Why Men Cheat

Your husband could be one of those dogs who, no matter how good you look, how well things are going in your marriage, how much attention you give him, or how willing you are to meet his sexual fantasies, he will cheat on you. Your problem is you are you, and he wants something new. Doesn't even matter if she's not as good as you; she's different.

It's hard to compete with different. Or it could be the other woman is there, and you are not. It's hard to compete with there when you're not there.

Men are really no more complicated than that. Some may have morals or restraints or inhibitions that make them resistant to women who are a) willing, b) different from you by just not being you, and c) there when you are not. Many men do not have inner cops. They may be, for the most part, good husbands and fathers. They just have this impulse and no moral compass to keep them from acting on it.

Then there are the men that we push into the arms of other women who are a) willing, and b) different. They may be even very similar to us, like a younger version who happens to be around, even if we are also around.

How does that happen? We let it. Consciously or unconsciously.

Last night, my husband and I were discussing a friend we had not seen in awhile, and to my surprise, he told me this friend had left his wife. How could he leave his two children, I asked? I grew up in a time when couples stuck it out until the kids were grown or 'til death did them part. My parents did. His parents did. Both marriages were doomed from the get-go, but they put in 25 years before making their escapes through death or divorce. But my husband said he understood how you could leave your little kids behind.

How?

Well, if she's nagging you all the time, if things are never good enough for her, he said.

I was stunned. That's all it takes in his mind to break up a marriage with kids?

Which brings me to the marriage of Elizabeth and John Edwards and the mistress Rielle Hunter. If you were ranking this trio in terms of who is most at fault, you'd probably rank them 1. Rielle 2. John 3. Elizabeth. Or even 1. John 2. Rielle 3. Elizabeth. What bastard would put Elizabeth first? I would.

Elizabeth was once slim and lovely, and with such a family fortune, she could hire a trainer and a plastic surgeon and stay slim and lovely for a long time. But after the awful tragedy of their teenage son dying in an auto accident, she was determined to replace him. It took two tries to get another son and she was 52 by the time she accomplished it, after years of hormone treatments and rumored egg transplants.

You can imagine that in John's eyes, a replacement son probably wasn't that high a priority, especially if it turns his wife into a lab experiment and their sexual relationship into a breeding chore. Maybe he knew no new baby could ever replace the one that was lost, and the best thing to do would be hug each other a lot and move on. After the physical punishment of two pregnancies followed by menopause, Elizabeth ended up looking exhausted and shaped like a sack of potatoes.

Then they go through a second major disappointment of not being elected vice president of the United States, and then she gets cancer. (And you have to wonder if all the hormone treatments late in life to carry two more babies to term had anything to do with that.)

Right in the middle of all this, a dumb blonde waltzes into John's life, her video camera pointed at him all through the campaign, and tells him, and I quote, "You're so hot." That's all it takes. Really. That's all. Men are that easy.

Let's put that dynamic on a scale and weigh it against the cancer-ridden, shapeless, exhausted wife who tried to replace your beloved son with a couple of new babies that you have been too busy to bond with. Which way does the scale tip? "You're so hot" or "You failed to make me First Lady"?

Tiger Woods cheated because he could. He's away from home being fawned over by pancake waitresses. David Letterman's wife is frumpy looking for a woman married to a multi-millionaire. It can't be because she can't afford a pilates class and a great haircut. Meanwhile all these happy, ambitious, young interns are working with her husband, a man whose ego needs massaging because Leno is beating him in the ratings. Hillary Clinton is busy and bitchy. Monica is adoring, brings pizza, and isn't opposed to trying new things like thongs and cigars. Like Chris Rock says in one of his comedy routines, it was Hillary's job to give the president blow jobs. She wasn't doing her job. Angelina is beautiful, has lots of babies, and wants to save the world. Brad is beautiful, wants lots of babies, and wants to save the world. Jennifer wants to make another crappy romantic comedy and doesn't have time to save even one Third World baby. Who's trying and who's not?

It's a cautionary tale, and it crosses my mind whenever I am less than thrilled with my own husband's accomplishments, or I nag, or I take stock of how much weight I've gain since we met. I'm not really trying, am I? You may say I shouldn't have to keep qualifying for the job of wife that I already have…but that's in a perfect world. In the real world, we are married to men.

We Are What We've Been Traumatized By

Not long after finishing Wally Lamb's "She's Come Undone," which is a massive excuse for bad behavior caused by trauma, I started thinking about my own traumas and how much bad behavior I could attribute to them.

Then Sunday night I watched the episode of "Ruby" on the Style network where all the fat ladies went to a six-day intensive training retreat to free themselves of their food addictions. The exercises were nearly identical to the alcohol rehab sessions the drunk mommies on "20/20" had undergone a couple of nights before. First, we find out what events in our childhood traumatized us. Then we get our revenge by slamming an ottoman with a rubber bat. Then we cry. People hug us. We're cured of our addiction.

Most of the traumas included abusive daddies and people we are dependent on dying and leaving us adrift. Childhood sexual abuse didn't come up on TV, but I'm sure it's a big one. It's the centerpiece trauma of Lamb's book.

In the early '90's, I tried to get some psychological help, but since I couldn't afford it and had no health insurance, I had to go to almost equally crazy people affiliated with various charities and religious organizations. We tried hard to unearth a childhood memory of sexual abuse -- there were adequate outward signs -- but I never could find a memory or a culprit. They'd give me crayons and I would draw ducks.

I've been thinking about listing all my traumas here, but it's too hard to do it succinctly without each one becoming a long story to itself. But let's try.

My mother slaughtered my pet ducks. What I took away from that is the person you would think should have been most protective of me was devoid of any empathy for me.

My first dog was run over. That probably happens to a lot of children, but maybe because of the cold way my family handled the situation, I never attached myself to a dog again. To this day, I'm afraid of dogs -- not that they will hurt me, but that I will love them. The dog was buried outside my bedroom window and for the rest of the time we lived in that apartment, I never slept in my own room again. I slept on the floor of my sister's room. You would think that would give my parents a clue.

My first divorce. It was actually a relief that the relationship could now be declared over with a reason my family would accept -- infidelity -- and it's not like it came as a surprise. I had sacrificed everything that did mean something to me -- my future -- for a relationship that actually didn't mean much to me, ended up losing both, and having no idea why I didn't have the strength to get out of it before the damage was done. Being a single mother at 22 with no family support in town is a tough way to start a career in a demanding profession, especially prior to women's lib.

My second divorce. This time I had no good reason my family could accept, so I was ostracized. I was escaping from 17 years of a co-dependent relationship with an older alcoholic, and finally thought I had found a safe place to land if I jumped, but I was wrong. I quit the husband, the job, and sold the house to pursue a dream which fizzed out spectacularly with a huge helping of betrayal from people I trusted. I was knocked for a loop that lasted for two years. Then the person who picked me up and shook me off also left me, which knocked me for another loop, but out of those ashes, I finally found the strength to create for myself what I most wanted instead of waiting for someone else to give it to me.

Good things happened for awhile, and then I got to the point where I actually had something to lose again and couldn't take the risks anymore. With security comes the death of creativity. With security comes the fear of losing that security. And with fear comes inertia. Hmmmm. So gradually, I am becoming the fat lady, and although I am not quite in need of an intervention yet, I might be in another few years if I start waddling toward ridiculous poundage. What pain am I feeding? Which trauma on my self-image board is to blame here?

What should I be yelling while I slap the ottoman with my rubber bat?

She's Come Undone

There's already literally 2,000 reviews of this 1992 Wally Lamb novel blessed by Oprah on amazon.com so I'm not going to add to the clutter or go into detail, except to say this has got to be the least appealing heroine of a novel since Scarlett O'Hara, and at least that bitch saved her family during a war. Although Delores Price has some trauma in her life -- a stillborn baby brother, parents divorced, her mother going into a mental institute for awhile, her own rape by a tenant -- even so, I never felt like that was an excuse for her to be the nastiest person on earth to everyone she encountered. Cutting herself off from the people around her just made her situation worse.

I kept waiting for her to finally get her comeuppance, as if all that came before wasn't enough, and it wasn't, and yet she still has a somewhat happy ending.

It made me think about my own traumas. There has been spans of time where I let myself use them as an excuse, but no one should because you can get past it.

It also made me think about where the publishing industry is going. Pocket Books has this priced at $7.99, and I can assume they made their money on it when they sold it, but since then, it has been bought and resold on amazon.com several times over. I bought it from someone for $1.99 and I'm reselling it for $1.98, and Pocket gets none of that. The book industry should be embracing the electronic book platform because it eliminates all this aftermarket reselling which takes away from their sales.

Wrong Turn, Great View

Although I was told the Springfield Landfill in Western Henrico was hard to find, my Google Map driving directions couldn't have been more clear, and I went straight to it in the rain this morning, with one small carload of household cast-offs. Much to my surprise, I was asked for $3 to get in. I was used to getting into the great dump in Hanover County for free, so this was annoying. You would think the clerk would notice my tiny car couldn't possibly hold much junk.

I immediately got lost. I saw a holding pen for tires straight ahead, and a road off to the left. A truck had just taken the road, so I followed it. It was a long and circling dirt road that got progressively muddier and I was climbing a grassy mini-mountain. By the time I was making the last loop to where the top flattened off, I could see literally for miles across Henrico County. I was way, way up. What kind of dump was this? It was really muddy up at the top, and there were a couple of bulldozers, and some debris, like a clothes and shoes, but not the amount of garbage I was expecting.

"Where's the dump part?" I asked one of the bulldozer guys. He was startled to see me. "At the bottom, you should have made a right turn when you came in."

I turned my little car around and headed back down the mountain. It was then I noticed that this muddy road I was going down -- well, one side was a sheer cliff and there wasn't much between me and a very long roll down. I had to trust my little Mazda to hang onto the road.

Back at the bottom of the mountain, I saw the ramp that took me to a more traditional dumping place, a place where you just threw your trash into big trailers, and another area where you could put things that others might want. I was sad that it cost $3 to get to this junk display case. Some of my favorite lamps and furniture came from the shed of possibilities at the Hanover dump and it didn't cost me $3 to pick over it.

I had planned to make several dump runs that day, but between the rain and the $3, I gave up after one. I told my husband about my misadventure when he came home, after stopping to hose all the dump mud off my white car. "What if you had slid off the mountain?" he said, shocked that I had made such a colossal wrong turn.

"I thought about that," I said. But I didn't. And that was quite a view. Are there any other really high places you can go and see Henrico?

Craigslist Evil People

I put a camera for sale on Craigslist since there were 13 of them already on Amazon.com, and even at the lowest price, I had no buyers after two weeks. On Craigslist, I immediately got three responses, one from Sam asking for "shutter actuations," which I don't know what that is.

Then another from Mike with a Yahoo email account that has a peculiar, un-Mike like email address, alessandraazh. He wants to know if I still have the camera. Well, yes, I just posted it 5 minutes ago late on a Saturday night.

Then I get an email from "Mario" also asking me if I still have the camera. Mario has a gmail account which is also two names, johnandjacob. I say I do.

Within minutes, I get an email from John Powell, also from the johnandjacob email address.

Hi,
Thanks for the mail...i was introduced to this site by a friend at
work and i will like immediate purchase of this item for my Niece
'Bella' who is away of the state and been requesting for this item...i
will offer you $500 including the shipping charges to her.. there
because she is in need of it as a matter of urgency and due to my work
i don't have time to handle the shipping..i will want you to help me
handle the shipping very well to her..Get back to me with your
confirmed PayPal email address so that i can send the payment..
Get back to me asap...

That's pretty fractured English for someone with the very English name of John Powell. Mario, at the same email address, had a street address in Boyertown, PA on the bottom of his email and a telephone number. John has no location. I do a Google search on the telephone number and I get all hits about Nigerian scams. All the reports are about people trying to buy things on Craigslist giving this phone number. Some reports say the phone is located in Jupiter, Florida, others in Seattle, Washington. Not surprisingly, the middle three digits of 206-666-5748 are demonic.

(Area code 206 covers Seattle, so John and Mario of Boyertown, PA have a very, very long telephone cord.)

Also, I am amused that the niece's name is the same as a currently popular character in vampire novels and the offer is for more than I am asking for the camera, almost twice as much. Who pays more, plus shipping? Where does Bella live that she can't find this camera locally? There's 13 of them on amazon.com right now. Even so, I write back a reminder that the ad said cash only and I meant to sell it locally. If this person wants to pay for it electronically, they need to go to my listing on amazon.com and pay for it through that company.

John writes back immediately and now he is getting bossy.

I have already confirmed shipping cost to her which is not more than
$60 to her via usps..kindly get back with the confirmed paypal email
so i can send the fund..Kindly go to www.paypal.com and set up account
and get back to me with your paypal email so i can send the fund..my
husband have already sent the fund into my paypal account thats why i wanna pay via that..
John has a husband? His husband must be Mario. Who am I to question a gay marriage in Boyertown, PA? You can send money to people through Paypal if all you know is their email address, and John is corresponding with me, so he already knows how to send me money. Something else is going on here. They are either going to also ask for the password and think I will give it to them, or hope I will mail the camera before their payment has cleared because they are using stolen credit card numbers.

It's probably a mistake that I continue to talk to them out of my email address, but I remind them the ad said cash only. It is now 1 a.m. on a Saturday night, but John, who is too busy to send his niece a camera, but not too busy to be writing me in the middle of the night, gives it one more try. Never once have we discussed the condition of the camera.

but i dont mean to hurt human beign like me..is just that am a busy
person that work trice in a day..get back if you can help me out..
If John is working thrice in a day, he must be working inside a Dickens novel. Who works thrice? I have lost interest in helping out Bella.

Meanwhile, I have not heard back from Mike, but since his first email started the same way Mario's did and he also had a double-named, free email address, he was probably a Nigerian operative who went to bed early or found a deal to work that was actually going down. 

A Life Measured in Junk

Saturday I went to my first estate sale because I wanted the cement benches that were pictured on the estate sale website. I want cement benches, but I want them cheap. My husband said if I decided to buy the benches after I got there, to call him and he would come with the van. This is his passive aggressive way of not participating without flat out telling me he doesn't want to go and doesn't want the benches.

It was very likely that when I called, he wouldn't answer the phone under the guise of being asleep. He can conveniently go into a deep, coma-like sleep when he doesn't want to do something.

But first he tried a Jedi mind trick on me. Why buy someone else's used, dirty cement benches? By the time I spent 10 hours cleaning them up, I could have easily bought new ones.

Wait a minute. First, I would never spend 10 hours cleaning anything up. After 30 minutes, anything I'm cleaning is as clean as it's ever going to get. And if I did spend 10 hours cleaning my dirty, used benches, how is that losing money I could have used to buy new ones? Am I taking time away from doing something else that would have paid me money? Was someone going to pay me to clean their benches, but instead I used that time to clean my own? I don't get the math here.

My husband is clearly not an economist.

So, a little bitterly, I set off for the estate sale, was shocked at how many cars were already there, and by the time I found the benches, a woman was taking the tags off them and declaring them hers. I could have had two benches for $50 if I had spent less time arguing with my husband over his bizarro theory of economics.

So it wouldn't be a total loss, I wandered around the place looking at the remaining stuff, and I do mean stuff. What happened to these people that suddenly everything they own has a price tag on it, including the house? Their property was called a "farmette." It had six outbuildings, all in various states of decay. Two of the buildings once served as kennels for multiple dogs. There was an old speed boat in the yard. An equally old tanning bed was in one shed. One shed was full of neon signs advertising beer and barbecue. From these meager clues, I tried to imagine who these people were. And what happened to them?

The house itself didn't seem particularly large and had long ago ceased being modernized for paint and carpeting. The narrow dining room had a humongous and ornate dining room set in it that would look overpowering in a castle dining hall. The 10 huge chairs were fit for royalty. There was a triple china cabinet and not one but two matching sideboards. It was not possible to sit in four of the chairs and if the table was pulled out to the center of the room, it would not have been possible to sit in eight of them. What crazy day was it when the owners brought this dining room set into this house?

But what struck me the most was the number of glasses, glass vases, glass bowls, china sets, knick knacks and figurines in the house. Shelves and tabletops in every room were loaded with them. There were boxes of them out in the sheds. The going price was $1 or 50 cents a piece, and not many were being purchased, because, frankly, who needs more than six glasses, one vase, and one set of dishes ever? And you never need figurines. Nothing good comes of all this junk except eventually having them all in a dusty box at your estate sale, marked down to 25 cents a piece and still not selling.

How much money do we spend on this stuff? I suppose if we all took a vow to never buy another glass or vase or figurine again, it would destroy the knick knack economy and jobs would be lost, but truly, what is the point of household debris?

I try to limit the amount of junk I accumulate. Moving to smaller places has forced purges, but when you get settled in one place too long, even if you never buy this stuff, you get it as gifts. Like these two statuettes I have of life-sized kittens sitting on their hind legs, wearing glued on Santa Claus hats. Someone gave me those. And one day, it sits at an estate sale, languishing. Whatever meaning it had for you is long forgotten. In the year 2040, someone will be at my estate sale, looking at those cats in hats and thinking, what the heck?

Why are you doing this to me, MCV?

My husband suffered a slight injury on the job in the spring of 2008 at VCU and was sent to the campus clinic at MCV to check it out. I didn't even know about it until a year later when the Virginia taxation bureau sent me a letter saying my state refund check was being held because MCV had a claim on it.

I called MCV and found out about the 2008 incident. It was a workman's comp claim, but had been billed to my husband's personal insurance, which never paid it, never told us they hadn't paid it, and MCV never billed us. The lady at MCV's finance office found paperwork on file that everything I had told her was true and assured me she would take care of it.

I assumed all was well because the state released our piddling state refund check to us about a month later.

A year later I get a letter from Guitar Center saying my husband's credit line had been slashed by two-thirds because of "serious delinquencies" on his credit report. I was entitled to a free Equifax report as a result. I requested it online, looked at the delinquencies and there was MCV with a $350 "charge off" from that same workman's comp incident in 2008. "Charge off" is a bad word in the world of credit reports.

I called MCV again. Oh yeah, she says. I see all that. Well, workman's comp never paid it, so that's why it's listed as a charge-off. They requested your husband's medical records and I don't see that they were ever sent.

In other words, MCV never sent MCV the health records, so it's labeled as a "charge off" on my husband's social security number and reported to the credit bureau as a "serious delinquency." Now I have credit cards crashing all around my head. They need any excuse they can find to jack up rates to 33.33% on outstanding balances.

Well, it's not really MCV asking MCV for health records, she says. Workman's comp for VCU employees is handled by Managed Care Innovations, an outside contractor. They asked for his health records.

And MCV didn't send them? I asked.

Hmm, no, she says.

Do I need to call them? I ask. Who do I call? How do I fix this? Because I know you feel like the case is closed because you've charged it off, and Managed Care Innovations doesn't care because without medical records, they don't have to pay, so they feel like the case is closed, but this is destroying my credit. Plus, Equifax is blabbing this all over credit land, and they could care less about what screw-up is behind this charge off, and now Guitar Center feels the case is closed. They've branded us with the scarlet letter of Serious Delinquents, even though I have paid off many years of guitar strings, reverb pedals and road cases without ever being late once.

I'll handle it, she says.

Where have I heard that before?