The Ex (excerpt)

         On Saturday, I called my ex-husband to ask him to babysit. Badal, the man I was talking online for six months had changed his travel plans and was arriving in town midday; I had agreed to get him at the airport.  I asked my ex if he could babysit our daughter; my son had slept over at a friend’s house.  But, my ex gave me a hard time: he had met a new girlfriend and was taking her to a four-star restaurant that night (it seemed he had a new girlfriend every weekend, even on the ones he was supposed to watch the kids).

“Please do me this favor,” I pleaded with him (I was always pleading about something-- paying me the monthly child support, getting the children on his designated weekend….)

“Ok, but you’ll have them next weekend,” he said, and I agreed.

I ran around the house gathering my daughter’s things for her overnight stay at her dad’s, who was living with a roommate in an apartment in town.

When he arrived he immediately confronted me about my plans.

“Do you have a date?” He asked smiling, standing in my way with his big-eyed look of ostrich wonder meant to be interpreted as a coy lover’s look.

“No.  I forgot about a play I’m seeing with some friends,” I lied.

“Would you tell me if you were seeing someone?” He asked while I walked away, still preoccupied with getting all my daughter’s things together

“I don’t know how it’s your business,” I yelled from my daughter’s bedroom while folding her pants and putting them in her bag.

“You know I still love you. I made a mistake. I would come back if you let me. You and the kids are my family.”

“Oh my god, enough already. I don’t want to hear it today,” I said handing him my daughter’s tote bag while pushing him out of the house. Seven years into our divorce and he was just as prying and annoying as ever.  The truth was that he enjoyed the single life, the dates, the women, the sex, all stories he shared with me on the telephone late at night.

 He played a sick game with me of tit for tat; I played a sicker game of accepting the unfair rules of his game. He didn’t respect my boundaries; I didn’t know how to establish them, thinking I couldn’t draw the lines between us because I had to feed his ego, making him believe that there was a still a chance between… as long as he paid me the monthly child support and helped me out with the bills every once in a while.

Sometimes, I imagined hiring an attorney, taking him to a court, and having a judge garnish his wages and grant me a restraining order, so that I would never have to plead for child support again and there would be endless miles of physical and emotional distance between us.  But I didn’t have the money, time, or energy to pursue legal recourse.  I could now, though, understand how divorces took years to work their way through the legal system while both partners pummeled each other with the mud of resented, buried, and unspoken understandings of their former relationship now painfully brought to light.

“I think your mom has a boyfriend,” he said to my sleepy twelve-year-old daughter who didn’t respond.

“Mommy has a boyfriend, mommy has a boyfriend,” he chanted while walking to his car.

I gave my daughter a kiss and told her not to listen to her dad

. There was an image in my head that gave me constant comfort when I dealt with my ex-husband: I was a super-hero the size of a mythical Thor, and in my beautiful, strong hands with the manicured, polished nails I held a 2 x 4 that I gracefully wielded and smashed across his head repeatedly. I imagined that over and over again that day, even while I was picking up the house and getting ready for my date.