between a woman and a dog. But did it also symbolize the ultimate downfall of all relationships? When two gathered, would one always be pissed upon? If so, will the pisser be as blissfully freed by his oblivion, as was Roger? And will the pissed upon suffer humiliation and confusion as intensely as I? I know just one thing to be irrefutably true: Roger’s bladder will fill again.

Am I fucked up?: When I composed this poem -- with as much effort as it takes to breathe -- I used the name Roger, for that’s the dog’s name. Yet the first time I spoke it aloud, I unwittingly substituted Jack for Roger. Why? This was my subconscious’ way of telling the conscious me that despite my quest to understand my poem, my deepest attachments and myself I don’t know jack.

In the final analysis, Stream of Consciousness defied definitive analysis. And yet, the very process of analysis left me with a deeper understanding of myself, serving as a thread into the heart of the complex fabric of my attachment issues with men.

And so the question is raised for us all: Do we utter such threads every day? Are they enmeshed in how we ask for more coffee? Our divorces? Paper or plastic? Are they always present -- coded desires, cloaked motivations, layered longings, unfinished business -- embedded in word and deed like the strands of DNA in every nucleus? I think perhaps they are -- if we know how to look for them. Perhaps all it takes is a little analysis.

Click here to listen to the "Single Married Widowed Divorced" podcast.

Conversations With a Home Burglar

by Carolyn Alfvin

When my ex-husband’s U-Haul pulled away from the house, home security rose to the top of my concerns. I felt vulnerable in a house without a man and I vowed to install a deadbolt and a dog, soon. But before I had purchased either, I stumbled into a conversation with a home burglar.

I had been pulling dandelions and chatting with my neighbor Connie in my front yard at 11 a.m. on an otherwise lazy summer weekend. Around the corner of the house, a strange man was fiddling at my side door. When my neighborly chat ended (“Oh sure so and so’s lawn looks great, but they use chemicals!”) I walked to the side yard. It was here that we met. We didn’t talk long -- the conversation took on the hurried tone of speed daters -- and we skipped the formalities.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m looking for the McKerlies,” he replied.

“There’s no one here by that name. Where do they live?” I asked, noting his all-black attire. Definitely an entry-level burglar or, like me, a winter.

The man grew agitated. “Somewhere around here.”

Liar, I thought. Men. Geeze! Can’t they just skip the head games and tell the truth?

“What street?” I pressed.

He grew more agitated. “I don’t know! Back off lady!” he snapped. As he spoke, he shot past me then slowed to a stroll as he proceeded down the sidewalk, where he passed a woman walking her dog. Rude, I thought. Back off lady? As if I was imposing upon him? Really!

I grew up in a neighborhood in which people didn’t lock their houses when they went on vacations. So before I was convinced that the stranger was up to no good, I asked the dog walker for her opinion. “See that guy walking down the street? He was just trying to get in my door. Do you that’s suspicious?” I asked.

“Like, duh!” she said.

So I called the police, who scolded me for talking to the man. “Don’t engage in conversation?” I asked. What else could I do? I wondered. My door wasn’t deadbolted. I had no dog. I had no gun. I had no husband. My only defense was my mouth.

If home burglaries are here to stay, and I trust that they are, then we should put our efforts into making them engaging, supportive affairs. Let’s face it. The economy has tanked and today’s thieves are working longer hours, often alone, and could probably use a little coffee-cooler talk to pass the time. Next break-in, if a neighborhood prowler punches into work at the same time I’m reclining inside on the sofa, the conversation could go as follows.

ROBBER
Lay face down on the floor.

ME
What you mean to say is lie, not lay, face down. Lie, as
you’ll find in the Associate Press Stylebook, indicates “a
state of reclining along a horizontal plane.” Its past tense
is lay. Lay, on the other hand, takes a direct object, such
as, “I will lay the gun on the table.” Did you not, therefore,
mean to suggest that I lie face down on the floor?

Robber rolls his eyes.

ROBBER
(sarcastically)
Madame, if you please, lie down. There, are you happy?

ME
(Laying down)
Oddly enough, I am working toward that goal. On one hand,
I’m uncomfortable living with the label of divorce. But on
the other hand, I’m feeling more at peace lately.

ROBBER
Hey! I’m on the clock so shut your yap and tell me
where you keep all your cash.

ME
Cash! Don’t make me laugh. Do you accept checks?

ROBBER
Only with a valid driver’s license or photo ID.

I stand up, retrieve my checkbook and write a check made to “Cash.” The burglar phones a service to verify my check, tapping his foot in impatiently as he wait, and waits. He looks around

ROBBER
Pretty sparse in here.

ME
Just divorced.

ROBBER
I hear you. How long?

ME
Not long enough to have redecorated. You?

ROBBER
Six months. It sucks.

ME
They say that when God closes doors, He..

Robber interrupts by slamming down the phone.

ROBBER
The line’s all fucked up.

ME
Excuse me?

ROBBER
I said the line’s all fucked up.

ME
And I said “Excuse me?” as in we don’t talk that way in
my house. I am the mother of an impressionable little boy
and when I want to say, “Fuck, fucked, fucking, fucker,
fuckhead, or any combination of these words – fuck you
fucker, to offer just one example -- I do it with my adult
friends or alone in my car. When you’re in my house, I
expect you to follow my rules.

ROBBER
(sarcastically)
Well, excuse me Little Miss Perfect Grammar Scrubbing
Bubbles Mouth. Your credit card, then.

I fetch my card, while he retrieves a credit card slip from his sack and one of those little credit card devices used in stores, then runs my card through.

ROBBER
$2,000?

ME
You’re dreaming. Look around you!

ROBBER
$1,800?

ME
Oh for cryin’ out loud! You can see the worn-out couch
and lack of tasteful art objects. What you can’t see is the
fact that I didn’t so much as allow myself to buy a cup of
coffee for the past year. That my ex-husband got the pension
and that I’ll be working until I die. That I barely manage
to pay my mortgage each month. That I have $5,000 on my
credit card. $1,800…you make me laugh.

ROBBER
$1,350. That’s my final offer.

ME
(mocking him)
$1,350, that’s my final offer. Yea, alright. I won’t even
know the difference if it’s on my credit card. (Singing)
Go on, take the money and run.

ROBBER
Hey! That’s enough out of you, SassyPants. I don’t come
to work to be made fun of.

ME
Has no one taught you not to end a sentence with a
preposition? Between you and my son…

ROBBER
(Interrupting)
Hey, shut up or I’ll shoot your head off.

ME
You mean you’ll shoot off my head.

ROBBER
I’m warning you!

He waves his gun, or maybe it’s a hand, under his coat.

ROBBER
(cont’d)
Now, tell me where your expensive jewelry is.

I raise an eyebrow.

ROBBER
Oh, give me a fu---, give me a break. I’m an entry-level
burglar, lady, not William Safire.

ME
Then I’m not telling you.

ROBBER
(takes a deep breath)
Tell me where you keep your expensive jewelry?

ME
Better. But back up a sentence and repeat what you
said after “give me a break.”

ROBBER
What?

ME
You heard me. Repeat what you said. Or no jewelry.

ROBBER
I’m an entry level burglar, lady, not William Safire. Don’t tell
me. It’s Benedict Safire.

He nudges me up the stairs with his gun/hand and into the bedroom.

ME
I don’t appreciate your insolent attitude one bit. For your
information, the previous sentence--the one in which you
said “I’ll shoot your head off” -- indicates that you’re
not a burglar.

ROBBER
I’m not? Well what am I? The president of the United States?

ME
You’re a robber.

ROBBER
A robber.

ME
The legal definition of burglary involves entering a building
and remaining unlawfully with the intention of committing
a crime.

ROBBER
I did that.

He motions me toward my dresser and waves his gun at my jewelry box. I open it.

ME
Robbery, on the other hand, involves the use of violence or
threat of violence in committing larceny, which is the legal
term for the wrongful taking of property.

ROBBER
Hmmm. Then I want to rob your jewelry.

ME
No you don’t.

ROBBER
Yes, I do.

ME
No....you don’t.

ROBBER
Yes...I do.

ME
You rob a person or a house. You rob a person of
his or her dream of being happily married, forever.
But you steal the jewelry or money. See?

I hand him my wedding ring and engagement ring.

ME
(cont’d)
Trust me. It will be worth something. Good luck.

He holds it in the sun, rotates is slowly, and smiles.

ROBBER
I’m going to give it to my finace.

ME
Fiance? I thought you were just divorced six
months ago?

ROBBER
So?

ME
So? So!? So give yourself some time to process the
changes in your life. Sit in it awhile, listen and make
the inner changes necessary. Otherwise you’ll just rush
out and repeat the same damn thing all over again.
Repetition compulsion, they call it.

ROBBER
I hear therapy.

ME
Ya, so? Anyway, you’ll still be divorced even if you
remarry.

ROBBER
That’s the way you end your sentence? With a so?

I roll my eyes.

ROBBER
(cont’d)
I don’t like being labeled divorced. And I thought you
didn’t swear.

ME
I don’t. Around my kid.


ROBBER
Ha! You think you’re so perfect, don’t you? Did you
ever consider your role in the divorce or did you just
blame it all on your ex-husband? Well, back up to the
sentence where – I mean in which -- you said that
if I get married, I’ll repeat the same....the same....

He motions with his hands, like in charades.

ME
...damn thing. So sue me.

ROBBER
No I won’t.

ME
You won’t sue me?

ROBBER
No, I won’t be divorced if I get remarried.

ME
Yes ...you will.

ROBBER
No...I won’t.

ME
Getting remarried doesn’t erase the fact that you’re
also divorced.

I look at him, holding the engagement ring in one hand, a contemplative look on his face. For the first time, I look at him as a man. He’s cute, really, in a Jesse James way. In fact, he’s the first man to enter into my bedroom since the divorce. The ring fits...he’s an OK listener...has proven his ability to compromise on financial matters...

And I wonder: should I start to date? No, not yet. I’ll have to take my own advice and sit in it and wear the label of divorce.

Damn it.

###

Single Married Widowed Divorced

Revenge of the Black Cat: Part 4 of 4

by Carolyn Alfvin

But Jinx’s death wasn’t enough. Five years after the wedding, with a 3-year-old, I could feel it all skidding south. No one was sitting on anyone’s lap, getting stroked and purring. I stuck to my script and Dave stuck to his, turning the pages each day. The men in Dave’s family fell asleep when confronted with a problem. The women in my family stayed fully awake, hyper-vigilant and amazingly productive in other areas of life while they waiting for the moment the bottom fell out. I was resentful, uncommunicative, bitter, depressed and as I walked up the stairs with a load of folded laundry at 10 p.m., passing my husband watching TV, I flipped him off behind the blue, plastic laundry basket and said, “Good night!”

In February, my ability to deny the issues reached a new level. It was like when my Dad was taking his last breaths and I stood by his bedside, fantasizing that his cancer would turn around, that he would begin to recover at that moment just minutes from death, and that he would be a medical miracle. So I went to the Humane Society and bought a replacement cat. What better way to say, “Let’s keep at this and maybe we’ll become a marital miracle.”

It didn’t work. In spring, one evening after Erik was asleep, Dave and I sat in the living room. “I want to get divorced,” he told me. Then he fell asleep.

I was silent as it sunk in, that we were one of the 50 percent. I stumbled into my home office, where I curled up on the floor in a fetal position. One hour ago, just one hour ago, my life had seemed manageable -- not great, but manageable. Now, I told myself, Erik will not grow up in a nuclear family. We could lose our house. We have lost home, as we knew it. I may have to give up my writing career. I had, in just five minutes, lost the illusion that I controlled my own destiny.

I walked up the stairs to my bed and slept in fits and starts and when I woke up I was dizzy from the cacophony of fears and losses that simply wouldn’t shut up and, as the sun rose, I ran to the bathroom and threw up.

Divorced. I would soon be circling divorced on forms that request marital status: single, married, widowed, divorced.

Divorced. Formerly married. A divorcee. A marital loser. The judgmental voices from my past didn’t care that divorce had become common since I was a child. My picture of divorced moms was grim. They lived in trailer parks. They had big hair, worked minimum wage jobs, and had latchkey babies. Society pooh-poohed them. What would I do amongst them?

So I entered the divorced world with a 3-year-old son and a 7-pound, purring, pooping replacement cat -- a calico reminder of my own emotional shortcomings. I didn’t love this animal, but Erik did. I estimated that I would be scooping clumps of cat urine and feces for 18 long years. Curled up on a pillow up in kitty heaven, Jinx surely woke up and busted a gut.

LISTEN IN to the Single Married Widowed Divorced podcast.

Revenge of the Black Cat: Part 3 of 4

by Carolyn Alfvin

He arrived at my apartment late and low on cash, and said he gave $10 to a man he met on the el platform who just got out of prison and was carrying a Bible. That’s not sweet, that’s being a sucker, I thought. But I overlooked it, for the cash station and pad thai were just blocks away. Besides, denial runs in my family like brown eyes and falling madly, crazily in love. When my Dad started to date my Mom, he’d often drive round-trip from St. Louis, where he lived, to Connecticut, where she lived, in a weekend. One of his best friends and coworkers recalled him being totally trashed on Monday mornings during the courtship, drinking cup after cup of coffee at the office. After he married, and had a family and few too many cans of Budweiser, Dad started to sway or nod off at the dinner table. The typical comment was not “What’s wrong with Dad?” but something along the lines of “Pass the salt, please.” Our family didn’t score high marks for dealing with problems quickly and openly.

So I slipped into a whirlwind romance with Dave. He was like my Dad – extremely smart, fun-loving, a golf fanatic -- but different – a bad day on the course didn’t blacken his mood for the day. He was like my Mom – extremely smart, caring, interested in the arts – but different. Unlike Mom’s controlled, artistic home, Dave’s had mounds of to-be-recycled newspapers and was in general disarray, save for the rented grand piano stage center of the living room. And a black cat. Little did I know that the two of us had been handed the scripts for adult children of alcoholics: We grow up, marry, and repeat patterns.

So that’s what we did. We married two years later at a downtown, non-denominational church, walked a block in the drizzle (this was good luck, I was told) to have lunch for our guests at a charming brownstone-turned-restaurant, then set off on our honeymoon that began in Switzerland.

Here in the land of neutrality, we began to polarize.

# # #

Whether we were riding the insanely accurate Swiss trains, hiking, making love, or shopping for watches in Bern, something didn’t feel right.

“You seem edgy,” I commented on a morning train ride into northern Italy.

“I’m quitting smoking,” Dave told me, and that settled that, even though I didn’t know he still smoked.

Back in the United States, Dave was promoted and we moved from Chicago to Milwaukee. But apparently Jinx didn’t approve, either of our union or the move, and he began to tell us so quickly and openly. He did that male cat thing, where he dotted the apartment -- on which we placed an $800 deposit -- with foul-smelling emissions. When summer came, the third-floor walk up heated up like an oven, turning Jinx’s litter box into turd casserole before we could scoop it out.

Worst of all, he meowed us awake at 5 a.m. and I began to suffer migraines triggered by lack of sleep, costly ones that forced me to forfeit a day’s income.

A victim mentality arose in me: in less than a year, I had a new and confusing marriage, a new and smelly apartment, had moved to a new city and was no longer a walk or an el-ride away from my best friends, started a new freelance writing business, and set a new personal record for migraines, and every day I was on my hands and knees, sniffing corners and applying Urine-Be-Gone. Why wouldn’t Dave put the cat down? I put him down every chance I got. “Hey, you stupid cat,” I’d say, when we were alone in the apartment. “You know what I’d like for a wedding present? Your last life.” Jinx glanced my way and closed his eyes, ever so slowly. If they would just stay closed, I thought. Then my marital problems would go bye-bye.

Miraculously, he obliged and died before the year was up, an appropriate time frame in which to present a wedding gift. His end was not brought about by a blow to the head with a Stanley hammer, as I so often envisioned, or by an overdose of some medication, an idea I entertained until I learned a person could do prison time for cat killing, but as best the veterinarian could discern, by a stroke. Dave was beside himself. I was elated.

LISTEN IN to the Single Married Widowed Divorced podcast.

Revenge of the Black Cat: Part 2 of 4

by Carolyn Alfvin

On a fall afternoon in 1989, I rode the Chicago el train from my one-bedroom apartment in Wrigleyville, on the city’s North Side, 48 blocks downtown to pick up a new pair of eyeglasses. Seated next to a blurry (smeared with Afro gel where someone had probably leaned back, listening to his WalkMan) I glanced at my watch and noticed it was broken. The gold timepiece had a family history – my Dad gave it to my Mom and my Mom passed it on to me – and I fancied Dad was sending me some message, straight from heaven to the Howard B train. “I wonder what it is?” I kept thinking, as I walked from the el station and through the revolving doors of the Michigan Avenue building housing my ophthalmologist.

The office was quiet – several floors up from street level – and there was just one other customer, a handsome, hazel-eyed, Swedish-looking man with an extremely full head of hair, dressed in a suit. Normally, I wouldn’t have made conversation. One oddity of living in downtown Chicago is you can get so used to the throngs you tune them out, and can end up with the same number of casual social interactions as an Iowa bean farmer. But the week before, my friend Kathy told a gathering of us single women that we were to strike up conversations with one new guy a day – in an elevator, on a bus, waiting in line to buy Cubs tickets – wherever we found them.

So I tried it. “Do you know where I can get my watch fixed?” I asked him.

“No.”

“Oh. Well, thanks anyway.” I noticed the red flower pinned to his suit. Aha. Gay

“There’s a few jewelers around the corner on Wabash,” he said a moment later.

And so we started talking. He said the red carnation was for Veteran’s Day – he had donated a few dollars to a veteran collecting for the cause on the street. Well, that’s sweet, I thought. I told him I was a freelance writer and he puffed out a bit and told me he was a writer, too – for the government. CIA? FBI? I wondered. He said he wrote newsletters for the U.S. Postal Service. “Maybe I’ll need to hire a freelance writer sometime,” he said. I sniffed a ploy but I gave him my business card anyway – Carolyn Bucior, freelance writer -- and he gave me his.

Before we said goodbye, we tried on each other’s glasses, and discovered we had the same prescription for entry-level nearsightedness, the kind of glasses you wear when driving at night or to read movie credits. Cute! Way to go, Dad!

The phone rang that night. Whoa, kind of desperate buddy! But after listening to his voice -- kind, friendly, ready-to-break-into-a-laugh – my next instinct was to accept a dinner date to a local Thai restaurant, a storefront near Wrigley Field where customers brought their own beer.

LISTEN IN to the Single Married Widowed Divorced podcast.

Revenge of the Black Cat: Part 1 of 4

by Carolyn Alfvin

On a sunny, Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1996, my husband and I sat our 3-year-old son on our bed to break the news. I did the talking. “Daddy is moving out of the house,” I told Erik with the scripted calmness of crisis intervention workers. “We’re not going to be married any more. You will still see Daddy almost every day. We both love you very much and we both will love you forever.”

Through the open windows I heard a skateboarder zip by, but not a sound from Erik. His small face –with big, dark brown eyes, a faint smattering of freckles, and framed by straight, sandy brown hair – was frozen.

“Do you have any questions?” I asked stupidly.

“No,” he quietly answered, looking at no one.

With that, he stood up, marched out of our room and into his. He returned momentarily with a Fisher Price hammer, clobbered me (not his father) hard on the knee, turned and again marched, this time straight out of our bedroom. He had never hit anyone before and whoever said 80 percent of the message was in body language was 20 percent off.

Getting divorced at age 38 was not in my day planner, and how I love the black-and-white-if-it’s-on-paper-it’s-under-my-control feeling of a day planner. But I knew it would happen to an estimated 50 percent of my friends. A few years prior, when I was living in downtown Chicago, the statistic hounded me as my friends and I accepted engagement rings. At one party, I scoured the other engaged couples -- Liane and Frank, Ann and John, Peggy and Tim, Suzanne and J.P. -- trying to assign the doomed ones, the unsuspecting losers who didn’t know they were crash test dummies on the road of true love. Who would it be? Were there clues under their noses that evening? A drinking or drug problem? Anger issues? A serious mental illness? Unfaithfulness? Terminal inability to care about another person? General weirdness? But none of them seemed divorce bound and I knew I certainly wasn’t. We were all confident we had struck gold.

I got married in 1991, saying “I do” to a healthy, young, white man named Dave (we were mutually attracted soon upon meeting) with a sickly, old, black cat, aptly named Jinx (we mutually detested each other immediately). Jinx would live up to his name and fur color, and when my marriage to Dave slipped, the cat would come to symbolize my marital problems and I would want him dead and would even come close to annulling him. So very, very close.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

# # #

LISTEN IN to the Single Married Widowed Divorced podcast.

Fun vs. Duty: Part 2 of 2

by Carolyn Alfvin

The next morning, I packed a suitcase with old jeans and new lingerie then pointed my car toward Indiana. My derriere was wrapped in the soft, clean, red fabric of new underwear and if I had known their meliortive power, I wouldn’t have denied myself for so long. Why not conduct daily duties with Jockey on my side?

If only new vs. old underwear was all I was straddling. I’m middle aged, a time between young adulthood and old age. My son is in middle school, between childhood and adulthood. At age 7, even Jingles is middle aged. Our family, in a nutshell, is in the middle. Time will make some pivotal decisions for us, steer us in one direction or another, but others we humans will make for ourselves. Jingles will be freed by his oblivion.

I considered canceling this trip, but a co-worker insisted I break camp, and sitting in my tiny, windowless office, ashamed that my lack of adventure was so evident, I thought about what I’d be giving up by leaving home. It would be a three-day weekend and I had had my fantasies -- how heavenly it would be to pursue and conquer errands, yard work, and interior projects, then take a big black Sharpie and run it slowly through each item on my to-do list. Sigh….

# # #

Saying that I’m driven to accomplish things is like saying Hitler was driven to visit other countries. A 3 x 5 index card, on which I’ve written my work tasks and errands, presides over each day: it is the alpha dog, the great and all-powerful Oz, a primitive god, and I work to please it.

Tao may say, “If you don’t have a goal, you will always succeed,” but without these written goals I feel unstriving, unmoving, un. So each morning, I transfer the previous day’s unaccomplished tasks and begin again on my hamster-wheel.

Except for one day.

It was a Sunday last December when I shunned The List. Erik was contentedly exhausted (he had juggled at three school talent shows that weekend) and stayed home, where he built a snowboard ramp, helped me shovel snow, knit a scarf. I spent the bulk of the day ensconced on the couch next to Jingles, reading and talking to friends on the phone.

For my lack of accomplishment I was rewarded at 8 p.m., when Erik discovered his wet boots warming by the bathroom heating duct and approached me, still on the couch.

You're a good mom,” he said, meaning I like it when you’re not so goal-oriented.

“I try,” I said, meaning I’d better write “Do nothing” on my index cards now and then.

An hour later, Erik slipped into bed. I bade him good night, and switched off his light.

“You’re a good kid,” I said.

“I try,” came his voice through the dark.

Odd, I thought, as I zippered shut my suitcase and walked out my door. When did duty take over my life and nearly snuff out such moments? I used to thrive on adventures – after college I took a job in the Virgin Islands, followed by a year of nomadic living in New York and Ohio. The List had not yet been born. Is it possible to rediscover that person in me?

I started the car and me and my silky black nightie drove to the edge of town and past my ex-husband’s house (where Erik would live for the next three days). Like running a finger through a cake’s thick chocolate frosting, it felt instinctually wrong, and increasingly irresistible. I drove on, out of Milwaukee, my tailpipe mooning my current life.

ON THE PODCAST
Kit, Carolyn and Mel discuss headline news on marital status -- from polygamy to research on cleaning house and how it impacts a couple's sex lives -- on Single Married Widowed Divorced.

Fun vs. Duty: Part 1 of 2

My To Do list was the alpha dog, the great and all-powerful Oz, a primitive god, and I worked to please it. Could I learn to ignore it?

by Carolyn Alfvin

On a Thursday during dinnertime, I took Jingles for a walk through the thick woods and tall prairie grasses of the local dog park near my home in Milwaukee. It was late October and if the leaves crunched under my feet I didn’t hear them through my iPod, which was pumping a Van Morrison song about getting one’s feet back on higher ground. The rhythms of the music joined those of my body to tease out what was troubling me.

Months ago, I met a man and, after an old-fashioned courtship, our relationship took a serious turn. On Friday, I would be leaving for Indiana to visit him at his house for the first time, marking another first -- the first time in the ten years since my divorce that I had left my son Erik, now 13 years old, for a sustained pursuit of pleasure over duty.

I’d done a good job of holding it together for ten years – kept our house, found and kept a job with benefits, provided hot dinners and clean clothes, recycled every other Wednesday, paid bills every other weekend, cleaned house every other weekend -- and I’d created a predictable, safe environment in the anxiety-ridden post-divorce years. Erik, who after the divorce refused to leave his bedroom in the morning unless I walked by side, recovered and flourished.

Then a friend introduced me to her single, male friend two states away and now, despite this happy turn of events, I’m strangely sad that a chapter of my life is closing, the chapter which features just Erik and I, where I unquestionably try to fly the route of SuperMom and do only what’s best for him, where I don’t have to wonder if my dating life will mess him up. It seems abnormal to be both a mother and a girlfriend.

I looked up and saw one duck, flapping against the bluish pink sky. A moment later, a V of about ten ducks passed overhead, following their leader. Then suddenly, the air exploded with happy honking, V after V of birds, their tail feathers mooning their current lives.

I hiked a few minutes more through tall grasses, then watched as one lone duck flew the same path as others before him, as if he’d had second thoughts and would be joining them after all. The sky was twilight, a time in which the sun’s rays are behind the horizon. By definition, that is all twilight means. It can be the beginning of a new day or the end of another.

Welcome to the Fraternal Order of Divorced, Working Parents: Part 3 of 3

by Carolyn Alfvin

Over the next few months, the door to the Fraternal Order of Divorced Working People blew open yet wider and I tentatively stepped into the vestibule. In the neighborhood grocery store, I chatted with a local firefighter I met on a housecall to my house, after Erik threw paper scraps in a halogen lamp and the house quickly filled with thick smoke. The firefighter was shopping for the brigade’s dinner and I knew he, too, was divorced. He brushed a leaf from my hair in the junk food aisle. “Were you the leaver or the leavee?” he asked as I tossed a bag of chips next to a gallon of ice cream.

“Ummm....Leavee, technically, but it’s more complicated than that.”

“I know.” He turned to go, then smiled a firemen’s-calendar-smile over his shoulder. “There’s a lot of us out here,” he said.

Famous people begun to join the club. Meg Ryan, Dennis Quaid, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman. We never met, but I saw the headlines in People magazine and felt bad that their private losses was supersized. Yet they boldly continued making movies, raising kids, dating other people, leading their work lives. Odd, I thought.

And then, the coup de grace – Sesame Street. I had skipped church one morning (once again, I should say), to lay in bed with Erik and watch the show and there, on a screen being broadcast to more than 120 countries, was a single, Latino woman with one child who acted like the two of them, just the two of them, were a family, and who appeared to be…happy. Like Poland in 1795 and again in 1939, at the beginning of World War II, my marriage did not technically exist. But certain bonds survive any war.

I turned myself over to the group (Hello, my name is Carolyn and I’m divorced) and I began to wonder: could I accept that my marriage, that a part of me, had totally failed? Had I totally failed?

# # #

The question reminded me of a late-night conversation with Dad a few weeks before he died, 16 years before my marriage ended. Only we were awake that night, me -- sitting on our beagle Patches’ favorite armchair-- and Dad-- lying on the couch in the room that had become his life’s physical parameters. It had been close to a year since I turned his head into a giant Titleist golf ball and close to a year since he’d left the house for purposes other than doctors appointments. Despite the morphine shots we all learned to give him around the clock, his pain was unrelenting, so bad that he asked a friend with diabetes for insulin and for my brother to buy a gun. He wanted out.
That night as we talked, his mind combed through his 55 years of life and snagged. He told me that he regretted his decision, 25 years ago, to quit professional golf, suggesting that he had missed his true calling in life.

“If you did that, you wouldn’t have met Mom and had Mark and me,” I commented.
“That’s the nicest thing anyone could have said,” he told me through his tears.

Dad hadn’t heard the self centeredness of my comment. In fact, he heard the opposite – that the path he took, despite the sorrow and pain he was feeling that moment, had meaning. He hadn’t failed.
A couple weeks later, Dad died. Not knowing what else to do, Mom, Mark and I returned once again to our previously scheduled lives.

ON THE PODCAST
How our dads affect us in marriage is the subject of the July 30, 2006 “Single Married Widowed Divorced”podcast titled "Father's Day."

Welcome to the Fraternal Order of Divorced, Working Parents: Part 2 of 3

by Carolyn Alfvin

Intellectually I knew I wasn’t the only woman taking immersion courses with such titles as “Find Your Fusebox!,” “What, Exactly, is a Sump Pump and Where in Mine Located?,” “Lawnmower Maintenance or Just Hire the Neighborhood Teen and be Done With It,” “Cars Have Needs Too,” and “Why You Should Change Your Furnace Filter Regularly,” (Answer: If you don’t, you’ll place a $75 emergency call on a sub-zero Saturday night in February to the furnace man, who will, at 10:30 p.m., tell you that your furnace shut down because it appeared that the filter hadn’t been changed for some time and you’ll say to him, “Filter?”)

Still, I felt shipwrecked with members of a club I never wanted to join: the Fraternal Order of Divorced Parents. People who, like me, were miserable but unlike me had intractable personality flaws. They, unlike me, were unsuited to life with other adults on a very basic level. I knew this because I had successfully analyzed their personalities and found clues to their marital demise. He’s a control freak! She’s humorless! Know-it-all! Windbag! Selfish! Neurotic! Preachy! Future overindulger of alcohol or other drugs! I may have been a used spouse, but I wasn’t really divorced -- more of a scratch-and-dent spouse than the rummage sale variety.

# # #

Two years after Dave moved out, Erik was tentatively stepping into senior kindergarten while I was stepping into my first post-divorce job, a half-time writing job at a local university. Day one found me seated in the office of the personnel director, along with my new boss, reviewing my benefits -- sick leave, vacation days, varieties of insurance that I hadn’t known existed, like the one that paid me if I got too incapacitated to work but not incapacitated enough to die, perhaps having survived a crushing injury from falling off that twisty playground slide.

“You have 80 hours of annual vacation time,” the personnel director told me. “And sick leave can be used to care for an ill child. You mentioned you have a child.”

What business was it of his? I steamed. I intended to enter the workforce with my personal life sealed tight as a Catholic girl’s legs and had no intention of changing tacks now, in his office. “Yes, a boy in kindergarten,” I murmured.

I hadn’t had a business conversation with an adult in the five years since Erik was born, which probably explains why I reopened my big, fat mouth at this point. I didn’t want him or my future boss to think I was a divorced mom barely holding it together, preferring that they believe the opposite of the truth. The exact words that shot out have been forgotten, but not their intent – to represent myself as SuperWorkerWoman, able to do the job as seamlessly as a childless man.

An awkward silence followed my outburst, as my words hung in the dead air like overstarched laundry on the line. They suspected my marital status! They had analyzed my personality for clues to my marital demise. They had orchestrated an all-university field trip in which they drove past my house in busloads and tsk-tsked the peeling paint and thriving weed garden. They suspected I was a fai- fai- fail…..

“I’m divorced twice and have a preschooler,” my future boss said.

What?

“Twice divorced. Teenager,” the personnel director said, looking down at his threadbare green carpeting.

Huh? Four divorces between the two of them and they were still functional! How was that possible for such double losers to hold non-menial jobs?

Yet, at the same time, I cursed myself for that SuperWorkerWoman outburst. Hey, why not belong to a club in which I was only half as divorced as others, only 50 percent as much of a failure? But something else struck me – I sort of liked these two people and I wanted them to know I, too, would burn rubber as I sped from home to work and back home again, that I’d strategically wrap my dress scarves in ways to hide stains from face paint, and I’d worry more about my son’s well being than my work productivity! Just like them!