I spent the night in my new home last night. Going to sleep there was fine. Waking up there, not so much. After six months of going through the business and heartbreak of getting divorced and setting my children and me up with a new place to live, it’s official:

My printed stationery is obsolete. I have a new credit card that I haven’t memorized, I double-check myself when giving my phone number and I don’t know where anything is in all the cartons and piles relegated to the corners of the rooms in wait for some furniture in which to place everything. I need more honey pots, so to speak, since as Pooh said, “they’re useful things to put things in.”

Oh, God, what have I done? I know how I got here, but I’ll be darned if I know what to do now that I’m here. I have my work, of course, but I don’t even know where to do that.

My office is still being painted and I have no desk or chair. So I’m sitting at the foot of my loaner bed with my laptop, well, in my lap — another useful thing to put things in, especially a tired and sad daughter’s head when she doesn’t know where home is. I used to tell my kids that home is wherever the family is, but even the family is scattered all over the place. I don’t feel like crying, myself — more like I’m suppressing a howl like the one you make as the rollercoaster crests a peak and there is a steep corkscrew directly ahead.

I’ve spent most of the past 24 years living in two homes, each of which we lived in for a decade. My soon-to-be ex is still living in the second house, with its patina of clutter, bulletin boards of precious clippings, and blankets that smell familiar like a blend of oatmeal and soap. My place smells like paint, plastic bags and cleansers. The televisions don’t work, I haven’t got music yet except on my iHome and the internet is iffy. I’ve christened my bathroom the Casper Suite since I have white sheets hanging over the windows. Okay, now I feel like crying.

This is what I have wanted for a long time, but I didn’t realize how bumpy this landing would be. We’re still rolling erratically down the runway and I’m still praying that the pilot puts on the brakes so we don’t go skidding into hysteria. Last night I grabbed a book after dinner and literally sat in five different places to find my “reading space.” So far, outside in the yard feels the most comforting, albeit breezy and dimly lit. At least it smells neutral and doesn’t remind me of all the work I have to do still to build my nest. Although seeing all that wild bamboo growing up the side of the house did upset my chi a bit since this is a Spanish house and tropical just doesn’t work. I’ll put that on my list.

The goal of getting lighter by passing on the stuff I’ve collected over the last ten years has had its own unforeseen crises. My best friend’s daughter just got her own apartment nearby and I gave her some things I’d had in storage and a few lamps and accessories. Now she is living in the sweetest, homiest little place with my stuff in it and I’m aching with envy. Perhaps it’s seeing my stuff in her life that gets me around the lungs or perhaps it’s how simple her move was. She’s 24, the age of my marriage, and unmarried and childless. Her biggest challenge was getting a bed and a bureau before she started her new job on Monday.

My jobs — and I have many — all take place in my home. I mother here, I write here, I design my website here, and I confer with my lawyers and other business associates here. I plan to have my friends come here, and many have in spite of my secret perfectionist desire to not wanting to show the place until it’s more presentable. What I don’t do here yet is settle down. Why I even expect to feel settled when I still don’t really know who I am going to be as a single woman is fearful and impatient of me, I know. But I just want to know that we’ll all be okay and happy. For that, I’ll just have to have faith.

A “missing” man who happens to be Governor of South Carolina gets caught with his pants down in Argentina while his wife’s only comment is something to the effect, “I’m busy here taking care of our four kids while the idiot is chasing his Evita.” Have you seen this guy, Mark Sanford? A wussy fellow who says inane things in a silly and pompous press conference like, “I’m going to lay it all out and…it’s gonna hurt.” Oh show me how you take the pain, Big Man! It’s all so tedious and sneaky and, well, unmanly.

Which is why I have joined millions of tween and teenaged girls as a devotee of the “Twilight” books. I’m not the first mid-life mom to discover the love story of a clumsy high school girl and a vampire; my girlfriend Cheryl was the first of my peers to recommend them. My 15 year-old daughter made fun of my secret interest in the series, but ended up giving me the first book on audio disc for my car. The plan was that we’d listen together while she practiced her driving under my supervision. But I started sneaking listening sessions when I was driving around town alone, and I was up to disc 6 before I had to confess to her that I was hooked. MORE ›

I am a fastidious woman. Not an obsessive woman. Not a helplessly narcissistic woman. Just fastidious. My every day routine includes flossing, leg and pit shaving, hair washing and conditioning, pumicing my feet, applying sunblock and clean clothes. You will never find me picking the jeans I wore yesterday off the floor and slipping them back on today. Nor will you see me with my roots grown an inch from my scalp. Not that there’s anything wrong with doing it differently, in fact the hair thing is rather stylish for blondes sometimes, but it’s just not me. Nails done every two weeks, hair colored every three weeks and haircut every four. So when I noticed last winter that a person (this person) does not only get gray hair on her curtains, but that sooner or later it’s bound to show up on her carpet (like nearly a decade later!), I did what any fastidious woman would do–I consulted my Girlfriends. MORE ›

A woman has two choices when she finds herself single again after twenty-some years (not counting suicide or homicide); she can redouble her efforts at work and with what kids are still around, thereby becoming a social hermit, or she can commit to a vigorous training program to become the most, um, fulfilled gal in town. I know, you’re already thinking about sex (who isn’t?), but becoming a harlot is not what I’m talking about.

It takes an extraordinary amount of energy and time, with no little courage thrown in, to be single and out in the world. Frankly, I’m stunned by how hard it is, but the alternative of a life of meeting my other divorced girlfriends every weekend over mojitos and guacamole isn’t exactly the reward I’m expecting after all this awful divorce business. MORE ›

Two days in a row I’ve been in a funk. Actually, yesterday felt like a long road of flat highway in Texas somewhere — empty and endless. Today feels like I’ll be lucky if I’m not crying by the time I finish this blog. Who knows, if I don’t snap out of it soon, I could slip into rage tomorrow and be in jail by dinner. These days aren’t worryingly frequent, but I do dread them and do anything I can to postpone them. Notice how I don’t say “prevent” them? That’s because I believe my almost-ex’s truism “bad feelings aren’t biodegradable.” They stick around hiding under the landfill like Styrofoam cups and disposable diapers. Sooner or later you are going to have to pick them all up and find a productive new use for them, but the chore seems so onerous.

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Me, pre- hair chop:

I had an epiphany recently and it said that a woman’s hair should not promise a fecundity that her ovaries can’t support. I went to my hairstylist with the order to “chop it all off” and let me tell you what a mass orgasm those words inspire in a salon! Immediately everyone in our vicinity was coming by with huge smiles and looks that could only be described as slightly feral. This is what they live for; someone coming in and letting them use every scissor, razor and thinning sheer at their disposal and then top it off with product (I love hairdresser lingo.)

Before my Girlfriends with long hair call me out as a hater, this was a very personal epiphany, although I do recommend considering it. Like most women, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with my hair; wanting it straighter in my teens, curlier in my thirties, thicker in my forties and less gray (or as TV commercials say, “fewer grays,” which suggests that they are still so rare as to be individually addressed.)

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One of the few bright promises sustaining me while trudging through a divorce is Sex With a Stranger. I haven’t had it yet, nor do I see any immediate prospects, but I’m keeping the faith that it is out there. It’s been 27 years since I’ve had it, and I seem to think about it, a lot. In preparation, I’ve even started kegeling again at all red lights and TV commercials. Four pregnancies and four babies; so much fitness to achieve in so little time.

Here’s the awkward part of my fantasy life: it suffers from arrested development.

I imagine making intense eye contact across a crowded room and then feeling the obsessive anticipation that he’ll come find me. There would be, of course, hours of kissing and swollen lips after. After the frenzy of our first touch, we would grab and tear at each other’s clothes and I would be conquered. (I mean that in a feminist way, of course.) We would linger over the discovery of each other’s body, naked before open windows that let the sunlight dapple us and the light breeze caress us. Clearly I’ve stolen the inner life of one of my teenaged daughters.

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“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” was a clever little slogan of the Women’s Movement during the Seventies. Little did I realize then how prescient it would prove to many of my peers as they hit middle age. In the past five years, I’ve been stunned by how many of my formerly married-with-children Girlfriends have bolted from their traditional family geometry and found true love with other women. It’s happening in the Parent’s Associations of my kids’ schools, in my knitting group, in my yoga class and it’s a big topic in women’s 12-Step groups throughout Los Angeles (and lesbianism was not the addiction they were trying to overcome.) Once I became aware of this quiet Pink Revolution, I couldn’t not see it everywhere I looked. But it was comedian Carol Leifer’s new book, When You Lie About Your Age The Terrorists Win, that convinced me this stunning phenomenon wasn’t exclusive to the experimental, artsy, truth-seeking addicts that make LA such a piquant town–newly minted mid-life lesbianism is a national trend.

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Evidently I filed for divorce on my husband’s birthday. Honest to God, I only found out when I read it on a gossip site under the headline, “Playboy Model Has Special Birthday Gift for Music Mogul Husband–Divorce.” I kind of like my description, in spite of it being inaccurate by about thirty years and rather incomplete, it has a lot of potential, and I’m sure he’s pleased with his, but I swear on Dr. Freud that the birthday thing was completely unintentional. In fact, the whole divorce thing was completely unintentional, even unimaginable to me for most of our twenty-four years of marriage.

As a child of divorce myself, I took such pains to ensure that none of our four children would ever experience the trauma my brother and I felt, so you can imagine my feelings of failure and shock. I have been divorced before, nearly thirty years ago (I was a child bride, of course) from a man I met in law school and left right before I found out I had passed the bar exam (so had he, and that did piss me off. I am capable of revenge, you see, but I stand by the accidental birthday filing story.) I had a job, he didn’t. He got the car, I got my student loans. Most importantly, there were no babies involved. It wasn’t until I had a baby that I realized that in my universe, marriage is an entanglement that isn’t worth the paperwork unless you plan to have kids. Even weddings, which are the loss-leader for most young marriages, are almost more trouble than a party is worth. Yes, I’m a little bitter today, but my Girlfriends tell me I’m entitled to be bitter, sad, absent-minded and unreliable for a full year after filing. It is like a death, I guess, but maybe also like euthanasia.

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Word has it that Silda Spitzer is lying low with their three daughters in their 5th Avenue apartment in Manhattan; like maybe on the closet floor with scissors in her hand and Eliot’s suits and ties cut into ribbons beside her. (By the way, why is the cutting of clothing so primitively satisfying to wronged women?) MORE ›