Every once in a while, one of my personas manages to wriggle her way out of the obfuscatory synapses of my brain. I find it easier to let her have her say than to medicate. Say hello to one of my little friends...
I give up. Seriously. I earned my degree in clinical social work. I have made my living interacting with teenage girls, trying to help them navigate their way through this minefield-laden developmental stage. I have earned a reputation of "being on the same page," as it were, with clients and their respective families. Yet, when it comes to the home front and the attempts I have made with my own 12-year-old twin girls, I have no recourse but to throw in the Porthault towel. This confession is painful...terribly, terribly painful. I can only hope that it will, at some point, lead to doors that are opened and not slammed in my face as they are today.
No matter how many times I sit my girls down in the hopes of deepening our precious (and fragile) mother-daughter relationship, when I broach the subject of my current affair, they absolutely refuse to even try and see how it has allowed me to flourish sexually, emotionally, intellectually and socially. I thought, and continue to hold on dearly to the belief, that being honest with them about my profligate nature and their father's emotional vacuum will ultimately strengthen us as a family unit. It might sound evocative, but I do believe it will lead them to evolve as I have.
Wait. Hear me out. It isn't as though I am sleeping with our rabbi...any more. I did understand how that affaire de coeur might have made things a tad dicey when we all took to the bima for the girls' b'not mitzvah this year. That is why I ended the relationship, and not, as some would have you believe, because his wife swallowed a bottle of clonazepam. She is an adult; her decisions are her own. (Besides, the bottle was only half-filled with .5 mg meds, anyway. Who was she trying to kid?) Stolen moments in the synagogue's library, knowing glances during the Aleinu, a light touch over the challah platter: all put in the past tense.
Doing the right thing left me feeling bereft, emotionally empty, and filled with doubt as to whether or not I was sexually attractive. Feeling dubious took its toll on all of my decision-making processes. Who was I to choose what to make for dinner, whose turn it was to borrow my Ed Hardy T-shirt, or to debate the existence of God. "Don't you understand that I am a person, too; I have needs?" I continued to ask my family, individually and as a group. I laughed inwardly at my husband's feigned indifference, the blank stare he took to using as a response the moment I entered a room. He cared. Perhaps too much. My daughters, on the other hand, continued to respond in manners that ranged from piercing screams with their hands over their ears to wearing three sets of headphones as soon as they came home from school. I ached; and like a young child who skinned her knee, I started to feel as though the ache would never go away.
And then, at a Community Board meeting I mistakenly attended, I met him. He was unlike any other man in my life: short, rich, and the Mayor of New York City. Our eyes met as he was being lambasted by some shrew determined to impress him with her knowledge of the Department of Education. As he rolled his eyes, I coyly stuck my finger in my mouth and faked a gag reflex. He laughed. I lowered my eyes and tossed my hair. Before the meeting was over, a member of his security team had slipped me a piece of paper, a street intersection scribbled on it. Forty-five minutes later, his limousine slowed down, the back door was flung open and his patrician voice echoed within the car, "Get in." So it began.
We've been through so much, he and I, and our differences have made us each much stronger. When his daughter was thrown in the ring, upon whose shoulder did he cry? Well, certainly not those of the former New York State Superintendent of Banks, whose body parts resemble nothing as much as those of a college football player. And when critics mocked his handling of the snowstorm, with whom did he laugh whilst mocking a Queens accent and drinking a talkative Vouvray? (Of course they had to shovel the snow on East 79th street in order to allow egress into his home. How else was he to negotiate the mountains of snow, by standing on his wallet? Get real.)
I want my daughters to know how intoxicating power is both in wielding and watching it work. I want them to feel free in discussing their inner lives with those they love. But for now there is no talking to them. For now they think our talks are intrusive and embarrassing. They pretend to ignore the girlish gait I have regained. I am the Worst. Mother. Ever. But time will reveal what they fight to ignore now. One day, God willing, they, too, will grow up to become the other woman.
