Category: Huffington Post

“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” was a clever little slogan of the Women’s Movement during the Seventies. Little did I realize then how prescient it would prove to many of my peers as they hit middle age. In the past five years, I’ve been stunned by how many of my formerly married-with-children Girlfriends have bolted from their traditional family geometry and found true love with other women. It’s happening in the Parent’s Associations of my kids’ schools, in my knitting group, in my yoga class and it’s a big topic in women’s 12-Step groups throughout Los Angeles (and lesbianism was not the addiction they were trying to overcome.) Once I became aware of this quiet Pink Revolution, I couldn’t not see it everywhere I looked. But it was comedian Carol Leifer’s new book, When You Lie About Your Age The Terrorists Win, that convinced me this stunning phenomenon wasn’t exclusive to the experimental, artsy, truth-seeking addicts that make LA such a piquant town–newly minted mid-life lesbianism is a national trend.

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Evidently I filed for divorce on my husband’s birthday. Honest to God, I only found out when I read it on a gossip site under the headline, “Playboy Model Has Special Birthday Gift for Music Mogul Husband–Divorce.” I kind of like my description, in spite of it being inaccurate by about thirty years and rather incomplete, it has a lot of potential, and I’m sure he’s pleased with his, but I swear on Dr. Freud that the birthday thing was completely unintentional. In fact, the whole divorce thing was completely unintentional, even unimaginable to me for most of our twenty-four years of marriage.

As a child of divorce myself, I took such pains to ensure that none of our four children would ever experience the trauma my brother and I felt, so you can imagine my feelings of failure and shock. I have been divorced before, nearly thirty years ago (I was a child bride, of course) from a man I met in law school and left right before I found out I had passed the bar exam (so had he, and that did piss me off. I am capable of revenge, you see, but I stand by the accidental birthday filing story.) I had a job, he didn’t. He got the car, I got my student loans. Most importantly, there were no babies involved. It wasn’t until I had a baby that I realized that in my universe, marriage is an entanglement that isn’t worth the paperwork unless you plan to have kids. Even weddings, which are the loss-leader for most young marriages, are almost more trouble than a party is worth. Yes, I’m a little bitter today, but my Girlfriends tell me I’m entitled to be bitter, sad, absent-minded and unreliable for a full year after filing. It is like a death, I guess, but maybe also like euthanasia.

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