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 went to hear Elizabeth Gilbert last night. I must confess, I didn’t like “Eat, Pray, Love,” although there were moments in her massive best-seller that I did like. I thought I might be the only woman who felt that way, but I have met a few others. It seemed to show the worst of women — needy, neurotic, obsessive, self-absorbed — made even more so by the fact that it was published after “The Last American Man,” whose subject, a self-styled man, is often viewed in mythic ways as the best of manhood.
And in person, she is warm, self-depricating, genuine; then I felt bad that I wrote the book off, perhaps too quickly.
But Gilbert is back with another book about — perhaps not surprisingly — marriage. As in her own: "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage." She marries “that guy,” the Brazilian-born Australian, José Nunes, whom she met in the “Love” part of the book (when he was called Felipe), even though they both feel strongly against marriage and agreed that they didn’t need to be married to love and commit to each other.
Why she marries him is to keep him in the country; his too frequent travels to the US caught the eye of Homeland Security and that was that.
I suppose that’s a good enough reason to marry — I know people who’ve married for less-compelling reasons, including me. But given the divorce rate for second marriages — at 60 percent, it’s higher than the rate for first marriages — you have to wonder why people get married again.
It would seem that Levi Johnston’s 15 minutes of fame would have come and gone by now. Once his would-be mother-in-law, Sarah Palin, lost her bid for vice president, you’d have expected that the somewhat hunky, hockey-playing, self-described “f-ing red neck” former boyfriend of Bristol Palin would have settled into his normal life in Wasalia, Alaska, doing whatever it is they do up there. After all, he’s not really famous for anything other than knocking up his teenage girlfriend.
I suppose he could have become a role model for teen parents, chatting up birth control (or abstinence, as Bristol has been) and personal responsibility.
But instead, the 19-year-old is kissing and telling and trash talking about his infant’s grandparents — and has landed on the cover of Vanity Fair. Because that’s how you get noticed nowadays; you dish dirt. Or you pose naked for Playboy (and Levi had been weighing an offer from Playgirl. Can’t say what he looks like nude, but he cleans up very nicely in some pricey designer togs in VF’s photo spread).
I’m not getting paranoid or anything, but I’m starting to feel that it’s a really crappy time to piss someone off, whether you intended to or not. It’s just that nowadays your misdeeds, real or perceived, are going to land you on a confessional TV show, the cover of a magazine or someone’s blog.
The e-mail came late the other night — I need u to send me a photo of the family. Thanks!!
"Family" meaning him, his brother, his dad and me. Whose idea that was — his or the teacher's, I have no idea. Teachers and schools don't really get divorced families, the need for two sets of paperwork to go to two separate house, etc. And that "family" isn't always Mom, Dad and kids.
There always seems to be one teacher who needs pictures of his or her students’ family; I understood it in elementary school when most young kids are still trying to figure out who’s connected to whom and why — especially since most parents throw them curve balls by calling longtime friends “Aunt” or “Uncle. But in high school?
And there never was a problem back in elementary school, because I was a SAHM and married and I was keeper of photographs, as most mothers are.
But now, I am a full-time working divorced mother, and “family photo” has a different meaning. Our family looks different now. Which family is the teacher talking about?
This has been a year of bailouts, but in my house, there have been bailouts for years. I’ve been the Bailout Queen since Day 1. You know — the kind of mother who drops what she’s doing to drive over to her kid’s school to drop off the lunch she notices is still sitting on the countertop, or the homework or field trip permission slip still on the kid’s desk (well, in the case of my family, on the floor).
I have come to my kids’ rescue throughout their young lives.
Families are odd, odd things. Oh, not my family, the one I created, my two boys and me. We’re great!
I mean my other family — the one that includes my mother, father and sister.
I won’t get into too many of the particulars of what went on in that tiny brick house in Queens, blessedly close to the best park in New York City besides Central Park and on a block teeming with a bazillion kids so there was always someone to play with.
Suffice it to say that for the longest time I didn’t realize that no one else tore paper napkins in half (to make the 260-count package last even longer? Who knows?); that other families weren’t watching black-and-white TVs whose screen was split in half, with one half showing whatever program was on upside down (years after everyone — really, everyone — had a color TV); and that going to the airport a few times a month to hang out on the observation deck watching planes take off and land wasn’t exactly considered entertainment by most people.
There are a lot of things you can control in life and a lot you can’t. The family you’re born into is one of the “can’t” things. I always thought that everyone else’s family was a bit more “normal” than mine, but this was based solely on my gut (and since I'm lactose intolerant and have other, um, GI issues, perhaps this isn't the best gauge). It wasn’t until I got older and started asking my friends and interviewing people as a journalist that I realized that everybody’s family is odd. There is no normal! Still, I certainly never expected to find a family that shared some of the same quirks that mine have — until I did.
When I heard about the death of Maria del Carmen Brousada, the 69-year-old single mother who made the news three years ago by becoming the oldest woman in the world to give birth, I was transported back to the summer I turned 8.
My family had gone to visit relatives in Israel. For whatever reason, my parents thought I was too young to join them and my sister, then 11, to Eliat, the southernmost tip, so they left me for a long weekend with those relatives.
The day they left, my relatives — who barely spoke English — did what most relatives would do to entertain a child they couldn’t say much to: we went to the movies. I can’t remember the name of the movie anymore, but I remember the opening scene. There was a house fire that kills a young boy’s parents, and he is left an orphan. That night, I had a nightmare that my parents died. I woke up screaming, and my great-grandmother, in her 90s, came in to soothe me. “Vas ist los, kind?”
Needless to say, she didn’t help much. I wanted my parents!
The singles event at the spacious Piazza Market in San Francisco was about to start when a pretty middle-aged woman walked in, sat down at my table and surveyed the scene. I knew just what she was observing.
“Why are there always more women who come to these things?” I asked, seeking a conversation entry point.
“Men don’t want to improve themselves,” she said. “They’re lazy.”
Well, this is shaping up to be a typical singles event, I thought, although in all honesty this was my first singles event, and not one even one solely to meet members of the opposite sex, so how the heck would I know, anyway?
It may not have been an easy question in the past, but it’s certainly a tougher one to answer nowadays: Are you happy?
I have never felt more unsure about my career — newspapers aren’t exactly a growth industry — and I am seriously questioning whether I’ll be able to hold onto my house and help my kids with their college education. I don’t have much in the way of a retirement fund, and a number of big-ticket things are broken around the house. In other words, there are a lot of things going on that could — should? — make me nervous, pissed off or just plain unhappy.
But, I am happy. And oddly, so are a lot of young adults even though they're facing a world in much worse shape than I did when I was their age.
When it comes to technology, I'd have to say I'm not one of the outliers. I only got a DVD player a few years ago, and that's because it was a gift (never mind that my TV is about 12 years old and isn't flat-screened). I was forced into getting a CD player, but still have my turntable and cassette player. My iPod is so old that it can't load any new songs onto it without freezing up, so I'm forced to listen to the songs that were my "fave" songs — three years ago. I have a serious love/hate with Twitter and Facebook, and with four e-mail accounts at work in addition to my personal e-mail account — meaning hundreds of e-mails a day — I am starting to hate e-mail, period.
And when I reluctantly fell for an ad pitch to upgrade my basic but serviceable cell phone to a fancy Blackberry for free, I hated it and after a week I switched phones with my older son.
Of course, I grew up in a family that was the last family in the world to get a color TV. My father was so against it that he rebelled by watching our old B&W TV for years after it suffered some sort of malfunction that split the screen in half, with one half displayed upside down.
OK, I'm not that weird, but all this technology often makes me ache for a time when I didn't feel so plugged in all the time.
So I've wondered — is technology really bringing people together or is it yet another diversion that keeps us from connecting on a genuine level?
My friend is finally pregnant after years of the pain — emotionally, physically and financially — of fertility explorations.
Which, of course, makes her an Oprah show — everyone wants to rush in with his or her opinion and story, often bordering on a Stephen King horror novel, about 36 hour labors, last-minute C-sections, lactation woes, lack of sleep, endless feedings …
There’s only one other life event in which people feel so free to divulge and advise, and that’s divorce.
So when I saw her recently — she looked so radiant and happy — I wanted none of that. Instead, I told her what I thought was the key to having a baby: Saving the marriage.
There are two kinds of moms — the kinds who hope their kids will become something — politicians, doctors or lawyers — and the kinds who hope their kids don’t become something — drug dealers, hustlers or the kind of people who talk to themselves on street corners.
I’m one of the latter moms, as you probably guessed.
Not that that’s the mom I planned to be; it’s just that when my first-born was young, I was always unsure of the way he played.
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 is Father’s Day, and so it isn’t unusual to have thoughts about dads.
Moms have been on my mind lately, mostly because of reading Ayelet Waldman’s book, “Bad Mother,” and my chat with her. Interestingly, you don’t hear much about dads agonizing over whether they’re Good Father or Bad Father.
Mostly, as she writes in the book, dads just have to show up to be Good Father.
But I think it’s more than that .
Dads have typically provided the financial backbone for most families, and that’s a lot.
They often don’t have the choices many moms do — stay home, work part time, work full time. And increasingly women want men to do more than just be the providers. We want a man to share the household chores and childcare, too.
Looking at my own dad, I have to wonder — was he a Good Father?
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.
I read a lot of mommy blogs — daddy blogs, too — and I've sometimes felt uneasy about what I've read and seen.
Lots of details about what the kids are doing, sometimes with snarky remarks; lots of confessions about frustrations, anxieties, anger over dealing with the kids; lots of pictures of kids being cute, or not.
If the kids are older and know what's going on (and give permission), that's one thing; when the kids are young, that's another.
Is it OK to reveal so much about our kids in such a public, permanent arena as the Internet?
“Are you dating someone?” my 15-year-old was asked by a relative while a group of us were celebrating his brother’s high school graduation.
“No. I’m just hooking up.”
Hooking up!?! Did that mean that my “baby” was on his way to becoming a playa?
Now, I'm a hip mom. Of course I've heard of kids hooking up — it's not exactly a new phenomenon. And hooking up to my middle-aged brain means sex (and not the oral sex is the new sex version, either).
As usual, my kids teach me much more than I think I know whenever I stop talking and just listen.
I had planned to bring a wad of tissues because I'm such a girl when it comes to things like this. But I didn't cry. I was just so happy that the day arrived, that he made it through high school, that he survived his teens.
As he told me recently, "A lot can go wrong when you're a teen."
