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Reflections, newsworthy items, and inspiring thoughts from author and award-winning radio commentator Jessica Bram.
The last thing I wanted to do this morning was go swimming.
But there was absolutely no reason not to head straight to the Y first thing today for my Sunday swim. No long Sunday breakfast with Bob – he’s in Massachusetts, packing for his move. My son Alex is away on a school trip. No, nothing keeping me at home.
Since recovering from back surgery three years ago, I have been determined to make my three-times-a-week swim commitment an absolute requirement. Not that I always make it there that often. The last two Sundays my swim was pre-empted due to a swim meet at the Y. Oh, too bad, I thought, secretly relieved that I now had a good excuse to weasel out of getting cold and wet.
The truth of it is, I never want to go swimming. Never. On cold winter mornings especially, waking up when it’s still dark, I lie in bed thinking, there is absolutely, positively no way that I’m going to get in the pool this morning. At that moment, I hate the idea of swimming. Maybe I’ll go to the gym instead, where I can stay warm. I swam twice already in the last week; what’s the harm of missing just this one time? I washed my hair yesterday – do I really want to have to do it all over again?
No way.
Then what usually happens is that I get out of bed and pull on a bathing suit. Just in case.
About an hour later I am sitting on the side of the pool at Y, pulling on flippers. The water is cold and I’m thinking, again, no way. No frigging way.
This is how I know that there must be a Power Greater Than Myself. Because by what can only be some Divine miracle, the next thing I know is that I’m in the water. After a brief “Oh, shit! It’s cold” I make it the opposite wall of the pool. And then, every time, there’s this:
Aaaaahhhhhh….. This feels – so – good.
Suddenly the water is warm, and I’m loving the feeling of being cradled. The rhythmic motion of my strokes lets my mind buzz off into six different directions at once – a total brain vacation. Suddenly I’ve done ten laps, then twenty …
Forty-five minutes and about fifty laps later, I climb out of the pool, feeling like a million bucks.
Every time this happens – and I assure you, this is exactly what happens every time – I am completely mystified by the fact that I never, ever, want to go swimming. Why should I feel such dread at the prospect of something that turns out to be not only not so terrible, but actually one of the most pleasurable things I do all week?
I have learned something quite useful from this, when applied to the rest of my life. Namely, not always to trust my instincts. Sometimes what I least want to do turns out, in retrospect, to be absolutely wonderful.
I remember dreading the idea of divorce. Looking at my single mother who struggled with finances and sadness, and thinking: that will never be me, never. Only to find that the best years of my entire life, so far, have been the last fifteen years in which I have joyfully raised my three sons as an independent single mother. Having the opportunity to enjoy my children in a way I never could before. Best of all, I have come to know myself.
Who knew?
Is there anything in you life you absolutely dreaded – or find yourself trying to avoid again and again – that surprises you by turning out great? I’d be interested to know.
Bob is moving in next week and I can’t say I haven’t had a moment or two of anxiety. We’ve been together long enough now, to know that we’re right for each other. But there’s a small worry, too.
I’ve been living the single life for fifteen years now. I have come to love my independence. It’s not so bad, really.
I worry about the fact that I have very little personal knowledge of what a good marriage feels like. My own marriage was troubled from the start, and miserable to get out of. My parents’ marriage, which ended in bitter divorce when I was six, is hardly the example to look back on.
Taking the plunge again will take courage. I’ll admit it.
Kim and her husband Art, a few months before his death.
While pondering this last night, I happened upon a blog called Healing Art written by the daughter of a former neighbor of mine, Kim T. Hamer. In her blog Kim, a young California mother of three, shares the heart-wrenching story of the illness and eventual death of her husband Art last April after a long battle with cancer. Riveted, I spent close to two hours following the terrible journey she shares in her posts.
Expressing herself with remarkable candor and sensitivity – how could she ever have written so beautifully while going through such a hellish time? – Kim describes a young family’s life that continues to be fraught with sometimes unbearable pain for and her three young children, who still actively grieve their loss.
Going through Kim’s journey with her in those two hours last night was transformative. How she supported him through his tragic illness, how ripped apart she was by his death, and how she now struggles to provide healing for her children even as she herself continues to grieve – all of those are testimony that, yes, love is indeed an act of courage.
But what I learned most of all, through Kim’s intimately told story, was how truly deep and profound love can be. It is a gift I will never take lightly. And certainly worth every drop of pain, every ounce of courage, and even, yes, the possibility of loss.
J.D. Salinger’s death yesterday at age 91 has suddenly brought him all the media attention that he shunned for the last five decades, along with an onrush of accolades. I won’t dispute his literary accomplishments. But to me, J.D. Salinger is first and foremost a man whose creepy obsession with little girls made him a garden variety child abuser.
When I hear the outpouring of adulation for Salinger, all I can think of is the writer Joyce Maynard, who as a confused and vulnerable 18-year-old, dropped out of Yale in her freshman year after Salinger emotionally seduced her with letters that declared them to be soul mates.
Joyce Maynard wearing a man's watch in the NY Times Magazine cover photo
As Maynard recounts in her memoir of the affair, At Home in the World, the 53-year-old Salinger wrote to her after being captivated by her photo on cover of the famous New York Times magazine in which her “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life” appeared. Only later would she discover that what compelled him to contact her was not so much her own literary talent, as it was the oversized man’s watch that she wore in the cover photo.
This seems to have been a particular obsession of his – I’ll call it a fetish – which he had written about more than two decades earlier, before Maynard was born, in the New Yorker short story “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor” about a serviceman’s brief emotional encounter with a thirteen-year-old girl. Of the pre-adolescent Esmé, Salinger wrote, “She was wearing a wristwatch, a military-looking one that looked rather like a navigator’s chronograph. Its face was much too large for her slender wrist.”
After luring Maynard from what certainly would have been a brilliant college career to join him in his reclusive life in the New Hampshire woods, he then went on to teach her the fine art of bulimia. When Salinger tired of her – presumably for the next pre-adolescent obsession – he discarded her with contempt. Maynard’s exposure of Salinger, along with all his other creepy obsessions, in her memoir At Home in the World is, in my estimation, no more than he deserved.
Joyce Maynard is a writer whom I have always admired, both for her fluid command of language, and her warm, accessible writing style in which she seems to effortlessly describe so many of life’s indescribable nuances. But perhaps what has always most drawn me to Maynard, and to identify with, is her fierce devotion to truth. Anyone who understands – and shares, as I do – Maynard’s aversion to secrets, particularly sick and harmful secrets, knows that it would have been impossible for her not to write At Home in the World about that bizarre episode in her life.
The literary community, closing ranks around the revered Salinger, criticized Maynard for publishing her memoir. Never mind a 53-year-old man’s shameless and creepy sexual exploitation of someone who was basically a child (and certainly looked like one on the Times Magazine cover). Her so-called betrayal of a literary icon has caused irreparable harm to Maynard’s own literary career, both professionally and financially. When years later, Maynard sold his letters in order to pay for her children’s college tuition – a move that I wholly supported, given Salinger’s exploitation of her – Maynard was all but excommunicated. To this day her exile has been so persistent that, as Maynard recently recounted, the only agent who agreed to take on her last novel, Labor Day, insisted he could only sell it by shopping it to publishers anonymously. Which he did.
Salinger’s death has already lead to renewed attention to Maynard’s memoir. I hope it leads to a huge jump in sales of her book. I believe he owes her.
I heard something this morning so selfish that it’s driving me up the wall. It was spoken by Scott Brown, the Republican who just won the Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by the late senator Edward M. Kennedy.
In a morning TV news show he was asked whether he planned to scuttle the health care bill that Senator Kennedy had made the cause of his lifetime. He made it quite clear that he does. Referring to the fact that Massachusetts already has the most progressive health reform system in the country, with near-universal health coverage, he responded, (I’m paraphrasing here, but it was something like the following):
“Here in Massachusetts we already have a good health care system. I don’t see how the new bill would benefit us. So yes, I’m against the national health care reform bill.”
So screw you, the rest of the country.
Am I wrong, or doesn’t a United States senator have a responsibility to the entire country, as well as his own state?
Maybe that attitude of “What’s in it for me?” as the governing principle behind any position defines what it means to be a conservative Republican. Personally, I call it un-American.
It’s Complicated . It’s a very funny comedy in which the not-skinny, non-airbrushed, 60-year-old Meryl Streep is simultaneously pursued by two men, former husband Alex Baldwin and new suitor Steve Martin.
As a single mother who has raised three kids and been on her own for some time now, I identified with several aspects of her life – although, sadly, not that gorgeous California spread, much-too perfect garden, and apparent complete lack of financial worry. But I especially cheered on the honest portrayal of middle age, complete with the main characters’ obvious wrinkles and thick waists.
But as a writer, I found the movie seriously flawed in one respect: that major plot turns resulted from characters’ getting either drunk or stoned. It’s not the alcohol or the marijuana I object to. It’s the failure of the writing.
Although I don’t write fiction, one thing I know about plot is that a character’s action needs to be both surprising and at the same time, reasonable. Even, somehow, expected. alcohol and marijuana become a contrived kind of “deus ex machina” that simply reveal an author’s lack of inventiveness.
Without all that wine and cognac, would Meryl Streep’s character ever have ended up in bed with her ex-husband? (Now there’s a fantasy I’ve never shared.) I don’t think so. But then, we wouldn’t have had a movie, would we?
Although I’m no prude about alcohol (I did go to college in the 1970s, after all) I stopped drinking years ago, primarily for health and diet reasons. I remember worrying about this when I first began post-divorce dating. Would men find me a dud because I didn’t drink?
I had yet to realize that a far greater worry should have been the opposite, which was this: how could I possibly find anyone attractive, now that I didn’t drink? Having a drink with a blind date when the drink consisted of a diet soda resulted in what I came to call the “What You See Is What You Get” Effect. Without the happy, edge-softening buzz provided by alcohol, no man ever looked any more attractive or interesting than he actually was.
Although this made for a great many dull evenings, I later came to see this as a very good thing.
You might enjoy this excerpt from Happily Ever After Divorce: Notes of a Joyful Journey on today’s More Magazine online version More.com:
Unlike many newly divorced people, I did not start out dreading the thought of dating. During the later years of my ailing marriage I had entertained more than a few silent fantasies about what it might be like to start anew.
And then reality set in. For one thing, I quickly realized I was a near-neophyte when it came to dating. I had married young, and in my previous 1970s college and grad school years there had been no such thing as dating, per se. No one called for a date back then. One minute I was in someone’s black-lighted fraternity bedroom listening to the Moody Blues, and the next thing I knew, I was having regular Sunday tofu-and-egg breakfasts at the Moosewood Restaurant with a new boyfriend.
But skip ahead a few decades and there I was, single and mother of three, facing the prospect of real dates for the first time …
(Read more)
It was a lovely 33 degrees in Orlando
I’ve just returned from Orlando, Florida where – in balmy 33 degree winter weather – I had the opportunity to speak about my book Happily Ever After Divorce: Notes of a Joyful Journey to my absolutely favorite demographic group: 70 and 80-plus-year-old seniors. I geared my talk to the Orlando JCC “Chai Steppers” – not a group that you might expect to be that interested in the subject of divorce – to the subject of how you can be supportive if your child or grandchild is going through a divorce.
Heads immediately nodded when I said,
“The first thing you all know, of course, is that you can’t give advice … right?”
I recalled how, when I was going through my own divorce, I mistrusted advice from just about everybody – especially someone related to me and therefore personally involved. During those agonizing months of “should we/ shouldn’t we go through with this?” coursing through my head every waking and sleeping moment, I knew that the only right answer was the one that felt right for ME – and thus, that came from inside. So my sister or my mother telling me “get it over and end it” or “why don’t you try to work things out?” was absolutely meaningless.
So what should you do – and not do – when someone you love is going through what may be the most difficult challenge they have ever faced? All I could do is tell them what my mother – who was proudly sitting in the back row – did for me.
- It helped to have her simply be there, just to know I was alive, and to be always on my side, no matter what.
- It helped when my mother reminded me of my strengths and my past accomplishments, which bolstered my self esteem and suggested to me that I would be able to get through this hard time, too. (“Remember when you backpacked alone through Europe? Remember when you were in Mexico and all three kids got sick at the same time …?”)
- Calling me too frequently to check up or express worry would have suggested I was in more trouble than I was. It was better to let me call her – and to know that when I did, she would be there to pick up the phone.
- She reminded me that my kids were OK. (Once, while listening to my outpouring of guilt as we sat beside the swimming pool, she pointed to my kids as they laughed and jumped in water and said, “Yep, they sure do look like they’re suffering.”)
- I didn’t need her to solve my problems; I needed her to HEAR my problems. Sympathetic noises were usually all I needed. (“Oh, dear, that must have been very painful.”)
- I did not want to hear that she had once had it much worse. In fact, I wasn’t interested in hearing her problems at all. When I was going through my divorce, it was all about MOI!
- Being sympathetic doesn’t mean you have to let yourself get dumped on. Once, after my mother had listened to me railing on about my ex-husband for the first two days of a visit she burst out, “ Jessica – enough! I can’t listen to any more!” And you know what? She was right. It was time I gave it a rest.
The best part of the afternoon, however, wasn’t talking about my book Happily Ever After Divorce: Notes of a Joyful Journey. It was the end, when I got to tell them about what my sons are up to.
In the state of Florida, you’re allowed to brag about your children.
I was delighted to learn that More Magazine – a magazine to which I have subscribed and loved for years - has included my recent blog post “I Believe in Second Marriages” on the front page of the “Sex and Love” channel of their online version.
A relatively new member was introducing himself to my local Rotary Club the other day. He told us where he grew up, went to school, career achievements, all the basic information. Next he went on to tell us about his family. ”My wife Laura and I have been married twenty-seven years.” And the entire room broke out in applause.
It never fails to annoy me. Like we should give this guy a trophy for staying married to the same woman all that time.
I really don’t see how marital longevity is to be regarded as an achievement that deserves more admiration than say, how much money someone earns. Don’t people realize that couples who stay together – assuming their marriage is a good one – are simply more fortunate than so many of the rest of us?
Or let’s assume that the couple made each other miserable for a good many of those twenty-seven years. Does the applause suggest there was something virtuous in staying unhappy, just to avoid the dreaded “D” word?
Personally, I’d rather applaud an act of courage, than years of long-suffering virtue.
Am I missing something here?
I had been hoping to find someone tall!
I would say the single most common question I have been asked by divorced women and men in the last few years has been this: “How did you meet your fiancé?” I was asked this question yet again after my recent blog post, I Believe in Second Marriage.
It’s in my book! There’s a chapter in Happily Ever After Divorce: Notes of a Joyful Journey called “Then Comes Love” in which I recount the somewhat embarrassing story of how I came to meet Bob. I’m not going to give it away here. Let me just say that anyone who is ready to find a loving partner could do worse than to follow my example.
I should also point out that prior to the story of my first meeting with Bob is an important chapter called “Opening My Heart.” There I tell how it occurred to me, even though I was actively dating, I seemed to be spinning my wheels, unable to meet someone in whom I was the slightest bit interested romantically:
The simple explanation was that I was enjoying my unattached state immensely. The dark days of the divorce were behind me, and my life felt very full and, for the first time in years, peaceful. It still seemed a daily miracle to wake up each day to fresh air instead of the dank smell of a dying relationship …
… After rebuilding this rich, new life after my divorce, I felt that little, if anything, was missing. I occasionally worried that I was becoming too independent. How would I ever be able to give up this delightful freedom to live according to my own schedule? Would I even be able to cater to a man’s needs or listen to his problems?
Then the day came when I learned to open my heart. You’ll have to read about it in the book.
