eyes. I can’t deal with this right now. I just can’t. I’ve had to listen to these same I-just-want-to-help diatribes of advice ever since Karl and I broke up. It’s almost like she considers my failure as a wife a personal slight against her parenting. And I just can’t go there right now. Not without sleep and not with everything that’s happened.
“I need to go, Mom. I’ve got—”
“Why do you keep insisting on running away from this conversation, Mallory?” She lets out a huff of disapproval and frustration—oh, I know that sound way too well. “I’ve been trying to talk to you ever since Karl left you, but you just won’t listen.”
“I left him! He didn’t leave me, Mom. I left him after finding out he was cheating on me.” I will not scream. I will not scream. I will not scream. “Doesn’t that matter to you at all? Doesn’t it matter more than whether I have frizzy hair or—”
“Of course it matters to me. He needs to apologize for what he did. But, Mallory, baby, marriage takes hard work. It requires sacrifice. Besides, you need him.”
Those three words—the same three words Karl has thrown at me from the very start of our relationship—zap the air from my lungs. I nearly give up, nearly just let my mother prattle on, but then force myself to take a deep breath instead. Force myself to take back the air, and everything else Karl has stolen from me as I respond, “Yeah, well, maybe if I hadn’t given him everything he’d ever wanted, he might not have taken me for granted. Ever think about that, Mom?”
She just continues. “Maybe if you wore more makeup or went to Victoria’s Secret every once in a while…”
And I am done. Her suggesting I wear sexy lingerie to keep my husband from cheating on me is the last freaking straw. “Karl cheated on me because he is an asshole, Mom. He is an entitled douchebag who thinks the entire world owes him everything and that he can have everything—including a wife and a girlfriend at the same time.”
“Yes, but—”
“No buts!” I cut her off for maybe the first time in all of recorded history. “Karl is the asshole here, Mom. Not me. Him. And all the makeup and sexy lingerie in the world won’t change that fact. If you keep harping on me about it, I’m going to boycott makeup. And sexy lingerie—no, not just sexy lingerie but all lingerie. I will burn every freaking bra in my suitcase and throw away every lipstick I own. So for everyone’s sake, you should probably just stop.”
Whew. That felt good! Like first-day-of-summer-at-the-beach good or coming-home-and-ripping-off-my-bra good.
“Mallory!”
She sounds shocked, but I don’t care. I’m tired of everyone in my life telling me that everything is my fault. I know I’m not perfect. I know I make mistakes. A part of me even acknowledges that I wasn’t entirely blameless in the failure of my marriage. Still, everything that went wrong didn’t happen because my fucking underwear wasn’t sexy enough.
“I have to go, Mom. Someone’s at the door.” And then I hang up the phone before I can change my mind.
I am so annoyed that I end up eating my weight in Oreo cookies before going upstairs and taking a shower, where I do everything I can to scrub and exfoliate my frustrations away.
I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. Why is my mom so hung up on me going back to Karl?
I mean, I get that our family doesn’t believe in divorce, but come on. Does that mean our family believes in cheating? Talk about a bastardization of decency or normalcy.
Does she really want me to stay with him and be miserable, knowing that I can’t trust him? Knowing that he’s out there fucking other women? Knowing that he has at least one child—if not more—out in the world while I stay home, longing for my own baby? A baby I will never ask him for now and that he wouldn’t give me if I did?
It’s absurd. More, it’s hurtful. Really, really hurtful.
I know my mom and dad are all about appearances, but I always assumed there was some substance underneath it. Now I’m finding out that there really is no substance. There is just them caring so much about me not having the stigma of divorce attached to their name—like there is even a fucking stigma around it anymore—that they want me to be miserable for the next