Single

The last time I saw my recent ex was on a hot August night when I visited his workplace. Nursing several glasses of wine, I had a long conversation with a woman a few years younger than me who bartends there. She had intentionally taken a significant amount of time away from romantic relationships to focus on herself. In that time she had done a cleanse, yoga, and a lot of reflecting, and is also training to become an alternative healer. Glowing with health and beauty, she concluded her description of her ongoing “single” experience by saying, in a tone of evident satisfaction: “My head is so quiet now.” My response was jealousy, for my head was not quiet. My head was like a 4 AM party that needs to be broken up by police or concerned neighbors. Even as I registered my response to this woman’s words—and her state of secure wellbeing—I could feel the howling wolves and broken glass of my inner hysteria…which, a couple of hours later, prompted me to initiate the end of that romantic relationship.

Now, about a month post- this latest breakup, I realize that I have either been in love with or dating someone since I was 18; almost half my life. What would it be like if the psychic energy I have been channeling toward men were poured back into me and my life? I also realize that to be a 35-year-old unemployed single mother is a horrible cliché. Around me, everyone I know has paired up. They have built or bought enduring structures. They appear able to, in the lingo of my Counseling studies, “form and maintain satisfying relationships,” both intimate and communal. Since about 18, non-sexual relationships have interested me very little: something that becomes clear whenever there is a holiday and I have no plans; that was apparent last month on my birthday when I did not receive a gift. How can I advise other people on how to succeed in relationships—of all kinds—until I can define what such success means to me?

I do not want to be judgmental here about my (or anyone’s) strong drive for love and sex. Trying to scrub these parts of me away or condescend to them would mean harming myself…which is exactly what I want to stop doing. I just want to press pause and see how I arrived at this state of things.

I am reminded of the end of the Jane Kenyon poem “Eating the Cookies,” which is about cleaning out the house after a close relative has died: the speaker pauses in her packing/folding and, for a moment, presses the last cookie from the tin against her forehead, “because / it seemed like the next thing to do.”

Letting my arms down

Since moving to New Orleans at the end of July, I have had my car broken into, contracted scabies, broken up, with great difficulty, a 4-year relationship with my child's father, and had one housing disaster after another: brief homelessness (through which I had to stay with my ex, who I had just left). Water shut off. Paying for 3 apartments at once, for over a month now: this happened when my ex and I sought separate housing. I couldn't move into the first one because I found out the neighbors were crazy and generally (possibly dangerously) invasive. I guess that wasn't a good enough reason to negate the lease, because I have now lost almost $2000 on a place I never set foot in for more than 10 minutes--a fact that keeps me up at night. I've talked to a lawyer but there is no clear way for me to get anything back; meanwhile the landlord keeps saying things like "Everyone in this situation is trying really hard" (to re-rent the apartment). Yes, but only I, out of all these earnest people, have lost $1800: so forgive me if I am not impressed with everyone else's "trying." Oh I'm sure they really, really care... The second apartment is the one Jon and I moved out of, for which we, too, have not been able to get new tenants since it's between semesters. Our daughter Sara has been sick 4 times in less than 4 months, including hospitalization with pneumonia. I have not been able to find a job and instead have found ever more elaborate ways to not find a job, such as joining ifreelance, a website where you bid for freelance jobs...against many, many people who are IDEALLY qualified for each job that comes up.

I've made this list lately in emails to friends or Facebook updates (that's how unhinged I'm getting...crying for help via status update) but I'm making it now from a different place. Maybe I'm not supposed to live in this town. Maybe it's not a safe place for a single mother and her 2-year-old. One could say that a job, a support network of friends or new love, and whatever else will all come in time. It could take years (as I know from experience in other towns), and I am starting to feel that I'm not up to it and do not want to keep subjecting Sara to this chaos. I say this because even as I have been--it feels like pelted with the hailstorm of New Orleans bad luck, there are many things I have been swooning over about this place. THE WEATHER. It's a bit nicer, especially in winter, than what I was used to in Ithaca. The luminously gothic, gorgeous-in-even-the-worst-neighborhoods architecture, coffee shops, culture, sheer variety and diversity of people and things to do. It's intoxicating and luring, like a love affair you know you shouldn't get into...rather than a nurturing partnership that will sustain me and my 2-year-old. Isn't it? I now live in a great apartment that is half of a house--a shotgun double--with a mantle/fireplace in every room, wood floors, a front porch...it's beautiful and fits all my furniture perfectly. But I am so depressed and broke I don't know how long I can stay here or how to enjoy it.

Today I feel tired and like...this is something a college ex-love used to say...letting my arms down. I think he meant it to denote some kind of surrender, admitting you're part of the human community; not being solitary and stuck. I'm sick of saying this will get better soon or is no big deal or I just need to fight, fight against every large external force to create the life I want. It shouldn't feel this hard. When I was packing to leave Ithaca, which I loved, in July, a thought floated across my mind that what I would learn in New Orleans is the pain of not listening to one's instincts and truth. I felt palpably that I should stay there, where I had a great support system of women, and family nearby; I knew the relationship wouldn't last despite all the complex reasons I still wanted it to...the relationship that I was following across the country with my cat, child, everything I owned, and no job. Four months in I still feel raw and scraped. I have discovered a lot of things, such as that the job I had in Ithaca (which I liked, but not the pay) was the best job on earth for the best salary ever and I cannot possibly do better as I appear to have no marketable skills, even after 12 years out of college; and now that job is gone. I've learned that boring can be good, if "boring" means continual access to the electrical grid and running water. I've learned that I have to create my life but it works better in happy, fertile soil rather than a blasted landscape of continual opposition. I've learned that romantic love, once and for all, won't save me though I have spent my adult life making plans that always put me off to the side somewhere, and the beloved in the center. I don't even know where I am anymore. And I need a lot of time, electricity, running water, and paychecks to find out, and then we'll see.