We Interrupt this Blog.....

I am writing to let everyone know I haven't disappeared or gone undercover after posting such inglorious personal details of my life. I am simply being pulled back into that other part of my life - you know, the one that writes the most prolific of all modern literature, my paycheck.

I have been cramming two weeks of work into one to prepare for a business trip/vacation to Hawaii. I am the Chair of a large conference so I have had to be on my game with respect to speaker notes, be here at this time, don't be late, etc. etc.

But I've also had to make arrangements for my kids, beyond all reasonable details and finish everything at the office that would have normally been due next week.......whew~~~~ I'm exhausted just thinking about it but I'm keeping my eye on the prize.

I will be in Hawaii for ten days. Enough said.

I am hoping to channel some deep, introspective, Hawaiin, hey dude, really cool blog entries while I am there.......stay tuned. Could be great, could be a bad reaction to the macadamia nuts. You be the judge.

Oh, and I pledge to return with no tatoos, of the islands, or otherwise. Pray for me.

Zen Mama out.....

Mr. Dependable (Part Five) - Out of the Ashes Comes New Life

This is the how the Alfred P. Murrah federal building looked on the morning of April 19, 1995, prior to 9:02am.

This photo could also easily represent my life at the time; neat and orderly, shiny and functional, everything happening according to plan.

But sometimes, the unexpected happens.


This is how the Alfred P. Murrah federal building looked after 9:02am of the same day. The unexpected had happened. The most unthinkable, unexpected happening anyone could have possibly imagined. After that day, nothing would be the same.

This is also what happened to my life. It blew up. I spent six months feeling as if I had been gutted. I encountered the unexpected and I faced the winds of change, taking me from the person I thought I was to the root of the person I am now and nothing would be the same.


This is the site of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building today, fourteen years later. It is a peaceful place, as calm as the waters of the reflecting pond. It represents those we lost, those who survived and those who came to help, to rescue and to recover.

Hearts were broken, blood was shed, our home was invaded by terror, lives were forever changed. But out of the devastation came humanity, out of the destruction came strength, out of the chaos came charity and out of the ashes came a kindred fortitude to not let this insidious act prevent us from once again finding peace and new life within our hearts.

**********************************************************

Mr. Dependable was devastated when I left him nearly two years later. We had continued to work hard to put the pieces back in place but no matter how hard we tried, the pieces simply didn't fit together anymore. A few years later, he found the perfect woman for him, he found his Ms. Dependable.

#1 son visited them one summer when he was around 15. He returned home telling me how alike they were, two big recliners, a large screen TV and a massive movie collection was all they needed. Then #1 son asked me why/how I had married him. You are so different, he said - I can't imagine how that could have worked.

Mr. Plentiful's wife eventually found out about our affair. They went through a rough patch but managed to pull it out. His daughters, who were preschool age at the time are now both in college. Our paths occasionally cross. He seems to be doing well.

I had an opportunity a few years back to ask him what it all had meant. A part of me retrospectively viewed him as a predator. He seized an opportunity, noticing an impressionable, vulnerable, somewhat naive, easy target. He assured me that was not the case, promising his words and actions were from his heart. He confessed having loved me then and continuing to love me throughout the years. I share the same feelings for him and probably always will.


As for me, I am free and I am not afraid. My hair went from stick straight to curly, seemingly overnight, as if to usher in the person I would eventually become. I am unconventional yet traditional, wildly abandoned yet grounded, sexy in a natural way, self-supporting, self-loving and self-taught. I have risen to the top of my industry and now I am imagining and pursuing a life I have always known would be my destiny.

I am a writer.




(Just to keep you begging for more - up next: Strike Three - Meet Mr. Sunshine With a Chance of Pain (Part One)!

Mr. Dependable (Part Four) - We're not in Kansas Anymore

I flew to Houston, a married woman, to be with my impending lover, a married man, two months after meeting him in New York. His letters had continued to arrive, sweeping me out of my reality and into his world, a world awash in ethereal colors and sensual pleasures.

The letters were innocent at first but gradually increased in intention and intensity. When the wind blew across his face, he would imagine it had just arrived from Oklahoma where it had blown through my hair. He wrote about business and baseball games but ever so delicately, interspersed throughout, were the carefully planted seeds, waiting to take root in me.

A month earlier, I had given a detailed account of the entire experience to Mr. Dependable. I told him of feeling vulnerable and having this man with a strong shoulder and tender, compassionate heart reach out to me. I told him of all the savory new tastes that seemed to still linger on my palate. I spoke of being enraptured by the city, the people, the excitement but mostly by this man who was able to cry with me.

I felt I was withering away, twisted, calloused and dying like a knotted vine, never to be unraveled again. I had set my sexuality aside, trading it in for a stable life. And yet, after New York, after the bombing, I could imagine new life; efflorescence was possible.

I pleaded with him to understand how the experience had changed me. We desperately wanted our marriage to work and we both felt this was going to be the catalyst for our new life. We could start taking small trips together, figure out what's wrong with us - see a counselor, go out to dinner, read some books, show some emotion, drink wine, be angry, make a decision, do something spontaneous, have sex for more than five seconds.

While he had declined my previous attempts to get him away from the TV and out on the town or to visit the much needed limp-schnoodle doc, he now seemed to understand our marriage depended on it. Keep in mind this was before all the hubbub concerning E.D. There was no Viagra or Cialis. Bob Dole had not yet made commercials about it. It was on the down low. A man was on his own to figure such things out and a wife was expected to be supportive and understanding.

Suddenly wife was awakened and horny so off to the counselor and Urologist we went.

The results came in with nothing permanently broken, thank God. Mr. Dependable simply had a wee problem with P.E. (and I'm not talking about 8th grade gym class). Both head doc and penis doc recommended the same protocol. He needed to desensitize himself by buffing the bat, you know, chafing the carrot, often, at frequent intervals, repeatedly.

Oh, that's all. Piece of cake, right?

Wrong.

Apparently when you're raised in Topeka Kansas, you are taught not to do such things. In his defense, I suppose it must have been really hard (or lack thereof) for him. While he seemed to embrace the opportunity to take our marriage to the next level, he must have been feeling rather emasculated by it all. I mean what husband wants their wife to essentially say, I want you to be more like him. He tried, God love him, he tried - but it was not to be. The course had been set.

Please don't think I did what I'm about to tell you because Mr. Dependable couldn't satisfy me sexually. This is a blog, there is not enough space in all the blogosphere to adequately explain why it happened. Further, I am not going to go into all the flowery details of the encounters because I am choosing not to glorify them and because I don't want this blog to turn into some pseudo paperback light-porn romance fiction.

I questioned myself, my God, my best girlfriend and Mr. Plentiful extensively before deciding to meet him in Houston. His reply, "I love witnessing the emergence of the total woman inside you. It is a most exciting and beautiful thing, and just thinking of it makes me yearn to see you fulfilled. If we are careful and thoughtful, I see only good coming from our having met. If it is at times frustrating or even torturous, that is to be expected, is it not? Would we all be better off not having been born because we knew someday we would die? I would love to continue our relationship within the constraints of our current situations until one of us decides that the pain outweighs the joy, if ever that should occur. I doubt, and certainly hope, it never will."

So, the little Okie girl flew off to Houston and began a six month affair. Before it ended, I would travel to see him in New York, Dallas and finally, in Boston. All the while, I remained twisted up inside that volatile vortex, thrust violently about, hoping to be thrown but then getting sucked up again. Like some floating piece of matter, I was an inhabitant of two worlds, side by side, each breathing a life of its own, their boundaries blurring and overlapping occasionally. One inhaled, the other exhaled. My reality was defined as I zoomed into one of them, that world becoming paramount, then logic was turned upside down as the other world expanded and engulfed me, defining a new reality.

.......to be continued (for the last time, I promise).

Mr. Dependable (Part Three) - The Answer is Blowing in the Wind

On my first day back to work in Oklahoma City, I received a letter from him. Yes, it was an actual letter. He had an email account but as yet, I didn't. He recounted how emotional it was for him to meet me, saying he had a "wonderful memory, as fresh as spring, and as full of promise as the bud on his tulip plant, but the next thing he knew, the bud was gone". He went on to tell me how my "gorgeous smile was burning a hole in his mind" and how pleased he was if he was able to make my life just a little better, as I had done for him.

I had arrived home from New York feeling as if I had returned from a finishing school meant to usher me through adolescence into womanhood. I had tasted the best New York had to offer in food, wine and a remarkable man who seemed to know no emotional constraints when it came to me. After our night together, sleeping in his arms - I had awoke feeling awkward, confused and out of place. He sensed this and knew I needed him to go.

Class that day seemed to drag on beyond any reasonable tolerance of pain and all I could think of was what the hell I had just done. Mr. Plentiful insisted we have lunch, just the two of us, cutting LA Girl out of our plans. I can't resist the obvious connection to symbolism when I tell you we went to a deli and I ordered chicken noodle soup.

Oh great power of chicken noodle soup, please give me comfort as I attempt to sort this mess out.

This beautiful man then took my hand, began to cry and subsequently pour his heart out to me in a way that even chicken noodle soup couldn't protect me. It was all about how much he loved his wife life, but meeting me had shifted the ground beneath his feet. Sound familiar, yes?

The rest of our week was spent dutifully finishing our work, continuing our (my) education in culinary edification and enjoying his gentle nudges to bring me to his bed. My convictions were strong and in spite of the seemingly surreal urges to devour him, I stayed true to my beliefs by remembering my happy, simple, (yet becoming aware of) incredibly boring life back home. Truly, the only thing that saved me at the height of desperation was remembering, "I'm not that kind of girl".

His letter closed with these thoughts, "It hurt me to think about what you were going through those first few days. I hope that now you're back home you can carry on with renewed strength and perspective. I'll be thinking of you as the leaves unfold." I called him and left a message on his pager (sounds so funny to say that now), thanking him for the kind thoughts.

Over the next four weeks, I received many letters from him, sometimes one per day, sometimes two or three per week, sometimes less. Meanwhile, I was staring down the barrel of my marriage and questioning what was happening to me as the winds were beginning to blow.

Anyone who has ever lived or visited Oklahoma knows a little something about the winds. Rogers & Hammerstein had it right when they wrote, "the winds come sweeping down the plains". On a normal day, you can't wear a short, pleated skirt; unless of course you want to invite your neighbors to the promised land. On a windy day, you are unable to host a backyard fete without engineering a devise to fasten your guests plates to the table.

Then there's the really impressive winds that occasionally whisk through. The 70 mile per hour, blow your windows out, winds. The winds that were gusting up inside of me, changing everything I knew to be true about myself, were more on the scale of those produced by an F5-Gary England-"Folks this is serious"-Tornado.

I was inside the vortex of that mother fucking tempest, swirling about tumultuously, trying to remain a good girl, a good wife. Hoping this was just a flirtation, a phase, an innocent, tender twister that would gently touch the earth, blow a few leaves around, then pick up again, leaving no damages or even a trace that it had been there at all.

I decided the only way to free myself was to tell my husband what was happening.

.......to be continued