Growing up I liked, what was considered at the time, “girlie” things: Barbies, ballet class, the color purple (the actual color, although I liked the movie too), and I was in-love with Silver Spoons’ Ricky Schroder, now known as Rick Schroder, a right-wing MAGA man. Buuuuuuut I also loved boy things like Spiderman, Superman, Speed Racer and the star of The Dukes of Hazzard, Jon Schneider, ironically also now-known as a right-wing MAGA man. I can safely say that I wouldn’t be into either one of those men nowadays, but then…I would have married them if they’d asked, even though I was only eight.
I guess what I am trying to say is, I always felt like one of the girls AND one of the guys. Truthfully, I always felt a bit more comfortable among a group of men. If they made a crass joke, I would one-up them with something even worse, always crossing the line with my ever-present middle-school-boy mentality. Maybe I felt more comfortable around dudes because they weren’t trying to compete with me whereas with girls, well, there was always a degree of jealousy about this or that that never allowed me to feel 100% at ease.
“I hope to marry an orphan one day so that I don’t have to deal with his side of the family.” - My funny friend
Fast-forward to adulthood when my very funny friend once said, “I hope to marry an orphan one day so that I don’t have to deal with his side of the family.” I thought she was just being funny but, turns out, truer words were never spoken. When I married, I inherited the proverbial in-laws and with those in-laws came Gabriela.
Gabriela was the wife of my husband’s brother, was six years younger than me and very sweet, even if she was still stumbling through finding herself in her early twenties. Looking back, I realized that she was making a concerted effort to befriend me and I was the one who was being a bit of a dick. Maybe it was because she and my new mother-in-law were already besties and I wasn’t a part of their girl-squad situation. Maybe there was a veil of superiority due to the fact that my husband was the golden child in the family and her husband was the scapegoat. Or maybe it was a combo platter of all of the above. Either way, we never really “clicked” and between her and my mother-in-law, I felt just like I always did among a gaggle of gals…gagged.
Tensions grew when Gabriela and her husband borrowed quite a bit of money from us and didn’t pay it back…never a good feeling when that happens between family. When my husband suggested that his brother get a job a McDonald’s if that’s what it would take to get back on his feet, he and Gabriela stopped talking to us altogether, not that I blamed them. Pulling out the ‘ole McDonald’s card was pretty low. They didn’t even tell us when they were pregnant with their second child. It was THAT bad.
Soon after, our marriage crumbled and I thought that that was the last I would see of my in-laws. Hopefully one day, when I was ready to find love again, that orphan would be there waiting for me with open arms, ready to be adopted into the only family he would ever know…mine. A girl could dream right?
Back to reality, I was newly divorced and had no one to turn to. Being an only child was great as a kid but let’s face it, it fucking sucks as an adult. My only real girlfriend lived 900 miles away back in St. Louis, my mom thought I should have just stayed in my marriage and do whatever I wanted on the side like my ex had been doing, and all of my guy friends were gay. I needed a female friend in my life who had my back, was physically near me to help navigate being a single mother and could also kick back a glass of wine or four without hesitation or judgement. Ding, ding, ding! I knew exactly who to turn to: Kate McCarthy. She was Irish, so the bitch could drank, she was a mom of boys just like me and she lived fifteen minutes away.
Kate and I became friends during the financial crisis of 2008. My husband and I had just moved to our upstate house to consolidate expenses; he was staying at his “bachelor pad” in Manhattan during the week and I was living in the middle of nowhere and trying to make the best of starting over in a place that was only ever meant to be a weekend getaway. One midday afternoon I spotted Kate standing by the pool as our boys took swim lessons together and realized that they were in the same preschool class together. It was a sign.
We became fast friends after that initial poolside chat. Our boys got along like gangbusters and we both were dealing with the reality of putting our own careers on hold to “serve” the careers of our financially more successful husbands. We shared secrets with each other: she was having sexual fantasies about her landscaper and I was having fantasies about never having left The Producers on Broadway. Both fantasies were obviously rooted in some form of unhappiness, but who had time for introspection when kids had to be raised and dinners had to be ready when the masters of the house rolled through the door?
So, it came as no surprise when my husband and I were first separated, that she was my rock. We stayed over at “Aunt Kate’s” on weekends, we cooked dinners together for the kids when her husband had to stay late at work, and we spent mid-week afternoons at Mount Peter while the boys learned to ski. We joked about how life would be better if it were just she and I raising our kids together. We even got to get a glimpse of the sister-wife life when her power went out during hurricane Sandy and they all had to move-in with us for a few days. She and I loved every helpful, wonderful, domestically balanced minute of it. It was a utopia of friendship; just us two and our five boys, a fully-stocked wine fridge and someone else to think about what was for dinner for a change.
One night while our boys were running around her McMansion playing superheroes, Kate had downed her second martini and let it slip that her husband beat the shit out of her. Not on a regular basis or anything, but it happened. Apparently, during a horrendous argument, he kicked her so hard in her pubic bone that she could hardly walk while grocery shopping the next day. It must’ve been some fight. She didn’t tell anyone else and made me swear not to say anything either. So, I didn’t. This secret had bonded us even tighter and we both pretended to live life like it never happened. Pathological? Maybe. But, she called me her “sister” which freed something in me that I didn’t realize I had been holding since my marriage began; I could be a good girlfriend. That I wasn’t flawed or “bad for the women” for not having made a substantial connection to another woman in this way. It was the first time I felt like there was even an inkling of possibility at having a “Sex In The City” kind of posse. Until…the text exchange.
You see, just as close as I was to Kate, my husband had gotten pretty close to her husband, John. He would hang with them from time to time upstate. Kate would relay the latest gossip on the adventures of his new bachelor-dom and it all seemed pretty harmless. You can’t force people into or out of friendships so, that was the situation. But one thing I never shared with Kate was that I was able to read my husband’s texts. We were living in different apartments by now and there was this bizarre lingering of his iCloud stuff still crossing into what used to be our shared computer. It was this thing that would be sitting there on my desktop beckoning to be read. (Don’t even pretend like you wouldn’t have done the same, because we are all human and as much as we’d like to believe we are above acting savage, we’re still animals at heart.) Most of his texts were benign, but one day, after my ex had stayed over at Kate and John’s house, I read something that shattered all my dreams of having that YaYa Sisterhood.
It was John’s birthday party so, naturally, my ex was invited and I wasn’t. I already knew that and accepted it. But late into the evening there was a text exchange between Kate and my ex. I thought that was bizarre. I mean, they were literally in the same house at the same party so why text each other? I read on and realized that the two of them were planning a meetup in another part of the house while everyone else was probably blotto drunk. (I knew the kind of parties they threw.) The next text exchange was about twenty minutes later and had sexual inferences, “that was fun”, and “you and I are two peas in a pod,” kinda shit.
There it was. My “sister” had messed with my ex. She had no idea I knew, or would ever know, but unfortunately I couldn’t un-know a thing like that. And I was in the middle of my divorce proceedings so I wasn’t inclined to incriminate myself by saying, “Oh, yeah, by the way Your Honor, I have been reading all of my husband’s personal shit because he was too lazy to erase our computer and change his iCloud password!” So, I had to pretend to not know…at least until the divorce was finalized.
It felt disgusting. She was disgusting. The betrayal of “Aunt Kate” was worse than anything my ex had done during our marriage. I don’t know why I thought I would be exempt from her man-hunting behavior. She’d been getting random dick pics from guys “out of the blue” and told me she made out with someone else’s husband, but that was someone else, not meeeeee. For some reason, I believed that I was “special”; someone who someone like her would never betray. Well, I thought the same thing about myself when I was married and look where that got me.
The saddest part about it was knowing that it would break up the boys’ friendships (pic below) and they were too young and innocent to ever understand, nor should they for chrissake! Adults really know how to screw shit up. I drifted farther apart from her with no explanation and when the divorce was finalized, I burned the proverbial house down in an email to the two of them saying that I knew what happened and they should both be ashamed. Of course, I stretched the truth on how I knew it happened but I couldn’t hold it in any longer and needed to purge the poison that had shadowed my soul for months. They both denied it all and frankly, who knows if they even remembered. The two were regular blackout drunks so, there’s that.
After that incredible blindside, I gave up on the promise of the female connection. What was the point? But when one door closes…a different kind of text exchange walks through it. My ex sister-in-law, Gabriela, wanted to get coffee. Wtf? Apparently, her husband had fallen madly in love with another woman and was leaving her and her two children. She was looking for advice and a shoulder to cry on; a person who’d been through it and knew the ins and outs of the dysfunctional family we had grown to love, but never really liked. Talk about a plot twist.
Instead of looking for someone to be my support system, I was able to be someone else’s. From attorney recommendations to therapists to strategies to just simply being there, I became the older “sister”. I became the “rock”. Ding, ding, ding! It was me all along! Instead of looking outside for the thing I thought I needed, I realized, I had always been there for me…I was my own best fucking friend. And because of that, I was able to be there for her.
Gabriela and I have weathered a few storms together over the last ten years. My kids and I will be attending her daughter’s sixteenth birthday next week, we grab lunch here and there and regularly text about what the latest gossip is on the ex front. Nothing has really changed in the family we both divorced ourselves from, but she and I were the lucky ones to find a true and lasting connection of sisterhood that has stood the test of time.
As for “Aunt Kate”, well, last I checked she ended up divorced from John, no surprise there, which is probably best for the both of them. Oh, and I ended up writing a song about the whole damn thing called, “Girl, Get On”. Enjoy!
Official Music Video: Girl, Get On
In laughter,
LStL
Amazing
Gut wrenching