You might want to ask Mrs. David Lettermen — I’m guessing she’d say no (although, one of Letterman’s paramours, Merrill Markoe, joked, “As you can imagine this is a very emotional moment for me because Dave promised me many times that I was the only woman he would ever cheat on.” Gotta love her sense of humor).
And so Letterman’s wife, Regina Lasko, becomes the latest in a string of wives who have been cuckolded — actually, cuckqueaned, but that just sounds so not OK— by their spouses (although the affairs occurred before they were married, Lasko and Letterman were in a long-term, committed relationship at the time).
I stopped into Loehman’s in San Francisco recently while waiting for my car to be serviced and, of course, found a “must-have.” On sale. As I stood at the register counter, the sales clerk said, “Oh, you have a birthday coming up.” (I’m a member of the “insider club,” where the store keeps track of such things)
“You get 15 percent off, and happy birthday!”
“Thank you, but I don’t want them any more. I’ve had enough!” I joked.
“Yes you do,” she said, quietly and sternly.
I immediately got what she meant. And she’s right. It was days after the death of Farah Fawcett, Ed McMahon and Michael Jackson. I don’t want to be like them. I don’t want to be dead just yet, although I know I will be one day. So, I must continue to have birthdays and perhaps should start really celebrating them.
The transition from 30 to 40 was weird, 40 to 50 even weirder. The slide from 50 to 60? Well, it certainly isn’t pretty for a woman.
Not that anything great has happened to me personally, but I know five people who are getting married and one is pregnant.
When you get to be middle-aged and you watch your friends and acquaintances get divorces or become empty-nesters as their kids graduate high school, it’s nice to experience the excitement of new love in its various forms.
The most amazing story of all the weddings, however, is the one of my recently retired co-worker, Beth Ashley. At age 83, after two marriages — one that ended in divorce, another that made her a widow many years ago, she is getting married. What’s even more heart-warming is that it’s to a man on whom she had a crush as a child.
It wasn't until I was a middle-aged woman, a mother of two boys and heading toward a divorce that I finally asked my mother whether she had been happy in her marriage.
I certainly had my ideas about that; after all, her marriage was my main model, and I’d been watching her and my dad all my life.
And now that I was about to have my family torn apart, my dad sent me pleading letters — don’t do it! — while my mom mostly worried about me, how I’d survive.
When I told a friend that I was going to — finally — start my own blog, she asked me "Are you a mommy blogger?" (well, after making a snarky remark about entering the 21st century).
I had a visceral reaction, which surprised me. It felt a little like a loaded question, like she was Dirty Harry asking me if I felt lucky — "Well, do you, punk, er Mom?"
Or like she was asking me if I were a good witch or a bad witch a la "the Wizard of Oz."
What is it about "mommy blogger" that give me pause?
Do you go back to the beginning, like Steve Martin so comically did in “The Idiot:” “I was born a poor black child …”
Do you start somewhere in the middle, the wedding, the years of endless diapers, your 40th birthday?
Or do you start now, with the cumulation of experiences, good and bad, that brought you to this place?
Do you focus on the positive — the loves, the marriages, the births, the graduations, the friendships, the promotions — or the darker stuff — deceptions, addictions, mental illness, divorces?
We can tell our story so many different ways, and all, in part, are true.
