As I listen to my husband read Hop on Pop to our 22 month old daughter,
I still find it hard to believe I met this man on Craigslist.
I came to Los Angeles to escape my falling apart first marriage. When I discovered my newly estranged husband had moved on rather quickly with a much younger dancer, I fell the rest of the way apart on my own.
It was 1997, the winter of El Nino. The heavy rains helped me grieve. It felt like Los Angeles was crying along with me. It was also the year that Beck's "Loser" was constantly on the radio. It was the winter of belting out "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?" while sobbing on Laurel Canyon Boulevard as trash cans floated downhill past my car, going faster than me… thanks to the traffic.
I came to Los Angeles to escape my falling apart first marriage. When I discovered my newly estranged husband had moved on rather quickly with a much younger dancer, I fell the rest of the way apart on my own.
It was 1997, the winter of El Nino. The heavy rains helped me grieve. It felt like Los Angeles was crying along with me. It was also the year that Beck's "Loser" was constantly on the radio. It was the winter of belting out "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?" while sobbing on Laurel Canyon Boulevard as trash cans floated downhill past my car, going faster than me… thanks to the traffic.
Since I was prone to bursting into tears at the slightest provocation,
the only job I could get was living with a rock band and taking care of their dogs
while they went on tour. I was a doggy au pair- and as much as I helped those
dogs, they helped me more. They were diabolical pooches, jumping out the
window of my moving car onto Mulholland Boulevard, but they kept me going, one
muddy walk after another.
Other men eventually came along, all oddly named the same name as my ex-husband. After ten years of Todds, I found myself forty and alone. I was scraping by with freelance writing jobs and struggled to come to terms with being a woman who might remain alone forever. I discovered Los Angeles isn't a kind city to women of a certain age.
It was almost as if the moment I turned forty I wasn't approached in coffee shops or even set up on blind dates, except by my meddling mother back in Brooklyn- who desperately signed me up for six months of eHarmony, which turned out to be an online version of male/female age politics. The only men online who were interested in meeting a forty year old woman were grandfathers in their 60s. Or older. I even experimented with the age game just to see what would happen. I started another eHarmony profile and stated my age as 38, which apparently was the magic number for flushing out allegedly available men 46 years old and above. Through eHarmony I did meet someone wildly interesting, and despite my being willing to work around his STD, he couldn't forgive me for shaving two years off my age... so I gave up.
I spent the next five years writing and working hard, watching my friends get married and have children or worse, second and third children. My mother stopped asking if I had met anybody because she already knew the answer. At 44 I attempted a career change. I decided to embrace reality TV and started working as the Gal Friday of a physically adorable but emotionally Draconian reality show producer. Apparently I wasn't very good as hiding my disdain for the brains behind "Dancing With Dolphins" and I was fired after two hellish months of pretending to care.
A dear and wildly successful friend took a group of us to Hawaii for my 45th birthday- it was the most romantic holiday that two single women and two gay men have ever experienced. One night in the hot tub I saved a baby gecko's life as he churned in the jet bubbles and the four of us screamed like kindergartners. Somehow I scooped the little lizard out of the human stew and he took off for the hills. The next day a Hawaiian lady told me that saving a gecko's life was going to bring me great luck, which I immediately chalked up to the things tired natives tell naive tourists over souvenirs.
Two weeks later I found myself manning a yard sale to pay off my Hawaiian vacation. I was cleaning out the garage of a profoundly successful female architect who decided she finally was ready to park her car in her garage, which was jam-packed with the debris of her first and second marriages. I posted her drafting table from Harvard Architecture School and a bunch of other stuff on Craigslist and waited in the early September heat of a South Pasadena morning for the potential bargain hunters to show up.
He was late. At least an hour. But finally his old Mercedes Benz station wagon pulled into the driveway and he climbed out of the car and smiled at me. A very calm voice in my head told me, "Oh, that's your husband."
And he was. The oddest part of meeting him was that he seemed familiar to me. Once we started talking we realized we had worked together ten years before, on a TV show in Vancouver. On that set, we must have walked past each other twenty times a day for two weeks straight, but since he was planning his first marriage and I was going through the turmoil of my divorce, we never actually met.
Three years after we met in South Pasadena we eloped to Marya's Wedding chapel on Normandie above Melrose- it was 10/10/10 and we were shocked to discover that we were the only ones willing to pay extra to get married on a Sunday.
A year and a half later we adopted our daughter. I am now 51, happily married and ecstatic to be a parent. The three of us live in a Craftsman Bungalow in Echo Park and almost every day I thank the three Todds and Dancing With Dolphins- if it weren't for all of those relationships not working out, I might not have found the one relationship that did… in Los Angeles, after all.
Other men eventually came along, all oddly named the same name as my ex-husband. After ten years of Todds, I found myself forty and alone. I was scraping by with freelance writing jobs and struggled to come to terms with being a woman who might remain alone forever. I discovered Los Angeles isn't a kind city to women of a certain age.
It was almost as if the moment I turned forty I wasn't approached in coffee shops or even set up on blind dates, except by my meddling mother back in Brooklyn- who desperately signed me up for six months of eHarmony, which turned out to be an online version of male/female age politics. The only men online who were interested in meeting a forty year old woman were grandfathers in their 60s. Or older. I even experimented with the age game just to see what would happen. I started another eHarmony profile and stated my age as 38, which apparently was the magic number for flushing out allegedly available men 46 years old and above. Through eHarmony I did meet someone wildly interesting, and despite my being willing to work around his STD, he couldn't forgive me for shaving two years off my age... so I gave up.
I spent the next five years writing and working hard, watching my friends get married and have children or worse, second and third children. My mother stopped asking if I had met anybody because she already knew the answer. At 44 I attempted a career change. I decided to embrace reality TV and started working as the Gal Friday of a physically adorable but emotionally Draconian reality show producer. Apparently I wasn't very good as hiding my disdain for the brains behind "Dancing With Dolphins" and I was fired after two hellish months of pretending to care.
A dear and wildly successful friend took a group of us to Hawaii for my 45th birthday- it was the most romantic holiday that two single women and two gay men have ever experienced. One night in the hot tub I saved a baby gecko's life as he churned in the jet bubbles and the four of us screamed like kindergartners. Somehow I scooped the little lizard out of the human stew and he took off for the hills. The next day a Hawaiian lady told me that saving a gecko's life was going to bring me great luck, which I immediately chalked up to the things tired natives tell naive tourists over souvenirs.
Two weeks later I found myself manning a yard sale to pay off my Hawaiian vacation. I was cleaning out the garage of a profoundly successful female architect who decided she finally was ready to park her car in her garage, which was jam-packed with the debris of her first and second marriages. I posted her drafting table from Harvard Architecture School and a bunch of other stuff on Craigslist and waited in the early September heat of a South Pasadena morning for the potential bargain hunters to show up.
He was late. At least an hour. But finally his old Mercedes Benz station wagon pulled into the driveway and he climbed out of the car and smiled at me. A very calm voice in my head told me, "Oh, that's your husband."
And he was. The oddest part of meeting him was that he seemed familiar to me. Once we started talking we realized we had worked together ten years before, on a TV show in Vancouver. On that set, we must have walked past each other twenty times a day for two weeks straight, but since he was planning his first marriage and I was going through the turmoil of my divorce, we never actually met.
Three years after we met in South Pasadena we eloped to Marya's Wedding chapel on Normandie above Melrose- it was 10/10/10 and we were shocked to discover that we were the only ones willing to pay extra to get married on a Sunday.
A year and a half later we adopted our daughter. I am now 51, happily married and ecstatic to be a parent. The three of us live in a Craftsman Bungalow in Echo Park and almost every day I thank the three Todds and Dancing With Dolphins- if it weren't for all of those relationships not working out, I might not have found the one relationship that did… in Los Angeles, after all.
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