Is This Romantic?

Netflix has lumped some of its recommended viewing into a category named "Romantic Comedies About Marriage." This is based on my having recently watched "The Four Seasons" and "The Money Pit."

That I have seen these movies in recent proximity reveals, perhaps, a certain masochism as I'm nearly divorced and trying to figure out how to keep my underwater mortgage afloat.

Netflix suggests that Love Hurts and Send Me No Flowers. Are these representative of the romance in marriage? This is what the algorithm has learned about marriage based on the collective input of subscribers.

There is/was romance in the routine struggle to keep a marriage going. It's difficult to see that, to remember that, from my current vantage point.

Learning to But Out

Last October, after ten interviews over four weeks I did not get the job that had started to feel like it couldn't go any other way. At that moment I had been severed/unemployed for 3 ½ months.

So I redoubled my effort and hours spent looking for a job. That included a 6 PM networking round-table for IT (Information Technology) professionals in early November.

These types of events all tended to follow the same format at the start and this was no exception. There were about sixteen men and women in business drag seated around a long, long conference room table on the 26th floor of the old MetLIfe building. (Or perhaps some people still remember it as the old PanAm building.)

A flip chart at the front of the room had the drill:

Name

Target job and industry

Former job and company

Target companies in your job search

If anyone around the table had any insight or connections in your industry or ideas about target companies, they were asked to interject on the spot.

When it got time for my elevator pitch about myself, a fellow across and down the table offered some ideas: “Have you considered...” (I do not remember the specifics.)

I replied, “Yes. I had thought of that, but...”

The moderator, a tall women who sat upright in here chair at all times like she was ready to leap up, stopped me with her forceful, sand-papery voice, “No no no no no no no no no no no! Did everyone hear that? The ‘but.’ He was offering you a gift, David. Instead of interrupting him, you - we all - need to sit back and accept the gift that is being offered to you. Hear him out; with an open mind.”

I sat their stunned; momentarily, mentally slack jawed. The fellow repeated his intended advice fully while I sat and listened. When he finished I said a simple, “Thank you.”

I have lived in New York city for 20 years. Someone taking a breath is an opportunity to interject yourself into the conversation. We anticipate the end of the other person’s sentences because we rush through many things here including conversations. So this piece of wisdom can feel counterintuitive although it runs adjacent to many other zen like principles that can lower your blood pressure rather than amp it up: Listen. Be present. Stay in the moment.

In the months since, I have made an effort to banish the buts. I listen to myself speaking and will try to edit myself on the spot if the “bbbbbbut” creeps in. It’s tough backing out of a point/count-point statement in mid-execution. I have tried to eliminate it from my everyday email. That’s tough because it prevents one from using the let me tell you about something I like before qualifying it with constructive criticism.

It feels like a worthwhile endeavor. The but not only disqualifies and dismisses the other person, it prevents me from discovering something I didn’t already know instead of interrupting with my pre-conceived knowledge. If I just shut up and listen I may find something new that I hadn’t considered before.

Looking for work required stalwartness that created unnecessary defenses. In that moment, I was reminded that I needed to invest in some humility so that I could get back to work. The moderator’s firm rebuke broke through that calcification. The rest of the meeting was uneventful but the lesson learned felt profound.

The continued application of this wisdom has been a work-in-progress. I still hear myself interrupt and sometimes talk right over someone like a bulldozer in action, enamored with my own opinions or feeling an urgency to be heard at that moment. (In the clusterfuck of conference calls, it’s nearly impossible to resist the urge to barge in.)

No great revelation has come of it. At least, I am no longer oblivious of courtesy. And I find that, when I listen and wait and respond, I feel calmer and I may find something new in myself that I had not considered before.

Sick of Sorry

John and I met at a bar in Gramercy, not far from Union Square, on a prematurely dark December evening at the end of last year; a typical black-box kind of place.

I hadn’t seen John - a big jovial grizzly-bear of a fella - in months; not since I had been laid off at the end of July. The company we had both worked for was sold. John went with the acquiring company. I was severed.

At the moment we bear hugged hello, I had been out of work for a little more than four months.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

I assumed he meant my job prospects so I listed companies I had been targeting and the many interviews that showed positive progress.

As I talked I kept my tone and manner buoyant. That was intentional. Self pitying was not allowed. In order to stay strong throughout my job hunt I had assumed the position that I was stalwart so as not to admit those doubts and fears creeping around the corners.

I had also begun to anticipate other people’s well intentioned sympathy and so I reinforced my self esteem every time I entered a “hello, how are you?” conversation.

“So, how’s Mark?” he asked,.

“We’re separating. Planning to divorce.” I made a little smile. I had taken the stance that the unraveling of my marriage would have to wait until I landed a job. At that time, divorce would have been a dangerous distraction from finding a job that would pay my mortgage. I needed my focus and energy soly fixated on finding a job to pay the mortgage. For every interview I wanted to portray myself as strong and confident so I played that part.

John paused before replying. “Shit. Please at least tell me that your health is okay?”

We laughed and I patted him on the shoulder.

How are you? So what's up? I had dreaded those questions every time I heard it over those six months of unemployment. When I answered it in any detail, in any number of ways, the response was almost always: I am so sorry, accompanied by a slump and a sad sack look of compassion.

The good intentions were obvious and kind. That had not been missed. I just didn’t want any fucking sympathy. I didn’t need it. I didn’t want it.

A week or so after seeing John, a friend-of-a-friend laid another “I’m sorry” on me. And then these words popped into my head was: Don’t cry for me Argentina.

So I said that back to the friend-of-a-friend: “Don’t cry for me Argentina!” I said it with so much attitude that I almost snapped my fingers like a sassy black woman.

He just looked back at me baffled.

In that moment I found clarity and, in the weeks that followed, I ran the song and its lyrics through my mind and sometimes sang them out loud.

Don’t cry for me Argentina
The truth is I never left you
All through my wild days
My mad existence
I kept my promise
Don’t keep your distance.

The lyrics make no literal sense, even in the context of the musical (“Evita”) when Eva Peron sings it to her adoring mob. They have been chanting “Eva! Eva! Eva!” She comes to the balcony of the Casa Rosada and answers them with this ballad.

As I wrote this I began to realize that the “cry” wasn’t boo-hoo, weeping, but rather calling out. The crowd is crying out her name so she sings to quiet them while laying out some personal actualization as political theater.

It made no difference. The abstraction of the lyrics and killer melody allow anyone - me, for example - to project themselves into the song. As I puttered around my apartment, unemployed, yet defiant and rueful, I sang these lyrics again-and-again and I felt coherent and empowered.

Losing my job and looking for another had been aggravating and tedious, but it was also thrilling.

I found something clarifying. As I looked at my profession, my experience, and my value, I began to sell myself like a goddamn gold standard!

And more, I didn’t like the job I lost. The only thing that was going to make me quit was being asked to leave.

As for the end of my five-year marriage, that sucked. And I had a mortgage where I now owed more than the apartment was worth after it devalued. And my severance had dwindled and I was dipping into savings.

As each woe piled on top of me, I kept thinking that I could not take on one more problem and yet I did. I did not panic. I did not cry. Oh no, not I! Handling that level of responsibility in the face such adversity made me feel like a bad-ass. From the depths of my soul, the guts of my being, I felt like a Phoenix rising out of the ashes.

I had a plan:
1. Get a job
2. Pick the least terrible option for condo
3. Separate and divorce

By the first week of February I had accomplished #1, when I started a good job after fielding two other offers. Now my husband and I are working through tasks two and three.

I changed my Facebook “relationship status” to “It’s complicated.” That, without intention or malice, became a public declaration resulting in comments and messages from concerned friends.

What really tickled me was the friend who “liked” it with the wee thumbs up icon. Some people might think that bad taste or just a bizarre by-product of the Facebooking of our lives. I appreciated it. I liked my new relationship status too. It’s forward moving and leaves opportunity for someone new.

I appreciate every one's concern - friends, family, strangers.

“I still need your love after all that I’ve done,” but “don’t cry for me Argentina.”

Please like my status.

I’m good.

A Change in the Weather

My marriage is ending.

The “ing” jumps out at me because ,not only does it place my predicament in the present tense, but it also puts me in the middle of a continuum rather than at the beginning of the end.

That statement - “my marriage is ending” - is a declaration and also a realization. The relationship didn’t just crumble one day. It weakened until it broke irrevocably. Sadly it is also not the end of the break up because - logistically, financially, emotionally - separation takes much, much longer than anyone can stand. But here I am; having to cope with life as it happens, rather than how I’d like it to transpire.

My husband, I believe, suffers from wanderlust - the impulse to wander, to leave. It is a gut feeling that a better, more exciting person or life is somewhere out in the world. Your present set of circumstances prevent you from finding it with an imaginary set of shackles; the old “ball-and-chain,” if you will. He longs for a more “passionate” partner and existence.
This is where musical theater comes to my aid with a song from a failed musical, “The Baker’s Wife.” The score boasts an exquisite set of songs by Stephen Schwartz (Pippin, Godspell, Wicked). It tells the simple story of an older man - the baker - and his younger wife. She leaves him for a sexy young man only to return, wiser, to her husband. She had wanderlust and recovered.

Late in the show a song comes along as a poignant counterpoint to wandering and as a beautiful cautionary tale: “Where is the Warmth?”

Since I grow feverish with the flush that comes every time he holds me,
naturally you'd suppose I'd be warm when I'm hot.
Well, I'm not.

But oh, where is the warmth?
The fire is there
But where is the warmth?

These lyrics have been looping through my mind a lot lately, especially “...naturally you'd suppose I'd be warm when I'm hot./Well, I'm not.” That plaintive conclusion comforts me. Don’t get me wrong. I like the burn, the fever that comes with some new couplings. We have had an open marriage so I have felt that rush and excitement that comes with inexplicable chemistry. I did wonder, in those moments, if one of those men held the promise of a better life than my man at home. Then my rational, reasonable self would kick-in to remind me that the heat is not sustainable.

But, ah, the warmth! That’s hearth that heats the home. It’s the concern and care you keep for one another, the dinners together, television watching side-by-side, planning for your shared future, telling your husband about your day, collaborating on what towels to buy, saying “I love you” at the end of each telephone call and before you go to sleep. The expression of that warmth can be subtle and easy to miss, or discounted as the “business” of running the relationship. Whenever I felt the heat with another man, I tried to remember the joint history of my real relationship so that I would not become tempted to squander it to chase a fleeting flame.

There are cold winds, too, that blow through a relationship: misunderstandings and miscommunications, hurt feelings, jealousies. Days pass with little said to one another. Or others when all that passes between us is the business of the marriage. He would retreat into himself to worry and fret and I no longer tried to get him to talk it out. Sex was had more often outside the marriage than within it. And there were a whole slew of real life hardships that two must either bear up against and traverse together. That quiet, creeping chill can cause the space between two people to erode, separating them further and further away from each other’s good will.

As my husband’s wanderlust metastasized, in that cold space that grew between us, my own imagination began to wander. I allowed myself to envision a happier, more simple, less complicated future - without him.

So what do you do when your spouse tells you that he wants to leave and you are also not so certain you want him to stay?

If my grip on the relationship is tenuous as he pulls away, then it’s not so hard to let go.

Looking for a Disorder

"Perhaps we should explore David's drinking. The conscious and unconscious reasons for it."

So said our - my husband Mark's and mine - couples counselor Tony. I like him. Natty and trim. He uses his hands like an orchestra conductor to slow, start, and pause our dialogue. He has the kind of haircut that looks like it gets a weekly trim and he peers out at us through glasses with prominent black frames.

Mark and I sit close to each other, side-by-side, on a small leather sofa-ette, which I tend to slip lower and lower toward the edge of the seat. The room itself is carved out of an old New York building without any symetry in the walls, like an aimless parallelogram.

His statement was both a cross-reference to another session and also a nonsequiter within the session.

For context: Tony and I had a one-on-one session two weeks prior, as part of our course of couples therapy. He had brought up drinking then, which had made me uncomfortable.

"If we talk about this, I feel, it then becomes a problem and I don't see it that way."

Look, I drink, but I'm not an alcholic, I thought.

Tony is adept and empathetic so he'd reframed the discussion (which is something he does well): "Let's not talk about it as a problem. Let's just address it as a thing. Something to explore. Perhaps there is something there worth understanding without vilifying it. You do like to drink

"Well, yes," I'd admitted. "Some wine..."

"How much?"

"Mark and I may drink a bottle with dinner."

"And cocktails?"

"Occasionally and moderately."

(Watching "Mad Men" does give me the urge to pour a few whiskeys on the rocks, while I watch it Sunday nights.)

"It's funny. I don't drink to get drunk or even to feel anything. I just like the ritual of it. Wine with dinner, unwinding at the end of the day."

And...I'm not drinking alone. Mark is there too, so why why am I the focus on this investigation? I ponder.

"Do you think- and perhaps just consider this - that it serves any other purpose?"

I sat for a moment and let the quiet settle in my head to see if something would reveal itself to me...about me. It did: "Perhaps, maybe it is an effort to anesthetize myself, a bit. A little. Just to keep the lid on..."

What I then conveyed and we further explored was that the wine keeps whatever anger and frustrations I may have in my marriage depressed. Not suppressed. Let's say less than fully expressed, like a burner turned down to simmer so the pot never boils over.

* * *

My dear friend Angela sent me an email this week apologizing for having "one too many" at my 40th birthday party last Sunday. She had given me the loveliest of toasts but she'd felt as if it meandered and went on a bit too long. She was also holding a baby - not her own, who (true to his disposition) was named "Cool" - during the tribute and he seemed to weigh her down as she spoke. (To read this from her perspective, go to Angela's column on the Huffington Post.)

As I read Angela's email, I immediately thought, what is one too many? The threshold is individual and defined by the consequences. If no one gets hurt and you make it to work the next morning without neglecting your spouse and children then you're no drunk in my estimation.

That occurred to me again when another friend wrote to tell me that she'd sent her husband of 25 years packing after Labor Day because of his long-term alcohol problem. She wrote that she felt like a pot insulting the kettle because she can drink. We used to work together and we'd go out on outings where she would get blitzed. In those instances she was always more of the loveliest parts of herself - more affectionate, more complimentary - and always upright and able to walk herself out at the end of the night.

It is useful to understand that we were both working in a Sales organization where professional drinking should really be a skill listed in the job description.

Her husband has since joined AA for the residue of his past sins will keep him out of their house for the foreseeable future.

* * *

In an earlier session, perhaps a month ago, Mark and I were exploring with Tony an interruption in - shall we say - physical intimacy.

So there had been a break in that interruption. There was a discussion about whether it counted because it had occurred after a night out on the town where we had imbibed a considerable amount of booze.

"Look." Tony paused our quibbling with the flat of his palm. "Sometimes alcohol is a social lubricant right? We do things, or we allow ourselves to do things when we've been drinking that we would otherwise not. Are the circumstances ideal? Sometimes if you wait for the optimal place and time and vibe, you can die waiting. Let's just - and I'm only suggesting that we consider this - let's 'celebrate' this." (And he did make air quotes on "celebrate" god bless him.) "Perhaps alcohol got you to it, but it happened and that's a good thing."

We each sat there silent, considering this prospect that alcohol is not always the villain.

* * *

Wine, beer, cocktails. Alcohol. We pour it out. We bring it to our lips. And we set down the glass when we're done drinking. It can be a balm or an agent for action.

We are so eager to vilify our own behavior that we go hunting for disfunction or tease it out of the obvious suspects, like alcohol. Marriage can be tough. If I gave voice to every frustration or passing gripe, my marriage would have ended years ago. The danger, however, being that perhaps the glasses of wine leave my thoughts muffled indiscriminately - the mundane and the critical subdued into inertia.

After all that pot that has been turned down to simmer may never boil over but it is still filled with scalding, hot water.

The Soundtrack of My Severance*

When something happens in my life of any significance - happy, sad, or otherwise - I cycle through the iTunes implanted in my brain and play snippets from showtunes to give words to my feelings. I never seem to know any whole song by heart so a few relevant (and remembered) lyrics start playing as a loop in my head. If I'm alone at home or in an elevator perhaps I will sing these bits out loud. I also would extract every recording I have of those songs from my computer to put them into active rotation on my iPod.

When I found out in mid July that I would no longer have a job, or that my job would soon cease to exist because of a pending merger with another company, lines from "I'm Still Here" started a rotation in my brain that lasted for days.

Good times and bum times,
I've seen them all and, my dear,
I'm still here.
Plush velvet sometimes,
Sometimes just pretzels and beer,
But I'm here.

Carlotta sings the song in Stephen Sondheim's "Follies." She's an ex-showgirl and a D-A-M-E. She's been around the block and - although her feet are tired - she is indomitable. She ends the song, which is really a "fuck you" anthem for indefatigable, with a defiant declaration.

I got through all of last year
And I'm here.
Lord knows, at least I was there,
And I'm here!
Look who's here!
I'm still here!

That mapped pretty well to my initial reaction to losing my job - rage. In fact, I didn't lose my job. That makes it sound like I misplaced my employment because I was careless. It was taken from me. Not that I loved it. It frustrated the hell out of me a lot of the time. I had gotten through re-orgs, product blunders, and clueless bosess and I still performed. I'd delivered.

To quiet that Eartha Kitt/Dolores Grey/Yvonne DeCarlo ranting in my brain, I came up with a simple mantra: Sometimes you have to be kicked out of something in order to leave it.

It's true in work and love. My last bad break up happened about six years ago. The guy dumped me. He was a tool but I would've stayed in that relationship and entertained delusions of longevity. So he did me a painful favor by ending it.

Sometimes you have to be kicked out of something to leave it

A couple of weeks passed between notification and the merger close date where I was still an employee although I had little to do except pack up my cubicle into boxes and shuttle them home. It was at that point that my accompaniment turned morose. That's when I reached out to Miss Peggy Lee and her version of a song that starts with a child's house burning to the ground.

I remember when I was a girl
Our house caught on fire
And I'll never forget the look on my father's face
As he gathered me in his arms
And raced to the burning building out on the pavement
And I stood there shivering
And watched the whole world go up in flames
And when it was all over I said to myself
Is that all there is to a fire?
Is that all there is?

I did not know that song very well and I didn't already own it, so I bought it. I made a Bloody Mary at the kitchen counter as I downloaded it. Then I played it. And re-played it. And re-played that song that was a lot like a dancehall dirge.

Is that all there is?
If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is

One might interpret this song as a cry of help. I see it as someone who, like Carlotta in "Follies," remains defiant although depression has replaced the anger. Also a level of acceptance has seeped into the message. If that's as bad or good as life gets then fuck you and pour me another drink.

Word got out and people would come by or telephone to offer condolences, which I refused by repeating my mantra to them: Sometimes you have to be kicked out of something to leave it. I said it to them. I said it to myself.

Sooner or later, I had hoped, my mantra would convince my emotions that what had happened was a positive thing.

The merger closed and I got a short email - pick up your severance package from HR and drop off your laptop with IT.

Best thing that ever could have happened

A good friend asked if, considering that I didn't have to work, if I would be taking August off. It had never occurred to me that I had that option. Meaning that I had the choice of not worrying about finding that next job. Adding up my severance and payout for unused PTO, I had four or five months of income to use up before my unemployment turned chronic.

There gotta be endings
Or there wouldn't be beginnings —

Right?

These lyrics from "Now You Know" (from another Sondheim show - "Merrily We Roll Along") overtook the other songs running through my head. This was when acceptance met empowerment.

It's called flowers wilt,
It's called apples rot,
It's called theives get rich and saints get shot,
It's called God don't answer prayers a lot,
Okay, now you know.

Okay, now you know,
Now forget it.
Don't fall apart at the seams.
It's called letting go your illusions,
And don't confuse them with dreams.

That day, after considering the question of "taking August off," I began a "sabbatical." After 14-15 years of uninterrupted employment - including two recessions and surviving a half dozen layoffs, I took a break. I have been going to the movies, reading books, and finally watching those old foreign films on my DVR.

Because now you grow.
That's the killer, is
Now you grow.

This last bit reminds me to remind myself that it's the hard stuff that makes you better if you can accept it, learn what you can, and move on. The alternative it that you dwell on the unfairness and the misery until that bitterness calcifies making that sadness a permanent aspect of your thinking. I do not want to hang out with that person, much less inhabit that body.

So I got shit canned. That made me angry then sad. Now it is just something that happened to me that has given me the opportunity to rest, relax, reflect, and - soon - find some new job.

[*NOTE: A "soundtrack" is different than a "cast album." The former is for films and that latter for recordings of theater scores by the original, revival, or studio casts. I only bring this up, as this distinction is very important to some enthusiasts. To me it's the kind of esoterica that is only interesting to the person in the role of correcting another.]

Today on "the View"?

I'm a bit anxious that I'm missing "The View" at this moment.

I'm concerned that I'm anxious about missing "The View."

I've spent too many days and hours at home. It's time to get out.