Alice Brooks' blog

1. Going from two incomes to one. I have to learn about things like investing and retirement, and I have to figure them out on my own. How do I turn a teacher's paycheck into financial stability?

2. How do I look naked? My ass is no longer something I'm terribly comfortable with.

3. How little shaving can I get away with? I have no idea how much shaving, waxing, and personal grooming women who aren't on cable TV actually do. I have no idea how much the guys I might sleep with actually care.

4. Falling down. I'm not terribly graceful — falling over the coffee table and breaking my leg is a very real possibility. How long will it take for someone to find me?

5. Something will break. What if something terrible happens to the car or the plumbing? There will be no one to take me to work or help find a bucket. There's no longer built-in catastrophe assistance.

7. I am turning 33. What if, when I decide I'm ready for someone else, I'm too old to find him? What if I'm not ready for years and years and there's a window of time I'm missing?

8. I don't want kids. What if this proves to be a deal-breaker for anyone I might want a relationship with?

9. What if I do want kids? What if I wake up one day, realize that I do want them, and then I'm single and too old?  read more »

My ex-husband Jake had an issue with my period in that he refused to have sex with me if I had it. There was a day he called "the day," the day I claimed my period was over but it still lingered. "Is it the day?" he would ask, all suspicious.

My friend Maria IMed me the other day. "I didn't think there were men left in the world who wouldn't have sex with a woman on her period." As I was about to reply, she added, "I went to a sex party last night and was turned down by three different people!"

Maria's life is very different from mine.

This has been easy enough thus far; I simply schedule around it. I schedule, but I don't discuss. It's one thing to discuss your menstrual cycle with your husband. It's quite another with someone you are casually dating.

A few weeks ago, I met someone I really liked. Someone from out of town. There's no scheduling around a flight home. Things were mostly over, but, well, it was "the day."

How do you say, "I don't know that you should put your face there just now, since my period just ended and I can't really vouch for taste?" That's not the kind of thing you can just let someone find out on their own, but how? What are the rules of etiquette in these situations?  read more »

I'm having a bad week. There is, unexpectedly, a boy I could call.

I want to call and ask him to say something nice, something comforting, something that will give me that stupid grin I get whenever I talk to him.

I know that I can call and say this. I know I could send an email right now that says, "This week is bad. Please reply and say something nice," and he will, and I will feel better.

But if I do, what is that? Underneath, as sad and cliched as it is, I'm scared to death of counting on someone to be there, even just for now, even just in this moment. Even for something as ultimately small as this email would be.

I ask my friends for help. Sometimes. Admittedly, I'm not good at it, but I recognize the need to do it, and the value of it. What makes this different? What's different is that this is a boy, and this is a boy I could like and like a lot. This is scary and uncharted and it's something I'm not ready to face.

So I'm staring into the computer screen at my email draft, I wondered if it's more pathetic to hit "send" or to stubbornly refuse this little thing.

I usually do a pretty good job of pretending this divorce hasn't damaged me.

 

A few months after I split up with Jake, my friend Darren and his fiancée broke up, so the two of us decided to have dinner and feel sad together.

At dinner, I noticed he was touching me a lot, and sitting rather closer than necessary. I tend not to notice this kind of thing — you practically have to take your clothes off and do a naked little dance to get me to notice you're flirting — but I noticed this. And this was odd.

This was not supposed to be a date.

We headed to the car. I was driving, so I unlocked his door for him. He took my arm. "Hey," he said. "Have you ever wondered what it would be like ..."

And he leaned in.

I've always imagined myself to be the kind of person who will rise to the occasion. I will hold open the airplane's emergency exit. I will perform CPR while the restaurant panics. I will calmly explain my feelings. I will demonstrate grace under pressure.

As it turns out, I will not.

I know this because when Darren leaned in I shrieked, jumped backwards, and ran around to the other side of the car, yelling, "Oh God, no! No! No!"

This, in retrospect, was not the best way to handle things.

When I dropped him off, I told him what he meant to me as a friend and how I'm in no emotional space to date anyone I might actually care about.  read more »

My dad asks my sister on a regular basis if I am "dating or anything." He desperately wants to ask me, but just can't bring himself to get farther than "So...how are you doing?"

When I told him about First Wives World, the conversation went like this:

Me: Dad — I've got sort of a writing job. I'm going to be posting on a website.

Dad: That's great! Hold on, let me get Jean on the phone — she's watching Doppler. Jean!

[pause]

Stepmom: Hi!

Dad: She's going to be writing for...what's it for?

Me: A website. It's a site for divorced women.

Stepmom: Really? So what are you going to write about?

Me: Well, you know — getting divorced. Trying to date after getting divorced.

Dad: [throat clearing] So ... if you're writing about dating, that means, er — that means there is dating?

Stepmom: What's the site?

Me: Oh, no. You can't read it.

Dad: But we want to!

Me: No. I'm totally not comfortable with that.

Stepmom: C'mom! We can handle it! We're not old fuddy-duddies!

Me: The fact that you just said that...no way.

Dad: But we want to read your work!  read more »

Thoreau says, "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." I first heard that in high school. I thought it beautiful and sad, and completely untrue. Through high school, through college, through much of my 20s, I couldn't even imagine that kind of mindset: There was too much that was lovely and exciting and unexpected about the world. Three years ago I was flipping through an old notebook, found that quote and realized it was me.

I get hung up on semantics. I love definitions. I can't feel something unless I have the word for it. When I'm in a mood I can't define, I panic. But this was a definition I didn't want. And this, I figured, was a sign things weren't working out. When had I become this person?

It's been about a year now since my ex left and as I take stock of my day-to-day, I'm not feeling that anymore. There have been some white nights, some wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat at 3 a.m., evenings curled on the couch holding onto a pillow for dear life as I concentrate on merely breathing, merely getting through the next minute, the next hour, the next day. But those nights are fewer and fewer as I find that happiness, that bounce, that look-around-at-this-world-that-is-so-beautiful is back - and it's returning more consistently each day.  read more »

I like to think of my life as a sitcom. That way, when things go terribly awry, I can put on a mental laugh track and get a bit of perspective.

That which is agonizing in person is often hilarious in observation, and really, what could be funnier than the 32-year-old divorcing woman trying to figure out how to be single? Especially a woman that hasn't been single since she was fifteen? Hilarity, clearly, must ensue.

So I'm taking stock of the other men in my life and analyzing the role they will play as I figure myself out. Have I cast my sitcom appropriately?

Scott: Obligatory Gay Best Friend

Scott represents everything I want in a partner, except he thinks vaginas have teeth. Once I actually asked, "Why can't I meet a straight guy who's just like you?" "Um," he said, "somehow I don't think you're going to find a straight guy who will skip with you."

Kingsley: Good-looking Straight Friend I Have Absolutely No Interest In  read more »

My husband left me for a country.

It's a blameless breakup, in many ways. No one had an affair, no one became a Republican, no one had a tragic and disfiguring accident. No one lied, cheated or stole. But when things needed attention, China got in the way.

Jake and I were together from high school. We were married when I was 22. About four years into our marriage, he started working in China. At first, he was gone a week or so at a time. Then a few weeks at a time. Then a month. After a few years, he was gone two months at a stretch, at least three times a year.

Every year he'd say, "Next year will be different."

Every year he'd say, "I know we're not working right now, but I can't focus on that yet. Next year will be different."

Finally he said, "This isn't going to change." And he flew back, this time to an apartment, this time to stay.

Now I'm 32, and single for the first time since I was in high school. There is much that is terrifying about this. Suddenly, I'm afloat, untethered, without that anchor to the world I've counted on for the last fifteen years. That sometimes makes me have to lean against a wall and try to breathe.

As divorces go, I've got it easy. We don't have kids. We don't have a house. No one's interested in screwing over anyone else.  read more »

Jake moved out almost a year ago — the day after my birthday. Why we both thought this was a good idea, I have no idea — there was pre-holiday reasoning that seemed perfectly logical at the time, and now escapes me entirely.

I left for work that morning, sat in my car in the school parking lot, and panicked. How will I live in San Francisco on one income — a teacher's income? What if my car breaks down again? Who do I list on my emergency contact information? What if I fall down in the shower and slowly bleed to death?

And then — most overwhelming, forefront in my mind — how on earth do people date?

Dating is supposed to be the thing that's exciting about being single again, right? But I am 32 years old and have never dated. I was with Jake since I was a sophomore in high school.

Everyone else my age has had years of practice: they've had that terrible first date, they know enough about sex to know what's expected awkward and what's let's-not-do-this-again awkward. They have some frame of reference. I feel like I'm 15 again — and I don't know anyone who had a good time at 15.

Honestly, all the concerns about income, emergencies, and spider-killing pale in comparison to the idea of navigating the dating world. I've seen movies. I have an idea of what I'm in for, and it's not pretty.  read more »