How do you get to be a single mom anyway?

So are you all nice and ready for some serious overshare? 

For y’all wondering – this is how you get to wind up as a single mom:

If you asked me on my thirtieth birthday how likely it would be that I’d find myself a single mother – I’d have said, ‘Not a chance.’  Three years ago I was a ‘normal’ person – whatever that means.  Married to an up-and-coming young hot chef, in love, loved, trying to conceive a baby – happy times. 

Three years later. When ‘for better’ or ‘for worse’ turned into a whole lot worse than I could ever imagine I found myself going from ‘married lady with a newborn,’ to’ single mommy trying to stay sane’ in the course of a paltry twenty four hours.

But let me back up just a little. Jude, the hot up-and-coming chef, and I met when he was twenty two and I was twenty three.  Laughably and delightfully young.   I was a wickedly feisty dancer on a German cruise liner; he was the pastry chef onboard.  We were sailing around the tip of Cape Horn when we met on the back deck during a drink-infused crew party.   The second we talked we felt the kind of mental connection that neither of us had experienced before in our short lives.   A mere six weeks later we left the ship, moved to London and were married at Chelsea and Kensington registry office.  A Brit and a Yank hopelessly in love.  We couldn’t think of any other way to legally stay in the same country outside of marriage – so we did it.  We told no one of our secret and binding union and assured ourselves that if it didn’t work out – there was always divorce.  But we were so in love – so connected, it was written in the stars, right?  How COULDN’T it work out?

These two young kids in love pulled each other back and forth from London to Los Angeles over the next few years.  In London there was rain, poverty and my family: traditional, middle class, conventional. In Los Angeles there was heat and sunshine, enough cash and his family: alcoholics, deranged, demanding…  Finally we settled in Los Angeles alongside the deranged family and from there the marriage started to unravel.  It first started to flail when the passage of time started to poke the relationship into a grownup’s marriage as opposed to a kid’s adventure.  There was talk of mortgages, starting a family. His career and lifestyle was also was more of a strain than I wanted to acknowledge.  He worked evenings, weekends, and towards the end, as the talk of mortgages and babies escalated he just stopped come home.  

One evening, shortly after he’d broken my heart by telling me he didn’t want to have children – not now, not ever – we got drunk at a fancy restaurant and had the kind of sex that gets a girl knocked up.   The next day we went our separate ways.  His way was straight into the arms of a fellow chef: blonde, wild, 24 years old, definitely more concerned with molecular gastronomy than ovulatory cycles. 

Three weeks later I called him, “Come back. I’m pregnant…”

It was just eight weeks after, Finn, a delightfully chubby smiley angel of a baby, was born that I discovered the photographs of their recent trip to Costa Rica.  He looked bloated and unsure, she looked possessive and utterly in love, her bitten baby pink finger nails digging firmly into the faded tattoo on his shoulder; her overplucked eyebrows arched in an overeager smile.  Slut.  Homewrecker.  All these words and more apply but at the end of their journey together she’d become just another little girl he’d guzzled up for all she was worth and spat to the side the moment she became needy.  

Photographs seen, I threw him out the house and awaited the sweeping apologizes, the grand gestures of I love you as only a man terrified of losing his very soul mate can throw.  But.  There was nothing.  No grand gestures, no I love yous, barely even a: ‘I’m sorry’…  Just a lot of, ‘I don’t know how I feel.’ And a lot of, ‘I love my son.’

Six months later nothing had changed, except the restaurant where he and the slutty chef had copulated in the dining room (yes, the very dining room where you ate the most overpriced piece of steak in the Inland Empire) had burned to the ground.  So he became unemployed at the time of the worst recession the world had ever seen and as a result, undivorcable.

I was about to enter the most frustrating holding tank of my life. 

But then, I uncovered some handy superhuman powers that I never knew I owned and somehow I learned how to really live again. I learned how to become a great mother. I discovered that the ability to revel in life, pee-your-pants with laughter and even fall in love again doesn’t all dry up because the loving, loyal man you thought you married turned out to be someone else entirely.

So as I waited to file for divorce I made a choice that I wasn’t going to wait to live my life again. I rediscovered golden nuggets of my personality that had gotten utterly buried after ten years of living with an extrovert. I got promoted at work, I wrote a couple of books, I learned how to knit, I started writing a blog and I suddenly remembered that I was pretty good at making people laugh. I learned how to appreciate the joy of living again and here I am. 

Living in the moment.

Waiting to get divorced but not waiting for my life to begin. 

I’m immersed. I’m in it. I’m finding joy in every day.