My parents raised me to be a respectful, obedient little girl who would acquiesce without question to someone in power.  That included anyone who was older, college educated or higher ranking on the socio-economic scale.  White folk, Republicans and members of traditional families too were highly favored.  Church-going Christians got a free pass almost regardless of any other characteristic.  In word and deed my parents made it very clear that people in those categories deserved special treatment.

On the other hand, those who were poor, uneducated, irreligious, not white or involved in non-traditional relationships didn’t.  It was never suggested that I actively disrespect them.  I think they’d simply have preferred if those types didn’t exist, unless it was to provide fodder for outraged gossip.

It was quite a revelation for me to find out (slowly, one example after the next) that their rankings were not particularly useful.  Even now, so many years after having come out from their influence it gives me a slight shock to realize that I still gauge my assessment of people by their scale.

Nearly two years ago my disposal suddenly died.  Not only did it die, as I discovered when I crawled beneath the sink to peer up at it, but also the bottom of it had begun to rust away.  I ushered my little ones to the hardware store, picked out a new disposal, and had it mostly installed within the hour.  Mostly, but not quite; I could not get the ring connecting the machine and the sink drain to lock as tightly as I thought was necessary.

“Did you manage to destroy something again?” asked my favorite plumber when I called him in for assistance.  He’s familiar with my history of attempted do-it-yourself jobs that require his help to set things right.  For all he knows this happens with every job.  He has no knowledge of the few I manage to carry off on my own.

I showed him the current predicament.  With only a bit of mucking about beneath the sink and an adept wrench flick he coerced the retaining ring into place.  The charge came to nearly nothing and once again I was thankful for his continued presence in my life.

He’s righted a bathroom remodel gone awry, a gas dryer installation which was much more difficult than anticipated and a few other random odds and ends.  Each time he lobs gently provoking banter my way; each time I bat it right back, happy that he’s not once remarked on the fact that even while married, I did all the household repairs.

Recently the disposal’s gnawings became increasingly vibratory.  Some cycles would shake the entire counter, causing dirty silverware to ting and hop next to the sink.  Lack of time made me put off the necessary call to have it fixed.

Until the other day, when in the process of removing a meatloaf from a heavy baking dish I managed to drop the entire thing into the sink.  A cloud of meatloaf shrapnel mushroomed above the counter; a sharp crack sang out from below.  The meal survived unscathed and safe in its dish, minus a few bits which clung to the wall near the sink. And on the bananas.  And the floor.

The disposal, however, was not so lucky, a fact which I didn’t realize until several hours later when the children announced a new company of ants carousing through the kitchen.  I looked.  There were no ants.  What they saw was black-specked filthy water leaking from below the sink, the outpourings of a cracked drain-pipe.

Not even an hour later the plumber arrived.  “What did you break this time?”  His voice was playfully sarcastic.  I summarized the sink situation as he dismantled the broken segment.  “Hm,” he said.  “Seems like the pipe was wearing down, then your meatloaf delivered the coup de grâce.”  I must have looked at him blankly.  “The killing blow,” he said.

“Oh, right,” I said, and to my shame the thought running through my head as I wrote out the check was “He’s smart.  For a plumber.”

I abhor the snotty, 50s-era throwback part of my brain.  I’d cut it out if I could.  You’d think that the eighteen years which have passed since leaving their house for good would have been enough time to eradicate that way of thinking.

Apparently it is not.

The door opens both ways, the door opens outward
My heart contains always the one time we kissed.
Only one other, only one other
Only one other has meaning for me
Only one other beside my own soul
You are that other with meaning for me.
–Out of the Darkness, Blue Oyster Cult

When the children go to their father’s house, the mini goes with them as his car doesn’t have sufficient seating capacity to prevent fratricide.

I drove off in his car recently only to have his cd holder fall on my head as I rounded the first corner.  I tossed it into the passenger seat until I got home, at which time I attempted to refasten the damnable thing to the visor.  In the process I discovered his collection of Blue Oyster Cult.  A wave of unbearable longing forced me to take them inside and download them to my mp3 player.  I spent the rest of the afternoon listening to his favorite music while I worked.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have, because I found myself missing him more strongly than I had at any point since we separated.  There was so little to miss, as the last few years we were together he was less like a person and more like an almost-undetectable ghost.

In the past few months, however, some of him seems to be coming back.   This has been most apparent over the holidays, when I’ve watched with a mix of pleasure and sadness as he happily helped the kids with their gifts and even fixed us a more than sufficient Christmas dinner.  Why couldn’t he have been like that when were together I wondered, and hearing the music we listened to in bed together didn’t help the feeling to pass.

I can’t place too much importance on this.   Feelings mellow over time; the extreme highs and lows wear away leaving something that seems more peaceful than broken. This is good for the children I know.  It’s good for all of us to have peace and love instead of hatred or dissent.

None of this makes me wish him back.  Things were too far gone for that.  But why, I ask the universe and anyone else capable of listening, why couldn’t he have been like this two years ago?  Why couldn’t he have made changes before the axe fell?

I was upstairs putting together some byzantine toy for the children, wondering why the ex didn’t come up to help.  When finally it was done, I came down to a horrendous sight.

He hadn’t been able to assist me on the second floor because he’d been busy rearranging the first floor.  You must understand that this man is a prodigious collector of every sort of paper.  He struggles to throw away anything made from trees, and in the time it had taken me to assemble the kids’ toy he’d moved his entire collection back into my house.  Along with every one of his storage “solutions”:  desks, bookshelves, binders, file folders, and et cetera.

I panicked.  I knew it was a dream, yet I couldn’t slow my racing heart or quickening breath.  I believe I may have managed to call out.

I cast my eyes about at the damage.  He’d shoved aside a new armoire and replaced it with bookshelves.  Boxes were piled over the dining room table.  And in the kitchen…oh the kitchen.  He’d removed cabinets from the walls and replaced them with bookshelves.  His desk had been wedged between the pantry and the dishwasher, neither of which could be opened.

“But where will I put all the dishes?” I asked in dismay.

He leered at me.  “Guess that’s your problem, isn’t it?  You wanted me to move back in, so you can deal with all my stuff.  You just couldn’t make it on your own, could you?”

“I was doing fine,” I said.

“Yeah, but you’re broke now.”

“I’m not broke.  I have enough money!”

He answered over his shoulder, smugly, as he stacked a messy sheaf of papers where once the sippy cups had lived.  “Only because you’re taking out loans at those paycheck and title loan places.”

“No I’m not,” I insisted.  “I don’t need you financially at all.  I asked you to come back because I love you.”

The dream spun off into another direction wherein I was given a new house, one that came fully furnished right down to every last drawer.  This prompted hours of dreamy exploration.

Once awake and even days later I have no idea why I dreamed of my ex moving home.  I do love him, though not in the way that I’d consider asking him to come here to live.  I don’t need him financially.  By all indications we’re doing far better as friends than we ever did when married to each other.

And if anyone ever tried to put a desk in between my dishwasher and pantry…well.  That would be the end of that relationship.

Why would I dream such a thing?  Armchair dream analysts’ explications are welcome in the comments below.

Now that I’m single, my small family’s total yearly income will end up being around 40% of what it was last year.  It’s really kind of shocking to write that.  I didn’t realize the difference until I did the math.

What’s equally shocking is the fact I now feel far more secure financially than I ever did while married.  I feel more secure than when we were first married and had nearly nothing.  More secure than when we were both working good jobs pre-children.  More secure than when we received substantial raises.  And definitely more secure than at any time after the kids arrived.

When we were married I never knew how much money we had in our joint accounts, not even when I managed said accounts myself.  It was a problem of spending, out of control unbudgeted spending, which meant that at odd (and often frequent) intervals, money would be spent that I wouldn’t know about until the next bank statement arrived.

Perhaps our issues would have seemed more manageable had I taken advantage of the online banking services that became available toward the end of our union.  But probably they wouldn’t have.  No matter how frequently I was able to check the accounts, I still would have had to ask, “Is this your charge for $75?”  And, “Do you really need another online game/service/subscription/book you’ll never read?”

Those are the questions that made me sick to ask, but not asking them made me feel no less sick.  We spent our marriage in and out of substantial debt, to the point that no sooner had one big bill been paid than another would take its place.  “It just means we’ll have a credit card payment for a couple more months,” he’d say soothingly, and back on the credit wheel we were strapped.

When I tried to put us on a budget, I failed.  He refused to live like “poor people,” he said.  “I’ve got a good job and I’m going to act like it,” he’d tell me, despite the evidence of never-ending credit card bills that ate through hundreds of dollars (and huge interest payments) per month.

But now, despite a substantially smaller income, things feel much more secure.  The only debt I have now is my house, and barring some extreme financial crisis it will stay that way.  I’m unwilling to use the sort of store credit plans (No Interest ’til 2010!) we lived on while married.  Nor am I willing to pull out my lone credit card.  For anything.  I’ve become a financial prude, and the words “fiscal responsibility” fill me with nearly as much luscious glee as do the words “bend over the bed, baby.”

It’s a revolutionary feeling to know how much I have in my checking account.  It’s amazing to be able to budget my cash each month.  It’s extra amazing to have a savings account balance of more than $20.

I’m not entirely certain how I’ve been able to manage all this, but I know I don’t want it to change.  Could I ever again surrender my money into the mix with a partner?  Maybe I could, but right now I can’t honestly see any reason why I would.

I wanted the kind of dishes that could be microwaved, frozen, eaten off of, bounced, jostled and slid down the table 9,000 times before showing the least hint of wear, but my mother insisted that I register instead for fine china.

“I won’t use it,” I pointed out, way back in the earliest days of the 1990s, but she assured me that I’d have dozens if not hundreds of chances to use the pricey place settings she matched with a trio of glasses for water and two wines.

Call it a self-fulfilling prophesy if you will, but I’ve used those items less than ten times thus far.  They’re far too fragile to be used more than occasionally, and they require the most cautious hand-washing after use.  They’ve stayed packed away in difficult to access cabinets and my china hutch, appearing only for a few holiday dinners before my youngest children were born.

They’d use the dishes for frisbees.  Of this I have no doubt.

The china hutch itself also has inspired my irrational rancor.  It is, in a word, hideous.  It’s firmly planted in the “married” section of my mind, and I’ve endeavored for months now to rid myself of all items of a married nature.

Recently I made up my mind to give it away.  I scheduled a pickup with the local furniture donation place (tax write-off, w00t), then on a child-free weekend I set out to divest the monstrosity of its contents.  It’s no exaggeration to say that the process was like the emptying out of a clown car.  I’d forgotten how much fragile crap I owned until seeing it piled along the kitchen counter made me remember the countless boxes sent to me before and after — even well after — the wedding.

It irked me to recall how gleeful I was in the weeks before the wedding, as box after box of china and crystal arrived at my house.  I made detailed notes of what I’d received as I wrote my thank you notes, then tallied up the count:  five place settings, seven water, eleven red wine, a full dozen white wine glasses.

Parts of the set that weren’t complete immediately after the wedding were given to me by my parents for holiday and birthday gifts over the next few years, until finally, disgusted at being deprived “real” presents (the husband always got the good stuff, while I got yet more ridiculous frippery), I insisted that the set was complete and I needed no more.

What does one do with a set of unused, displaced dishes and enough glasses to make my very own champaign fountain?  I could have sold them, but that might have moved my mother even closer to filicide.

Instead I packed them away in specially padded boxes and stashed them in the basement.  Maybe someday I’ll use them again.  Or maybe in some parallel universe, a Happily Married AAG is setting them out right now for an elegant dinner.

I wish her well.

—–

I keep forgetting to mention that “An Appetizer Before Dinner” was the winner of our Babeland Swag contest.  The story’s author was kind enough to share some of the swag with the author of the second-place story, “Marie’s Secret.”  Thanks to everyone who participated and thanks especially to Babeland for letting us celebrate 15 years of sex toys.