:: Dictated But Not Read ::

Musings from the ''Miracle Girl''

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Things That Have Been Said About Me
You are the Minx.
She plays taller than her height.
You have a refreshing attitude.
You're such a renaissance woman.

She's not much of a biller.
You are very angry.
You are so self aware.
You need a more sophisticated haircut.
You are not afraid of anything.
You have a great attitude.
Your life is like a Seinfeld episode.
You are winsome.
You look great in hats.
Miracle girl.
I am belligerently conciliatory.
You've got it big time.

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

SPERM

I do not get many unsolicited responses to my online dating advertisements. I am on two such services and do not often get responses. I admit it, when I do I consider it an event of sorts. Actually, I do get a fair number of responses I just do not get the responses I am looking for that often. I keep my advertisement intentionally vague because I do not want people who know me to recognize me.

A couple of days ago I got a lovely note from a physician in a town about 8 hours from me. I thought that was interesting. He said he was having trouble meeting Jewish women where he lived and had expanded his search. I noted, from his profile, that he has 3 children and in the blank after custody it said “they are far away”. In fairness, I think that this is one of those silly forms where they give you choices and you probably get to pick from: (1) They live with me; (2) I see them every day; and (3) they are far away. Still, I was struck and wondered if he was trying to communicate, “Don’t worry you won’t have to deal with them.” Upon further e-mail communication I learned that his 3 children are 5 year old triplets, all girls. Further I learned, though I did not ask, that they spent a whole week with him over the summer. I got the sense that I was supposed to be impressed. The kids live in a northeastern city and he lives in the south. He seemed quite proud in his e-mails that after finishing his training in California that he had found a job on the east coast. “It's much easier to see them now.” I suppose the plane flight is shorter but it is still a plane flight and they are 5 years old.

I am cautious about my cynicism and ability to be judgmental about people’s relationship with their children post-divorce. I am exposed on a daily basis to how complicated these things become. I also do not have any children so what do I know really? Still I was kind of skeptical of a person who seemed very professionally successful (I googled him and he is) and yet could not locate a job in the same town as his children. I tamped down my cynical side for long enough to return his telephone call last night.

The conversation started out pleasantly enough. He had interrupted me watching The Gilmore Girls and so we talked about that a bit. He said he had turned it on after he called me and then turned it off after about 20 seconds. OK, that said, we moved on. He very quickly turned the conversation to divorce, dating, and children. I am a big proponent of being up front but this was a bit much during a first telephone conversation.

He talked a lot. I think I have two favorite highlights from the monologue. I gathered from his e-mails that he has been on the east coast for about 5 months and that he has been separated from his ex-wife for a total of three years. That would make his children two when they separated. He gave me a long speech about how it is with 3 infants and how dependent they are on you for everything. He thought it was amazing last weekend when he was visiting with his children how independent they are. He told them to go get dressed and they came fully dressed. Gee, who taught them that?

My favorite comment though came when he actually asked me a question about myself. He wanted to know what my law practice included other than divorce. I told him that I get involved in adoptions, legitimation, and paternity and other related cases. He immediately wanted to know how I got involved in paternity cases. I told him that my firm has a tendency to represent sports figures and we sometimes have to help them out with those issues. He proceeded to tell me that he has been worried since his divorce about something like that happening to him. He already has three children that he does not get to see very often. He thinks there are women out there just looking for a guy with a good salary to have a baby with. When he was in college he just worried about STDs and the like but now he has to think about pregnancy. “Know what I mean?” he asked. I think I am an empathetic person but I did not know what he meant. For one thing, if I am a woman looking for a guy with a good salary to have a baby with I bet I am not going to pick a pathologist with three other children to support. For another thing, I do find it hard to believe, and offensive that he believes, that there are large numbers of women trolling around trying to have a baby with a random guy with big bucks.

He wants to meet me but I guess he will be jealously guarding his sperm and his money if we do.

D.B.N.R.

Sunday, November 24, 2002

Sucker

One hot August night I was hanging out with some friends at a bar. We were there with work people who were not necessarily friends from work. I was avoiding the work crowd and was talking to a guy I had met at the bar a few weeks earlier. I did not find him particularly interesting or attractive but he was there and he was not from work. Naturally, my eyes were wandering. At some point I looked up and saw a particularly good looking guy sitting at the bar. I thought he might have been looking at me but I thought it was highly unlikely. He seemed to be too good looking to be interested in me. My eyes were drawn back to his several times. Finally, the guy I had been talking to realized my attention was elsewhere and asked who I was looking at. I told him I was looking at the guy in the white shirt at the bar. He basically yelled, “Oh, you are looking at Brian?” I shrunk back and thought I was going to die of embarrassment. Brian, upon hearing his name, turned around on his bar stool, extended his arm past several other people toward me and said, “Hi, I am Brian.” Our eyes met in one of those movie moments and we were inseparable for the remainder of the evening. We talked and danced until the bar closed. At some point during the evening his cell phone rang. He explained that it was his friend who was taking care of his daughter that evening. We talked a bit about his daughter and then I asked, innocently, “So, how long have you been divorced?” He paused and answered, “Four or five years.” It seemed an odd answer to me. Didn’t he know how long? But, it was late and we had been drinking so I did not dwell on it.

We started dating rather intensely and the relationship was fun and good. We were both rather busy people but managed to steal moments and hours together and to have a lot of fun.

As a result of being a divorce lawyer I notice different things than other people. One night Brian came over after dropping his daughter off at her mother’s house. He told me about a conversation he had had with the woman he called his ex. It was contentious in a manner and tone that shocked me. I was stunned that this was a conversation between people who had been divorced for several years. I asked sarcastically, “And you have been divorced for how long?” I did not mean it as an accusation, I was genuinely shocked. He hesitated and said, “Well, actually…” It turns out that while he refers to her as his ex and considers himself divorced he is not technically divorced. He had not gotten around to it. I posited that there must be some reason for his inaction, like a lack of a desire to move on or something. He denied it and supposedly contacted a divorce lawyer soon thereafter. Although I learned that Brian was a liar that was not the end of our relationship.

About two weeks later we had a huge argument over nothing. Still, that was not the end of the relationship. A few days after the big fight I was trying to call him and he was not answering my calls. I knew he was not answering my calls rather than not getting them because he is one of those people who keeps his cell phone attached to his body at all times. I went into my stalker mode and started calling him every 20 minutes. Finally, after about 2 hours a woman answered the phone. I sputtered that I must have the wrong number. She asked in a rather boisterous tone whether I was looking for Brian. I said I was and she told me he wasn’t around right then. This was his cell phone! Still, that was not the end of the relationship. He told me he was in a bar and his phone was ringing and ringing because he was not answering anyone’s calls. He was taking time to think. The woman who just happened to be sitting next to him at the bar finally got irritated with the ringing and grabbed his phone and answered it. I believed him.

About a week after that, Brian and I were on the phone and we were having a hard time finding a time when we could get together. We were both too busy. I got frustrated, probably in an unpleasant way, and he told me that I was “too needy.” That was the end.

The only conclusion I can possibly draw from this and other relationships I have had is that you can lie like hell to me and I will stick around but if you expose my weaknesses I will run.

D.B.N.R.

Friday, November 22, 2002

Teach Your Children Well

I had the privilege of attending private Jewish schools from the time I was in the third grade all the way through high school. When I was in elementary and middle school the schools were not quite as religious as my high school. Still, even in elementary school I had trouble with the sexist nature of the rules. Each month, in celebration of the new month on the lunar calendar we had a special service. Seven boys each month were called to the Torah (the scroll of the bible) to say a special prayer and be honored. They were called up by their Hebrew names. One day in bible class in the fifth grade our teacher asked each of us to put our English and Hebrew names on index cards. I knew the cards were used to call the boys to be honored at the Torah service. I refused to fill out the card because I was not going to be called. I decided at the same time that I would not attend any more services where I was treated as a second class citizen. For the remainder of the year, I sat in the library during the services and did worksheets on various prayers. The following year the synagogue that sponsored my school got a new more liberal Rabbi who allowed women to participate fully in the services. I was the first to read from the Torah scroll on my Bat Mitzvah day.

It only got worse in high school. The only Jewish high school in my town at the time was very strictly Orthodox. Although my family was not of that tradition, it was considered a good school, so I went. Girls and boys were separated for classes. Girls had to wear skirts that covered their knees and shirt sleeves that covered their elbows. A girl and a boy could not be a in a room alone with a closed door. A girl and a boy could not touch each other at all. When we played basketball, the girls had to wear sweat pants.

Girls and boys learned different Jewish subjects. Girls learned the laws of the home while boys studied the very complex Talmud. The Talmud is the commentary on the commentary of the bible. It is recorded in oversized books with pages packed with Hebrew written in ancient script and Aramiac. I was frustrated as hell that I was not allowed to study the Talmud. It had nothing to do with my thirst for knowledge. I was inundated with 4 to 5 hours of Jewish learning a day as it was. I just felt it was fundamentally unjust to deny girls this learning. I approached the most liberal Rabbi in the school about this problem. Rabbi G. was about 6’5” tall, smoked like a chimney, and had a fabulous gravelly voice. He claimed to have done some voice-overs for commercial radio. He was also kind and thoughtful. A perfect target for me. We debate the topic in ten minute increments each afternoon between 7th and 8th period each day while he blew smoke out the window. After a couple of months he conceded the point. He admitted that there was no reason why girls could not study Talmud. To reward my victory, which was hard won and required a fair amount of research on my part, he offered to teach me Talmud after school. This was a bittersweet victory. As it was, my school days went from 7:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. The addition of another hour seemed tortuous to a fifteen year old. So, I never pursued it and neither did Rabbi G. We were at an impasse and I learned the joy and pain of a partial victory. I had earned the right to study but not during the regular school day. Still, I got a taste of what it feels like to win an argument and it has served me well as an attorney.

D.B.N.R.

Thursday, November 21, 2002

Power

I am a lawyer. I am not ashamed of my profession. In fact most days I am quite proud of the work that I do. Still, there are days, not infrequently, when I am deeply disappointed in the law and in particular in lawyers.

I am cognizant of the fact that judges were once lawyers and that means, like lawyers some are good and some are not so good. I measure lawyers who deal with other humans as opposed to piles of papers, not in terms of intelligence, but in terms of compassion.

I was in court yesterday and I witnessed a complete failure of compassion. We were in family violence court. The Judge basically told us how he was going to rule and insisted that we, the lawyers, go work it out. We worked out an agreement and came back to give it to the Judge. He read it, asked some questions and ultimately signed it. He thanked us for working it out. Then, just as we were leaving, he decided to add some commentary from the bench. He talked about the fact that these parties need to understand that both of them are the parents of the child and that both have the best interest of the child in mind. The Judge noted though, that some children manipulate their parents. “But”, he said, “this child is probably too young for that, although she is a girl child and they start young. It’s genetic.” I was speechless, I looked at the other attorney, a young woman, and she was bright red and agape. We both stumbled out of the courtroom and asked each other two or three times if that had just happened. My client’s mother who was there for moral support asked, “What do we do now? Get him?” I shook my head sadly and said, “Nothing.” Such is the nature of power. It is good to be the Judge.

D.B.N.R.

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

The Circle Game

About six months after my divorce was final a friend of mine told me that I should check out the personals at a particular website. I was skeptical at best. I wondered how desperate you would have to be to go on a personals website. It turns out, however desperate that was, I was it. A few Friday nights later found me sitting at my computer trying to be clever. You have to fill out a profile before you can poke around and look at other people’s profiles. I kept my profile hidden. I just wanted to check and see who else was on there. I typed in some vague statistics to find men in the Atlanta area between 25 and 35 who had posted ads with photos attached to them. In excess of 100 ads popped up. I decided, logically, I thought, to click on the top ad which was the most recently updated one. I clicked on that one even though I thought the nickname on the ad was perfectly ridiculous. It was “Thelonious Hunk”. I clicked on the ad and almost choked on the popcorn I was munching when my ex-husband’s photo popped up. I had one of those moments that usually only happens in the movies. I actually looked around my loft to see if anyone else was seeing what I was seeing. His ad was not the second, fifth or tenth ad to come up, it was the first. His ad was pomposity defined and I wondered how I had ever been married to this man. I laughed about it with friends. Some of them thought his description of an ideal mate sounded remarkably similar to me. I felt both like I was invading his privacy and like he was invading my intended space. It was clear to me in that moment that the past was not going away and so my only hope lay in the future. I clicked “show my ad” and started my adventure.

D.B.N.R.

Sunday, November 17, 2002

Building Birkenau

I recently saw the movie The Grey Zone. I did not know before I went that it was about Auschwitz-Birkenau. I knew it was a movie about the holocaust. Even if I had known, I am not sure that the story would have come to me right away. I know the story well and as soon as the movie began I remembered. I wrote a report on Birkenau in the 6th grade.

The crematoria at Birkenau were operated by special units of prisoners. The special units were killed and replaced at least every four months. One such unit decided that instead of just participating in the killing and being killed themselves, they would try to destroy the killing apparatus. They managed to obtain explosives and destroy two of the crematoria.

So I wrote a report on these events because we did these things in Jewish day school when I was growing up. I even built a model of the crematoria. It’s odd in retrospect. I guess kids write reports about wars and war strategies and if I recall correctly that is what my report was. I think I was able to talk about how the prisoners planted explosives and how the revolt started in one crematorium and spread to another. I could show how it was done on my poster board model. There was no discussion in my report, at least that I recall, about what the crematoria were actually used for.

By the sixth grade I was used to pictures of piles of shoes, clothing, and even bones. I knew the songs that had come out of the concentration camps by heart. I knew the number 6 million. I knew the name of the gas that was used. I knew the imperative that we can never forget lest something similar happen again. I knew a lot about mass death and destruction as a twelve year old. In some ways I took it for granted. I suspect I thought that the Birkenau story was some sort of triumph of the will. The other facts that surrounded it were already known. I did not need to report on them.

I didn’t know that other people did not really know these things in the same way that I knew them. It did not occur to me that no one else had a visceral reaction to German being spoken from watching too many Nazi documentaries. The documentaries showed Jews being shouted at in a language many of them did not understand. Screamed at in German and then killed, 6 million of them. I did not, as a child, have the Woody Allen paranoia about the rest of the world being Jew haters. What happened to the Jews of Europe happened in Europe. There was a big word called “Anti-Semitism” in the United States but I did not see what it had to do with me. I doubt I understood what a Semite was and probably did not define myself as such. I thought we were all in this together to remember what happened in Europe. I did not think it was odd that I was building Birkenau. It was not any different to me than the heart that pumped blood that my father built for my science fair project.

As I grew older I learned the world is a complicated place and we are not necessarily all in this together, at least not in the same way. I had a pretty clear understanding of this by the time I got to college, or so I thought. I sat next to John in Chemistry 121. He was more of a natural at Chemistry than I was. I was struggling and he was both funny and helpful with the Chemistry. We had an undefined kind of college flirtation. One day in class I looked down at his notebook and realized he had drawn Swastikas all over it. I was shocked. Surely he knew how that would make me feel. He must have known that it made tears well up in my eyes and make my stomach do flips. But he did not know that. Amazingly, it was a symbol used by a band that he listened to and it had not really occurred to him how it might make some people feel.

A friend of mine said he would never go see a movie like The Grey Zone. I think he said it was because the subject matter was too difficult. I am compelled to go to the movie by my childhood, by John from Chemistry, and yes, by the kind of paranoia that Woody Allen manages to laugh about. I want to force my friend to go to the movie. I want him to understand the next time he calls me a neurotic Jewish woman or the next time he makes fun of me for wanting to find a Jewish man to marry. I want him to understand the pain of remembering that which you have not experienced.

D.B.N.R.

Thursday, November 14, 2002

Chapters

I first met M. at my favorite bar of that moment. A Latin place that has the same band playing the same songs every Friday night. I can’t dance at all but after a few mojitas I never cared and danced like a mad woman. I had a group of friends who were similarly inclined and we became regulars. We would arrive around 8 stand around and drink until about 10 when we would finally get a table and eat and then dance until the band quit at 1.

On this particular night one of the regulars invited a friend of hers and that friend brought about 10 others with her. We were quite a crowd. M. came in with the group. I immediately thought he was very good looking. He had dirty blond hair, deep brown eyes and a kind of strange looking crooked nose. We spoke a bit but he was frankly too drunk to carry on a coherent conversation. We also danced a bit. After a while he disappeared and I was busy with my friends. Never one to miss an opportunity, I tracked him down through my friend’s friend and got him my telephone number. He called and we set up a date. We were to meet at a bar. I am ashamed to admit that before we set the date I had been forewarned that M. was an alcoholic with an (ex?)-wife and 6 year old child in Bolivia who he did not particularly support. Rumor had it that he was in town to work on his dissertation but he really was not doing it, rather he was partying quite a bit and driving a taxi cab to pay bills. But he was attractive and seemed fun and it was only one night.

The night before my scheduled meeting with M. I was telling my friend T. about the date and she started laughing. As it turns out T.’s friend met M. at a different bar the night after I met him and her friend had brought him to T. and P.’s house where the four of them stayed up late drinking and talking. M. was so drunk at the end of the night that he ended up sleeping on their couch. T. could not believe I was going to go on a date with this guy.

The date was, not surprisingly, a bar hopping extravaganza. It was a Wednesday night and I think we hit at least 5 bars. We actually had a nice conversation and laughed quite a bit and there was a lot of chemistry. Still, as dead beat dads are not my favorites, I had no intention of seeing him again and I was pretty clear he had no intention of seeing me again.

So, that should have been that but it was not. A couple of months later, I sent an e-mail to my ex-husband, J., inquiring about why he had not pursued the religious divorce that he was in charge of pursuing. (He, being the man, was charged with that not by me but by the generations that came before us.) J.’s reply was that he had been delaying because the closure was hard for him. He provided an example, the evening before he was writing the e-mail he had been having coffee with a friend of his. His friend was talking about her new boyfriend. It turned out that her new boyfriend had once gone on a date with me. This was so upsetting to J. that he left rather abruptly and went home. Having been on a plethora of first dates that were not followed by second dates I wondered who it could be. Curiosity got the better of me and I wrote and asked. He couldn’t remember his name but knew his approximate age and that he had a child in another country. Over the next couple of months, M.’s name came up in a variety of weird contexts. He became a symbol of the fact that although I live in a big city it has a tendency to feel like Mayberry sometimes. Finally, I heard he moved to Seattle. I had the strange sensation of a chapter of my life closing even though he was barely part of my life at all.

D.B.N.R.

Friday, November 08, 2002

Secretary

The dynamic of a relationship rarely changes. Its circumstances may change but the relationship has a life of its own and its nature does not alter. In my relationship with my ex-husband I was the care taker, the provider, the responsible party. I was the one who pushed and poked him to get up in the morning. I was the one who remembered to pay bills, buy toilet paper, give the dog his pills, and generally take care of the stuff of life for both of us. So, it is not surprising that some things do not seem to get done in his life now that he does not have me around. Although I have lived in two different places since the divorce I have kept the same phone number we had when we were married. The phone number has not been J.’s phone number for over two years and yet I still get telephone calls for him. I do not ignore all of the telephone calls. For example, when his best friend from high school called to say he was in town and would like to see “us” I immediately called J. When his grandmother called and seemed confused, I again picked up the phone and relayed the message. However, when his dentist’s office calls to remind him of his appointment I ignore it. (The dentist is his cousin.)

So this week when I was extremely busy and I got three messages from the film lab that develops his photographs for his business I did not feel any urgency about calling him. I planned to e-mail him when I was back in my office today. Before I could do so, I received the following e-mail:

Hi,

I was told today by one of my film labs that they recently left several messages on your phone number trying to reach me. I have made a good effort to update my current phone number with every database but obviously some will slip through the cracks.

I have always forwarded mail to you received at the house and will continue to do so. I would be grateful if you would please e-mail me with phone messages for me that reach you by mistake.

Thanks.
J.

I wrote a very brief reply explaining that I had been quite busy and that I would forward him his messages in the future. I did say "mea culpa" just for the hell of it. I realized how little his antics impacted me and felt proud.

I have an extraordinary feeling of freedom tonight. I am reminded that I am not anyone’s secretary, mother, or assistant. I am my own mistress and it feels great.

D.B.N.R.

Sunday, November 03, 2002

Hope You’re Happy

Divorce is an ugly business. I have experienced it from a personal and a professional basis. As a result of the latter I just ought to know better. There are some things you don’t do in a divorce. For example, you don’t fight over the hand made lamp. Why? That guy’s studio is 5 miles away and you can get another one. You don’t date or sleep with other people until the ink is dry on the divorce even if you are separated. Why? Because it is confusing for, and inconsiderate to everyone involved. Finally, you don’t take stuff that doesn’t belong to you. Why? You know why. It just isn’t right.

I was so excited to be moving out of my marital home that I spent weeks anal retentively packing every last item that I was taking. The best way to do the divorce thing is to move out of the house and leave behind all the stuff you don’t want. I recommend it. I had sorted through the debris of 6 years of life together with J. I had packed the items I had agreed were mine to take. The very last thing I needed to do was sort through the stuff in the master bathroom. I was packing and talking to my sister on the telephone. I was trying to make light of the situation. I started with the cabinet over the toilet. One of the first items I came upon was a box of condoms or so I thought. I picked up the box and realized it was empty. Strange, I thought. I know I had not used those condoms and if I had certainly would not have kept the empty box. I didn’t say anything to my sister, threw out the box, and kept packing the bathroom. The next morning though, my mind started churning. J. had been living in an apartment for several months but I had allowed him to keep a key to the house and unfortunately he came and went as he pleased. Sometimes I would come home and find random things missing. Things I knew had been there the day before. This is the kind of thing that tends to make you think that you are going crazy. So, I began to wonder could he have come in and not only taken the condoms but also left behind the box.

The day that I moved, my father came to assist me in the execution of the move. Since I was so perfectly organized and the movers were 3 hours late, my father had lots of time to pick up stuff around the house he thought that I should have. I am embarrassed to say I did not work very hard to stop him. I was physically and emotionally exhausted and so I watched him take down the pot rack, pack the random spices, and unplug the Bose speakers. He argued that I had been grossly mistreated and had supported J. in the style to which he had been accustomed long after J. stopped earning a salary. All true.

Since we had plenty of time, I shared the condom story with my father. He pointed out that we had to go to J’s apartment to pick up some items that J. had had during the separation but that I was keeping in the divorce. J. was too busy to meet us so he had given me the key. I suppose he preferred for me to enter into his new world without being there. He had recently changed careers to become a photographer. He managed to leave out, for me to find, a photograph of a naked woman on the sofa that I was keeping. I also found the box of dishes that I was keeping marked clearly in a feminine handwriting, definitely not J’s. When I unpacked the dishes some of them were dirty. With my father’s sinister encouragement, I picked my way through the muck of J.’s apartment (it was disgustingly dirty) to the bathroom where I opened the top drawer and found about 4 Trojan condoms, not in a box. I shoved them in my pocket and left. I’m not proud of myself and I can’t swear that those were the condoms from the house; however, it felt damn good at that moment.

D.B.N.R.