Note To The Armchair Therapists (who are always named "Anonymous"):

Thanks, but I already have a shrink.

Minus-Five could use your help, though.

First Step

I've waited ten years for my husband to open up, to allow himself to be vulnerable, to risk real communication. Finally, tonight, this:


Biggy: You know, when Daisy dies, I'll have a new puppy within 24 hours.

Tania: That's pretty fucked up. You wouldn't even mourn her for a whole day?

Biggy: Remember, my biological parents gave me away.

Save The Date

I've waited three years for this gig. Y'all come!

If Wishes Were Scooters, Then Beggars Would Ride.

This is my new heart's desire. You listening, Santa?

We Return To Our Regularly Scheduled Program

All Lo, All the Time.





Yesterday, at the dentist: No whining, no clinging. Not one single tear.


JackMan and I have appointments today. We plan to cry.

You Can Thank Minus-Five For This One

All right, I managed to resist the urge to write about my ex-husband when Thursday's post went up, but Sarah's comment today, her link to the court tv thing, pushed me over the edge.

I have to admit, I was disappointed that no one had posted an entry for my ex on dontdatehimgirl.com, especially since, once divorce papers were filed, women crawled out of the woodwork to tell me of their seedy misadventures with him. One even met me for coffee and allowed me to record the meeting for my attorney. Keep in mind, these tales of depravity were offered even as the male and female staff of the restaurant we owned were calling to bear their own witness to ten years’ worth of his sexploits. I was weary with it.

Why hadn’t they come forward years earlier—when he’d been convincing me I was a crazy, suspicious biotch? All those nights I’d tried to believe he really was leaving at midnight to go spray the restaurant for roaches!

Suddenly, everyone was filling me in on the backstory while providing daily updates as to his whereabouts: “He was at the Darkhorse last night with somebody's babysitter.…we saw him buying a pony ride for his girlfriend at the Inman Park Festival…Saturday he was at the Grateful Dead concert, wearing boxers over his jeans like he thinks he's 19…” Yeah, thanks. Just leave a message.

Seems the ex loves waitresses, which stands to reason, since we met when I was a server at the Gyro Wrap in Athens, putting myself through school (and he was, incidentally and unbeknownst-to-me-at-the-time, pretending there was actually a major in Golf--well, something like that--so his family would support him). In any event, he also likes wine reps, food critics, his golf buddies’ wives, sales girls at the mall, his old girlfriends from high school (Hi Shanna!), and local co-eds.

Yes, he was an equal opportunity cheater. Since he’d made no bones about the fact he liked his women bony, I’d existed on beansprouts and egg whites, only to hear later that one of his paramours was a woman I knew who resembled Roseanne. Fat, thin, young, old, professional, student: I give him credit; he did not discriminate.

I remember saying to him, as I turned 28, “I can’t believe there are full grown women in the world who are 10 years younger than I am.” Little did I know, he was dating them (and their mothers). In the end, I hired a private investigator, and the girl he was seeing at that particular time was about 20, a student at Emory. It had been going on for a while, so I suspect he got at her while she was still a teen. When she and I came face to face, I seriously felt a little sorry for her. She looked as wholesome as nine-grain bread, and I could only imagine how he’d buttered her up.

Somewhere along the way, he actually cheated on her with ME (Old habits, even very bad ones, die hard. Ick!). And when I found out they were indeed still seeing each other, despite his teary-eyed claims to the contrary, I marched over and told her the truth.

“How do I know it won’t happen again?” she cried.

“Oh, honey,” I said, “it WILL happen again, but you can bet your sweet young cheerleader ass it won’t be with me.”

After the divorce, even as I was begging out of those informative chats with everyone from the fry cook at the restaurant to the counter girl at the video store, evidence kept bubbling up in odd places. Like at the drycleaner’s, over a year later, when I went to have a skirt altered and they brought out a half dozen dress shirts of his I’d never seen before. Apparently, he’d kept a separate gigolo wardrobe stashed away, along with his PO Box and his hidden bank accounts.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by this, though, seeing as how the night I threw him out, I’d gone searching for him in the basement of the new restaurant he’d just opened and discovered a space right out of Love American Style: a sort of small studio with stereo and cd library, washer and dryer and a rack of clothes to go in them, and his friends (Hi GH!) to keep lookout.

I ended up with a black eye that lasted for three weeks.

Suffice to say the black eye was what finally ended my misery, the one thing I couldn't talk myself out of. I’d rationalized the other things—the stripper he brought home, the mysterious trip to Rhode Island (where it turned out his high school sweetheart was in school), the STD—not to mention the way I had to live, like a single parent in poverty.

He’d stripped the wallpaper, taken the doors off all the cabinets in the kitchen, killed the grass and my favorite plants, and destroyed my bedroom furniture, claiming he was going to finish/replace everything, and it would eventually be better than new. Half a decade later, the only progress that had been made was the waist-high weeds in the yard. He’d even had the shade trees cut down (which caused the basement to flood) and told the workers to knock down the swingset the kids played on every day. Nothing was finished and I’d disintegrated into a creature too ashamed to make new friends or let my children ask their school chums over.

The day I really should have kicked him out, however, was the Sunday I ran down the driveway after him as he was leaving to play golf yet again, and I asked, “Do you ever plan to see your children?” to which he responded by yelling, “They’re YOUR children,” and spun away. I didn't know, until I headed back into the house, that the oldest, seven, was standing at the window and heard.

After he left, and I’d dug the remnants of my old self out of the rubble, I'd take the Amex to Home Depot, telling the cashiers, “My husband has been so busy nailing dancers and screwing his hostess, he hasn’t had time to use his tools at home. So I’m going to run this sucker up until the bathroom is tiled or the card is cancelled; you just tell me when.” They were happy to oblige, and it was a couple of weeks before one of the ladies shook her head sadly and handed me the scissors.



This month would have marked our 20th wedding anniversary. I thank god every day it’s over.

I hope he has changed as he’s gotten older. But just in case he still thinks it’s okay to be married and date, consider yourselves warned:

Don’t date him, girl!

What happened to SuperMAN?

We saw Superman Returns last night. Right. If it hadn't been for Lo's spilling the Fanta I snuck in for her and Biggy's cellphone ringing TWICE--Hello Moto (No, you don't want to go the movies with us), I'd have fallen asleep. The film was a giant soggy cracker. Besides the production designer (wow!) and Parker Posey's hair (playing the REAL villain), there was no true star. And between the epicene Brandon Routh and bland Kate Bosworth, it was like trying to light a match in the rain.

Watching Routh in action, I was reminded of an essay I read in Salon a few years ago, entitled "Robby Benson's Clean White Underpants," wherein author Cintra Wilson's description of Benson, as I apply it now to Routh, put it better than I ever could: " [He] was too pretty to be taken seriously...always described as doe-eyed, but his eyes are more eerily religious, like backlit blue marbles. If [he] had been allowed (or had allowed himself) to develop a little more coolness and/or masculine, sexual alertness, his teary-eyed vulnerability would have had more legs. But since his supersensitivity was coupled with a cloying, chaste manner, he was written off as a dickless square. ...[He] moved on tippytoes, like he was carrying a dying baby bunny in a potholder. [He] represented a soft, sexless flavor that called for a taste nobody but grade-school girls ...wanted to acquire."

Hey, that was fine for me when I was ten and thought you could get pregnant if someone gave you a wet willy. But not today. Give me a Christopher Reeve. Give me a real man of steel, with a steely look and tracks in his shorts--not a simpering boy-man whose look suggests he's wondering whether his eyebrow wax appointment is Tuesday or Wednesday.

And don't get me started on the problems with the story. I don't have all year.

More Things A Man Should Never Say

After he'd consumed his dozen Colorado Goldens at Wild Wings last night, Biggy asked our waitress for a "wet-nap." I told him that if I'd heard him say that while we were dating, it would have spared us both the last ten years. It has nothing to do with the sexual connotations, either. If he'd asked for a "moist towelette" it would have been just as bad. In fact, I'd have been less horrified if he'd asked her for a "lap-dance."

Just Like Billy Ray Cyrus

I have no class. For the first time in eight years.






And I can't believe I'm saying this, but I just might enjoy the break from teaching.

I'm Right I'm Right I'm Always Right

One morning, before nine (this was a couple of years ago), I was coming back from a jog--sweat pooling in my pits, yesterday's mascara smeared under my eyes, wearing my son's old East Side Tigers gymshorts and a Taco Bell t-shirt--and my neighbor on the corner, where our little court meets the road, pulled beside me in his minivan and introduced himself as though we hadn't met at the Testa's Memorial Day cookout some months prior and hadn't occasionally waved and exchanged small talk.

I found myself reminding him, pointing out my house--"you know, down there at the end...with the pop-up camper...husband Greg....hundreds of kids..." before it occurred to me he was actually hitting on me. It was an odd thought, and I checked myself: Why would a man try to pick up a middle-aged woman in the street while the school buses were still running? Why would I even THINK such a thing? But it was just a feeling.

Now, if it had been, say, 8 p.m. and me in hot pants drinking MaiTais at the Bamboo Lounge, it wouldn't have freaked me out. But as it was, this disturbed me greatly, and I reported as much to Biggy. He, as usual, thought I was nuts.

Since then, I've always referred to this neighbor as Skeevy Alan, to which Biggy responds by rolling his eyes, because his wife is delusional and thinks all men are scumwads who want to molest her.

So--yesterday morning, on the way to work, the Q100 morning show was talking about this website, dontdatehimgirl.com, and I made a little mental note to check it out when I got home from work (As it happens, I was too busy to do it while I was AT work).

Once home, I pulled up the site, did a search for Georgia, expecting to find my ex-husband's profile, which oddly enough didn't pan out. But what I did discover made me squeal so loudly with glee that Biggy came running downstairs to see what I was right about this time.

That's him. My neighbor. Skeevy.

Suburban Fireworks

Biggy with his South Carolina contraband.



Daisy, trying to make a citizen's arrest.



They come from far and wide to see this spectacular event. (If you click on the photo, you can see Biggy's audience. Their parents won't let them get any closer.)



Yes, it looks dangerous...

Cobbled Holiday

We’d been talking about taking the kids whitewater rafting ever since Biggy and I went biking at Tsali and watched the kayakers/rafters on Memorial Day. He and I love to kayak, but we’d never taken the chil’ren. Anyway, Biggy’s boss gave them a surprise day off work, so we decided to take a long weekend for the 4th. The plan was to go up to North Carolina on Sunday and come back Monday or Tuesday.

Alas, I could not get off for the Monday (Orientation day for new students—granted), in spite of my begging toward that end all week, so we had to move our plans up. Try getting a place to stay at the last minute on the 4th of July weekend! My poor husband tried for three hours straight, calling every cabin rental within an hour of the Nantahala Outdoor Center. Sunday and Monday? No problem. But Saturday? Riotous laughter on the other end of the phone.

We’d pretty much given up, but around mid-afternoon on Saturday, a woman called and said she had a double-wide (“It’s clean, though.") that she hadn’t advertised. They’d been putting on cedar siding, ("which makes it look like a cabin") and had finished that very minute. Oh, we’d take her cabler, all right. Hell yeah. Even Georgie’s beau, GareBear was on board. We grabbed our swimsuits and our WalMart water shoes, threw the dogs in the car, and headed for the mountains. We had to take two cars, since I had to come home early--In the red Beetle: me, George, Gare, and Stella. In the blue minivan: Biggy, JackMan, Lo, and Daisy.

Here's the play-by-play, for your entertainment:


This is how we roll.





Picturesque cabin that would have been available Sun-Tues, passed on the way to our rental.





Arriving at the cabler.





Stella calls dibs on the couch.





When in Rome...





Waiting for a table. Biggy has turned on his heartlight.





The Stone's Colossal Onion Loaf. Have I told you how much I hate onions?






Sunday morning on the trorch.



Then lots of whitewater:



I would have done this last series of rapids, but I had to help Georgie get these sweet shots of the boys.




Survivors





Kids these days! When I was a child, after we kayaked for three hours, we walked home uphill, in a hundred degrees, wearing our personal floatation devices and carrying our boats on our backs...





Leaving my peeps and heading back to Atlanta with the dogs (Stella took this photo). Of course I got stuck behind a big-ass truck hauling an offroad vehicle. I was cussing the whole time.

Lo's New Look

I suggested she update the t-shirt as well, but no dice.

Raised in a House Full of Females

Last night, I took 14-yr-old JackMan to Publix because after three hours of drumline practice he had a hankering for a chicken tender sub. As we were pulling out of our neighborhood road onto the main drag, a white station wagon turned into the ‘hood, right past us.

T: Ew, that was that pervert Byron who works at Publix. You know, the one with the big ol’ thick square glasses? He lives three doors down from the Testa’s old place.

J: Why did you call him a perv?

T: Well, whenever you buy feminine hygiene products, he won’t touch the boxes, except with two fingers, by the corners. You can tell it’s excruciating for him.

J: That doesn’t make him pervy.

T: Hey, it’s weird. It reeks of weirdness. Take my word for it.

J: Maybe so, but a pervert is someone who likes to sniff girls’ panties—stuff like that. No, he's the exact opposite.

T: I guess you’re right.

J: But, still, we should go when he’s working and load the cart up with Kotex and Tampax. Oh, and Midol.

T: We could throw in some Summer’s Eve and FDS too. Boy, that would really freak him out.

J: Yeah!

Let Freedom Ring

And my air conditioner is busted.





What are they really seeking?

B'Bye Mean Old Bastard

Every old suburban neighborhood has one--the legendary geezer with a riding mower, whose lawn means more to him than his mama (god rest her soul). Though he seems to be nowhere around, let some kid on a bike swerve enough to bend a blade of his grass, and he'll come running from the wood shed with a BB gun.

Our Mr. Baker is gone now, and his little house is going too.







Don't worry; he didn't die. He just sold out to the folks at McMansion.

Some Gals Have All The Luck

Remember my neighbor—the one Biggy lusts after because she squeegees the driveway and rakes the yard? I realize this might be confusing, since he has a crush on Sam now, but I’m talking about the better half of the young couple down the street. We’ll call her K.

K just had her second baby, last week, while we were at the beach. Big deal, right? Ordinarily, I wouldn’t care about this news—certainly not enough to report on it. After all, I’ve had four of them, and few women these days can top that.

What’s interesting, however, is that K is special. God makes the rest of us suffer through pregnancy and its aftermath, but, for some reason, K was chosen to be spared. Pregnancy #2 was a repeat of the first: She was on the pill and never knew she was knocked up until five months after the fact.

No puking up Saltines, no throbbing rivers of blue veins in her breasts, no cravings for Kraft macaroni-n-cheese mixed with canned artichoke hearts, no Regan-like mood swings, no crying in the dressing room mirror at Motherhood—no clue someone had taken up residence in her body. Four months and a little glow later, the beautiful, perfectly-healthy infant pops out like toast (buttered, no less), and Mom is served breakfast in bed.

So I come back from my run last night, and Biggy and Lo are standing in Young Couple’s driveway with the proud papa. I stop, hoping to hear that K has hemorrhoids, but this is how the conversation goes:

Tania: So how’s everyone doing?

Proud Pop: Great. Perfect.

Tania: Getting any sleep?

Proud Pop: The baby sleeps through the night. And K’s already lost all the weight.

I give him the finger, turn up my iPod, and jog on up the hill.

While the Cat's Away, The Mice Will...Uh...Work

Earlier, over at minus-five, I read Sarah's story of the handy-man hand-out and so decided to tell part two of Sam the Wife. It's an embarrassing tale, especially considering my effusive praise before and considering, as well, how regularly I find myself thusly screwed. It's never exactly the same way; I mean, I vary the ways I allow myself to take it up the--

Anyway, a bit of background/clarification:

About five or six weeks before our Fripp trip (free work retreat), I arranged for Sam to take care of the house. I told her, too, that I was going to try to save a little money out of my allowance (Yes, another blog for another day) and get her to clean some for me. I hoped to save a couple of hundred dollars. As it turned out, I managed to squirrel away only half that amount (thanks to Father's Day!), and I let her know. Before we left, then, I reiterated, "Just do $100 worth of work--ten hours, because that's all the money I have." To which she responded, "What needs to be done most?"

Together we decided that she could clean the three bathrooms. All I do is disinfect the sink and the areas our tender parts touch. I tend not to mop floors, clean baseboards, or wipe down blinds, and I hardly ever scrub the shower walls or doors. We both knew that between the five years of grime I'd allowed to build up and her tendency to clean with toothpicks, it would probably require three hours per bath.

Sam charges $10 an hour for whatever she does, whether she's digging a cellar or polishing a doorknob (in addition to her base rate for house/pet-sitting, which is $30 per day). Always thinking of others, I reminded her, "Please don't do ANYTHING outside. Greg's not paying for this; I am."

As indicated in my last post, when our family arrived home, it looked like Hazel, Alice, and Edward Scissorhands had joined forces under the supervision of Nurse Ratched. Inside and out was spic-n-span. High from the 409 fumes, I discovered a note on the counter from Sam, telling me she'd done a lot of extra work and how I could pay her for it later. No rush.

I walked up the street to her house with a check for the $320 we'd agreed on (dogs/cleaning). It was about 10 p.m by then, and my emotions were all ajumble: exhaustion from the long drive, with its several rounds of The Quiet Game, which always ends with Lo kicking and sobbing and JackMan taunting the "cheating freakwad"; elation from coming home to the new house Summer Santa had brought us; and confusion about money owed.

What was she thinking? Did she not GET the part where I had only been able to save twenty dollars a week and what that says about my financial situation? When she came to the door, I asked her straight out: "How much extra, exactly?" No answer. She kept mumbling stuff like..."a LOT of work...let your conscience be your guide..."

But she didn't have much confidence in my conscience. The next day, after I got home from work, I went to the mailbox and found a four-page itemized list of all the chores she'd taken it upon herself to do, which included cleaning the toilet brushes and their holders, bleaching the bird shit off the bench by the walkway outside, and sanitizing the two large Waste Management trash cans. She even cleaned the pimento cheese and peanut butter out of the buttons on the remote (OK, that I'd pay for). At the bottom of the list was a bill for the balance: $400. For a grand total of $720. ( I know you can add; I'll keep repeating the total, though, until I believe it.)

I thought I was going to throw up. I still might.

I'm thinking about going over there tonight while she's asleep--pruning her shrubs, washing her car, and planting some squash and tomatoes in her backyard.

How much do you think I could charge?

The Wife He Never Had

While we were at Fripp, our neighbor Sam (Mary Alice) house-sat for us. I've known Sam for 13 years, seeing as how I lived in another house on this same street when I was married before (a future blog).

Sam is a jane-of-all-trades and makes her living as a pet-sitter, cleaning lady, painter, construction worker, landscaper, and soothsayer. I used to refer to her house as "the commune" because she lived with all her exes: her ex-husband, his mother, his sister, and the sister's husband. The ex-husband eventually married again and moved out, and his sister's husband died year before last. Now it's just the three women, so it doesn't qualify as a commune, unless you count the five cats and the hedgehog.

Because she told me, I know she's in her fifties, but she's one of those people you can't pin an age on. From my front door, if you see her in her own yard, she looks like a girl, with her long white braid and cut-off painter's pants. She loves animals and people equally, she is honest and loyal, and she can clean like nobody's business (She's OCD, hence the scrubbing involves such implements as toothbrushes, Q-tips, and popsicle sticks).

If it sounds like I have a crush on Sam, you should have heard the rest of my clan last night upon our arrival home. It was like Christmas, only instead of, "Look at the skates Santa brought me," it was all: "Did you see the floor in the pantry?!" and "She got the egg yolk off the wall!" and "Hey, I didn't know that grout was white!"

They dragged me from room to room, showing me the spotlessness. Biggy kept saying, "I can't believe she's not married. She should be someone's wife." This morning, gazing out the sparkling living room windows, he actually confessed, "I'm seeing Sam in a whole new light."

I've got news for him; she can also caulk a tub and shingle a roof. She's an artist (pastels and watercolors) and pianist too.

He'll have to fight me for her.

How To Dispose of the Body

Lo, feeding the deer one more time before leaving Fripp.

Friday Nostalgia

In honor of the dolphins we've been seeing here at Fripp, I'd like to remember "Flipper." This show only ran from 1964-1968, so I must have been watching years of reruns. Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Flipper, and Daktari comprised my own 1960's version of Animal Planet.

Lost

Yesterday, Biggy, Georgie, and I took kayaks to Turtle Island (about a 2-minute paddle). Biggy, who’d already scoped it out on Wednesday, proceeded to give us a bogus tour of the three-jillion-year-old driftwood fossils and Captain Hook’s tractor. When some guy cruised by us on a four-wheeler, our guide shouted that we must ‘hide from the natives—all cannibals,’ at which point I suggested he leave us out of his “Lost” fantasies.

(Long beat of silence)

T: I know you have a come-back to that.

B: Yeah, but why ruin our vacation?

Beauties and the Beach

Blue, Lo, and Georgie




Here's the Beast. After a long day in the surf.

Quick Notes from Fripp

This is a picture of Georgie I took Saturday morning before we left for the beach. She's been asking for a new bed since we went to Ikea New Years Day. Begging hasn't worked so far, so she is suddenly claiming her own bed is too uncomfortable. It hurts her back and elbows, and makes her hairline ache. So committed is she to her mission, she began a vigil of sleeping on the futon couch in the sunroom every night last week just to prove her point. That couch, by the way, is so uncomfortable, no one even SITS on it. Let's hear it for a teenager's perseverance!


By the way, while putting in a Sex and the City dvd tonight, I discovered a tiny area where the laptop was picking up someone's signal. If I hold the machine at a certain angle, the bars come and go, and that's how I'm posting tonight.

While I have it, then, here is the view from the front porch at Fripp:


And from the back deck:

Your Mother Is In The Car!

We’re at the beach again, this time, Fripp Island, SC, for the annual Portfolio Center Staff Retreat. I never thought I’d grow to love the low country the way I love the gulf coast, but it has finally happened. All these years of good/crazy memories—so many stories. If you lack for stories, try sharing a beach house for a week with the folks you work with and their families.

No Internet again, though, so I had to ride the monkey bike to the only office on the island with a dsl connection. In other words, I’m sitting in a little hole in the wall, because I’m a FREAK, when I should have my toes in the sand. And all I really have today, is a brief snippet of conversation:

Yesterday, my first-batch kids and I—Blue, Georgie, and JackMan—drove to Super WalMart in Beaufort (an experience in itself), a 45-minute trek, mind you, for groceries. We were listening to Counting Crows, the only cd we could all agree on.

Blue: If Adam Duritz asked me to marry him today, I would.

Georgie: Duh. Me too.

Blue: The first thing I’d do is get him to write a song for me.

(SOME WHISPERING I COULD NOT HEAR)

Blue: Yeah, true. The second thing.