The Secret Sex Life of a Single Mom (23 page)

How often had that scenario played itself out? Once, twice a month? Or had it
really
been every other night when he was home, just in more subtle ways? God, why hadn’t I just said, “Nope, you get your butt home. You should be with your wife and kids!” But I hadn’t. I’d just bent. Despite the cost to me.

When it came to arguing with Robert, my vertebrae were as supple as unbaked dough. It wouldn’t matter what we were at odds about, the dynamic was almost always the same: I would carefully approach him, and clearly, but sincerely, express my concerns—I didn’t want to come across as on the attack. But his response was almost always the same: passive-aggressive anger. He’d go into internal lockdown, ignoring me, avoiding me, throwing backhanded remarks at me. Potent one-liners, full of disdain. I hated it. I hated the tension; I hated the knot in my stomach; I hated the fact that we were wasting the precious limited time we had together in between his work assignments.

So
I
would apologize to
him
. Apologize for bringing it up, apologize for making him mad or upset.
Yes, honey, I know you work hard when you’re out of town . . . Yes I know you’re a great provider and you’re doing the best you can . . . Yes, I’m just being silly. Yeah, stubborn and unreasonable, too. What’s that? Make up sex? Yeah . . . sure . . .
I definitely needed to get a handle on my knee-jerk deference

I definitely needed to get a handle on my knee-jerk deference response, not just with the men I dated, but with Robert. Because he was
still
threatening and bullying me around our separation agreement. A part of me wanted to cave in to his financial terms just so I could free myself from him and move on with my life.
Yet another part of me screamed,
Stand your ground, Delaine! He is so accustomed to you giving in to him that he assumes he’ll get his way again. You need this money to look after yourself and your kids, and whether he likes it or not, he has a financial responsibility to you.

So I wasn’t going to cave. I still
wavered
from time to time, but I wasn’t backing down.

Lately, when I’d had contact with Robert, I did a little creative visualization to help me deal with him: I’d metamorphose into my Warrior Woman, a respected and close ally of my Wild Woman. I’d imagine myself standing before him in a warrior stance with a shield in my hands, instead of my hands wrapped defensively around my chest. I’d look him square in the eyes and hold his gaze, instead of looking away. Still, sometimes I exited our meetings wounded all the same, and it took me a few days to recover. But sometimes not. And I walked away with my head held high.

As I employed this tactic, I noticed changes in his behavior. He avoided looking me in the eyes more. Hey, for all I know, maybe the sight of me disgusted him. But my intuition said he sensed I was getting stronger. I sensed his growing cowardice. And yet . . . my softer, more forgiving side was a strong force too, because while I felt proud of the progress I was showing, I nonetheless felt compassion and sympathy for him; he, too, was struggling to figure out life as a newly single father. But I knew I couldn’t let my guard down about the settlement and custody agreements. He’d come in for the jugular every time.

As for my brief “relationships” with Adonis Boy Daniel and Minotaur Brent, I had no regrets. Unwittingly, they helped me take a deeper look at my chameleon-like nature. And they enticed me to step out of the “Land of Shouldn’ts” and into harmless Young Man Territory. Their sexually desiring me was a great ego rub; no doubt about that. And having sex with them was good, delicious fun. Not only did I expend my pent-up sexual energy
on them, but I also discovered I could G-spot orgasm in different positions and with different men other than with Football Coach Chad and his “maneuver.” It ultimately affirmed that
I was
the one in charge of my body; my body, my sexuality, and my sensuality belonged to me.

My young-man relationships also confirmed something that I already knew: A nice butt and a broad set of shoulders weren’t enough to hold my interest for long. I could respect and appreciate them for all their worth to me, but I was definitely ready to move on.

The question was . . . to what?

 

THE “THOUGHT” CROSSED my mind today. It wasn’t the first time. In fact, it had stuck its nose in my face hundreds of times since I’d initiated my divorce.

Doubts always lurked around my decision to end my marriage:
What if I gave up too soon? What if things got better? What if, what if, what if ?

Sometimes I wished I hated him; then all doubt would be eradicated. If I could dump all my anger, blame, and hurt on top of him, I could turn him into a monster so hideous that I could wallow, self-righteously, in the role of Undeserving Victim. But I knew it didn’t work that way, that hate would only turn its ugly head on me and eat me from the inside out. My wish was nothing but an illusion, a fantasy of a quick fix that momentarily justified my suffering and excused me from having to take responsibility. For anything.

But I knew I still loved Robert in many ways, in spite of how unkind he could be. It was my nature to see the best of a person, to their core. And I believed in his authentic goodness. I would always care about him. I simply didn’t have enough rage to wipe out all our wonderful memories together. I couldn’t label him Evil
when I could still feel the warmth of his smiles and laughter. Or when I remembered the times he cried, the times he tenderly held my children, the times he generously gave with his love and money. I couldn’t take the vastness of his spirit and lock it into a container marked “POISON.”

Thoughts are funny things—dangerous too. My conscious mind never seems to turn off. It’s an endless barrage of memories, analyses, projections, fantasies. It chatters to the point of overload, determined to understand, decipher, solve. And quick on its heels lay an army of emotions, a chaotic mass of furious feelings that range from love and gratitude to anger and despair. I become prisoner to an internal hell that is 100 percent self-created. Could Robert and I salvage our marriage? Could we have a decent life together if we chose to? I knew the answers were yes. It would take a tremendous amount of work, but yes, we could. But the bigger, more important question remained: Was Robert the man I wanted, desired, and deserved to spend my life with?

I loved Robert when I married him. My definition of love back then was more naïve and more limited than what it is now, but my feelings for him were genuine. Often I hear divorced people speak bitterly about their marriage: that it was a mistake, that they never really loved their ex, that warning signs had been flashing from the get-go. My hindsight exposed those incongruities, too. But I felt no need to minimize or rip apart a love I deemed so beautiful in my twenties. It was real to me then and offered me many gifts, like my three beautiful children. If a marriage was already dead, why wave a carving knife over its grave?

I found myself constantly pondering the meaning of “true love.” Through TV, books, my family, the church, I was indoctrinated to believe it was the ultimate goal in life, that it was this magical merging of two souls on every level. And that “time” was one of its essential ingredients—a lifetime, that is. No doubt, there
was something beautifully romantic and courageous in the idea of two people witnessing each other’s entire life journey, through all the triumphs and heartbreaks.

But I wasn’t convinced that that definition was correct. And I felt certain I was but one of thousands, if not millions, who had questioned it. Especially if they’d gone through a divorce. I wondered if perhaps true love wasn’t something conferred on you by another, but that it was more a state of personal being that one expressed outwardly and received in return. A state of being that was not exclusive, but
inclusive
: to her partner, her friends, her neighbors, her coworkers, and the vast beautiful world at large. To me,
that
kind of love seemed the ultimate, for it honored the connectedness and sacredness of all life.

My personal take on this thing called life is that we’re here on Earth to learn and grow and evolve into beings of love—individually. Perhaps that process is fostered within one serious relationship alone, or not. If a relationship no longer served me on a spiritual level, I wondered, should I feel compelled, guilty, obliged to stay in it—whether I made those vows two, five, or twenty years ago? Do the rules and expectations of marriage sabotage our souls’ ultimate mission?

I couldn’t help but wonder if this reluctance to let go of a relationship when it became detrimental rather than nourishing was because of our perception of death. Whether it’s the death of relationship or the death of anything else, I always perceived it as an awful thing I had to resist, fight, or oppress. But death is intrinsic to life. Maybe I’d clung to the idea of marriage not just out of love, but out of fear. By vowing to stay together “till death do us part,” I believe I felt a little less vulnerable in the face of the unknowable future. Safety in numbers, comfort in my husband
and
our children.

But my feelings evolved. I now understood that death was a period of transformation, not annihilation. That within the ashes of
death lay the seeds of new growth, new learning, new opportunities for the self. I no longer could reduce it to black and white—that life was “good” and death was “bad.”

And I needed to apply this insight now.

So I asked myself again: What do I really want? Not what my fear said I should want, or what society said I should want, but what this soul named Delaine wanted. On one side of the teeter-totter sat a single mother of three, facing an unknown future all alone.
She was terrified!
Across from her sat an emotionally exhausted mom/wife fighting to save a dying marriage riddled with wounds.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to sit across from Robert again as his wife. And all I saw was a man heavily chained, a prisoner of his upbringing, his closed-down emotions, his take on what it meant to be a man. I saw myself looking at him, trying to break down his walls, knowing that within that steely shell lay an abundant, feeling, beautiful soul. I
knew
that it was there: I’d caught glimmers of it in his eyes, and sometimes it spread to his voice and his actions and we connected in a higher way.

But inevitably, without cause or word of warning, his walls would seal back up. He was gone. Once again, I found myself powerless—my hopes, needs, dreams were sucked into that chasm, too. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and scream:
Open up your soul for God’s sake! Can’t you see that’s the most beautiful part of who you are!
But I didn’t. Instead, I turned my pain and frustration within . . . and then I’d turned to Graham. How could I back step so far and find happiness? I couldn’t. I would simply blend again in his presence.

My mind overloaded, I exhaled away my thoughts and brought my awareness inside my body. There was just one more question to ask, the one I ultimately returned to navigate my course of action:
Could I ever enjoy sex again with Robert?

The answer was fast and visceral: my stomach clenched, my body tensed, and my inner thighs moved to close. The answer was an indisputable “
No.”

And so I threw my hands up in surrender. My head and heart just couldn’t figure things out. I had to trust that my body knew things that the rest of me still didn’t.

I FINALLY MADE A DECISION about what I
really
wanted in a relationship right now: a “friend with benefits.” I knew I wasn’t ready for the demands of a fully committed love relationship—I was still getting over old pains, after all—but I did want ongoing sex with
one
open-minded, decent man. Yes, one.

Football Coach Chad was someone I could have seen in this role: we laughed a lot, we grew up in the same
era,
and
,
topping it off like hot chocolate sauce
,
he was a deliciously fine lover.

The problem was, he hadn’t called
.
In over
five weeks
. This time I wasn’t making any excuses for him. Even if he called me tomorrow, there was no way I’d see him again. I didn’t want an arrangement that happened but once a month and on someone else’s terms.

My only consolation was knowing that Hali was as confused about the concept as I was. A couple of weekends ago, she’d met a prime candidate for the position: Payton, the wavy-haired computer techie I’d left squirming in the parking lot. Yup, I’d played matchmaker
again
.

When Hali had first spoken with Payton by phone, she’d been in one of
those
moods: ravenous for sex and too impatient to pretend otherwise. “
No
, I don’t want to go out to a movie,” she’d said, when he suggested one. “
No
, I don’t want you to rent a movie either. I
want you to come to my house tonight so we can see what our chemistry is like. I only have one thing on my mind.” Payton had been startled by her directness but had eagerly played along.

But boundaries got skewed when their initial night of partying between the sheets turned into a weekend-long bacchanal of sex, friendship,
and
romance. They spent every waking and sleeping minute together, shopping, cooking, and even running errands.

But ten days had now passed, and he hadn’t phoned or tried to see her again. He had avoided her online and only sometimes responded to her text messages.

“I just don’t get it,” Hali said angrily. We were commiserating over the phone while I watched my kids through the window as they played on my front lawn. I sipped my cup of tea as she spoke. “I know I was bold with him the first night. But we spent the whole weekend together—he saw other sides of me, the
real
me, and he really liked me! I even apologized for being so direct with him that first night and explained that I don’t normally act that way. He’d said it turned him on to have a woman assert herself like that.”