Things About Crying in the Sink

I used to joke that all of my exes*, rather than being from Texas, were from Wisconsin. Back then I took some pride in the fact that other than the mere fact that I had more than one "ex*" to claim, there wasn't much else about my life that resembled a country song. The fact that they were from (as I think it should be called) the Middle East of the U.S.A., just meant that there was less deep-south heartbreak to correlate with my breakups, plus, my dogs were still alive and my kids were all smart and attractive, and nobody in my family had been thrown in jail in a couple of generations.

Lately, my bragging rights to a relatively melodrama free life have been circling the drain. Both my big dogs died, leaving me bereft and without a hound dog to ride shotgun in my pickup. My employment situation wavers perilously on the brink of the down-and-out blues, and my love life went tits up, relegating me to a life that is the smack dab epitome of a cry-in-the-sink country song.

Most of these things, with the exception of two dead dogs, I can boil down to matters of choice. My career path has been, to say the least, a meandering one, for which I make no apologies and generally thrive in the flexibility and enjoyment that I usually get out of it, however much stability is lacking. That's a choice I've made and I own it.

 In love, I can only blame my choices for the broken hearts I have borne. Either I chose the wrong guy, or I chose the wrong behavior. And maybe sometimes, like my recent past, I chose both.

I'd like to say that my choosing has gotten better over the years. Albeit much too gradual for my impatient taste - but I know that I have been choosing better and better in the men department and I know that as far as behavior goes, well, I wouldn't hardly recognize the girl I was ten years ago if I bumped into her today. I am getting better, no matter what they say.

But still, no matter how real those increments of improvement might be, they haven't arrived me at blissful perfection yet, and while the number and geographic diversity of my "exes*" have grown a little, so has my ability to be the kind of person that someday, when I choose the perfect guy, will make me nigh unto perfect myself, and I'll be singing the B side of that heartbreak album about heaven and having everything I ever wanted. Someday.


*Authors note: I am strongly adverse to the terminology of "exes" - I tell my girls that once a relationship ends, you aren't their anything, and they aren't yours. I don't like the ownership idea that it conveys. I have former husbands and past boyfriends (don't really like that word either...)... but they aren't "MY exes."