Pancakes Taste Like Poverty: And Other Post-Divorce Revelations Read Online Free PDF Page A

quick as a flash.
    You and your partner in parenting have to get a
super clear idea of what traits are most important to you and you
have to discuss, openly, the Issues that both of you are dragging
from your own childhood experiences into your current parenting
practices.
    Maybe you were given tons of gifts, but no
attention growing up. Or maybe you got neither, so you drown your
kids with both.
    Either way, too many parents simply never discuss
it and spend the precious and terrifyingly brief eighteen years they have arguing and second-guessing and squabbling and then poof! The kids are gone and that's one more
parched, dysfunctional adult walking around.
    It's work. It's hard, hard, hard thankless work.
Sometimes it's crazy hard and the hand drawn hearts and love notes
aren't cute enough. Sometimes you want to take a nice long bath and
let yourself get pulled down the drain, cartoon style - riding that
pipe to a new life in a new place.
    But you can't.
    This is the life you chose. You have to wear it.
You force yourself to enjoy it. You learn to find joy in the bad
knock-knock jokes and the school plays. But sometimes, when you're
not thinking about "the life you could have had" and your
guard is down, your son lovingly twirls his fingers in your curly
hair, and looks at you with his dreamy gray/brown eyes and says some
romantic nonsense like "Mommy, if you died the whole universe
would move because everyone would hear my sad love cries."
    And then you realize that even though your life
is not particularly meaningful to you it's everything to someone
else...and sometimes that is enough.
    Jesse/Jessica I
actually wore makeup, like, four times this past week so pat me on
the back. I’m still having a hard time rectifying the really
tomboyish, masculine part of me with the female part of me.
    I know what kind of girl I wish I was.
    I wish I were the
kind of girl who got her nails done, who was smallish and smelled
good all the time, who wouldn’t think of leaving the house
without makeup, who cowered into some alpha-male’s side during
horror movies. But I am soooooooo not that girl.
    I stink most of the time.
My nail polish is always chipped. I hardly ever leave the house
with
makeup. And I am pretty sure I have never dated a male who didn’t
secretly want me to be his mother, forcing me into the position of
protector and wound-soother. This wouldn’t be such a problem if
I actually wanted wounded-artsy-whiner boyfriends but I completely
don't!
    I like alpha males. A lot.
    And girly girls make me seriously uncomfortable.
I feel so awkward in groups of women as if I'm doing “being a
woman” incorrectly. The whole scene is just awful. I just have
a lot of residual masculine energy.
    The combination of not having a male authority
figure growing up and my marriage to a feminine energy male has
caused that part of me to develop – that missing male part –
and the rest of me to take a back seat.
    If there was a “How to be a Girl”
class, I swear I’d take it.
    For now I feel like a really brusque, emotionally
detached, animalistic, bawdy enigma. Maybe, I’ll be able to
cultivate it into something really lovely and attractive one day.

    Work
    I'm not quite sure how
I'm supposed to make this work. The cost of after school care for
three children is about $900/month. How would I pay that and my rent?
Right now we are coasting on the hundred dollars here and there that
I get from my ex-husband. We eat a lot of beans. I actually
contemplated becoming an escort. I also thought about selling my used
panties on EBay.. .

Things are
less than ideal.

Big Fat
Liar
    I confess. I'm a big fat liar. I
do
want to get married again eventually...I think...
    Maybe I just want another wedding - anyone who
attended mine can tell you it was a blast.
    But I am so scared that no one will ever want to
date me so I keep lying and saying I "hate marriage"
because "don't get it" and "don't believe in it."
But the truth is that I have