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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Unpleasantly plump
American kids are too fat and their parents are too wimpy. No one wants heavy kids to feel a burden, but is pudgy healthy?
By Anneli Rufus
[11/03/99]

Meet the Screamers
My kids are so loud they go to group speech therapy.
By Jennifer Moses
[11/02/99]

My grandparents were pioneers in the battle for visitation rights
To me, they were dependable, a security blanket I would never lose.
By Damien Cave
[11/01/99]

Eager saints and sweet-toothed sinners
The blessed Halloween of my youth
By Kate Convissor
[10/29/99]

Halloween hand-wringing
Are the stories about trick-or-treat mayhem for real?
By Jill Wolfson
[10/29/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

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These days when I imagine Gina, she's walking down the street wearing a turban and a loose-fitting dress. Nobody suspects that the pretty woman is bald and lacking part of a breast. Somewhere in her body, a few stray cancer cells may be floating around, impossible to detect. Nobody knows if these cells escaped from the tumor before the surgeon began to slice and dissect.

Here on the beach, the grains of sand, like the cells in a human body, seem infinite. I think how hard it would be to search out and destroy just a few "bad" grains in this vast expanse.

When I first started dating Ted, he told me about Gina, but not much. That was fine. Obviously he wasn't interested in seeing her exclusively, so I figured anything could happen between us. Maybe even true love.

"I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!" An invitation to enter the Mothers Who Think "Is This Marriage Doomed?" competition!

That was three years ago. Since then I've learned that Gina has been married twice and is childless. She owns a chic women's jewelry shop, had a nose job when she was younger and made the striped curtains hanging in Ted's kitchen.

Chances are, Gina has gleaned some information about me, too. She probably knows I have never been married but have one son, and that I gave Ted the Klimt print that hangs in his bedroom. I wonder if she knows that I write for a living and dye my graying hair. I wonder if she wonders about me as much as I do about her. I wonder if she, too, has resigned herself to the fact that Ted has no desire to be monogamous

As I shiver in the chill wind, my 11-year-old son does cartwheels in the tide. He wears a bathing suit; I'm in a jacket and wide-brimmed hat to protect myself from the sun. Wrinkles are even more frightening when you don't know who has more of them, you or the other woman.

The apples and juice we brought with us now seem unappealingly wholesome. What I crave is a glass of brandy in front of a roaring fire with a lover who wants only me. But then I always yearn for what I don't have -- milky skin, a garbage disposal, Katharine Hepburn's neck, rapier wit, a committed man.

Our dog cavorts alongside my son, who is running now, down the beach with a kite rising slowly behind him. It floats high above us, red and white and gold against the late afternoon sky. When my son comes back, he sits down beside me and begins to concentrate on attaching the kite handle to two sticks that he has placed upright in the sand.

"Look at my invention!" he says. I envy how he stays with the moment. The kite, like one of my unrealized dreams, has risen far beyond us, its string stretched taut. Then I remember the dreams that have come true, like motherhood, like having a lover who makes my heart race at the mere thought of our next night together.

Gina and I just happened to fall for the same guy -- a man who was unhappily married for 20 years, finally got a divorce and now wants to answer only to himself.

Ted once told me he thought Gina and I would like each other, that we share many of the same values. We do seem to have at least one thing in common: an ability to make do with what we've got. We're two pragmatic women in our 40s, no longer holding out for the "one and only." Instead, we're settling -- possibly for less than either of us deserves, possibly for more than either of us would otherwise have.

Who knows? In another life, maybe she and I would become friends. She could teach me to wear jewelry with flair; I could invite her to share in the joys of motherhood.

Next page | I often wish Gina would drop off the face of the Earth