I have a bunch of kids and I homeschool and I pretend to be a writer so I stay busy. Ipso facto, the age of divorce kind of snuck up on me. Having lived some life, I knew a time would come in which I would look around at my friend group and it would be riddled with divorces; but I wasn’t paying attention and before I knew it, that time had come.
I was clued into the dawning of the age of divorce when I was innocently scrolling through social media and came across a meme entitled “The Big 4 of Divorced Dad Rock”. I looked at the pictured lead singers in horror as I realized that my husband listened to three out of the four bands. And the fourth band that he didn’t listen to was friends with a band that he did listen to. I took pause and counted up all of our friends that had divorced. I was surprised to realize that I needed more than two hands to count them all up now. I was in the age of divorce and I was in no way prepared!
This meant my husband was now going out into the world with cougars on the prowl. Women who wore make-up and got their hair done and who didn’t look like Mugato when they first woke up in the morning. Women that owned high heel shoes, said things like “DM me” while understanding what it meant and who didn’t have random baby teeth in their underthings drawer that they keep forgetting to dispose of. Women whose purses weren’t filled with sucker wrappers, random little boy socks (why does he keep putting his socks in my purse?!), acorns, Hot Wheels, wipes, trains and cicada shells. Women who aren’t keeping themselves in the 1990s via artificial construct thanks to streaming services, itunes, cyclical fashion and never leaving the house.
I had entered cougar puberty and it was going about as well as my first puberty.
My first order of business was to put on some make-up. It took me a couple of hours to even find it because I’d hidden it from a kid that liked to write on the mirror with my mascara. I eventually located it on the top most shelf of my linen closet, along with some cherry chapsticks I’d hidden from chapstick eater and eye drops I’d hidden to keep grubby children hands from touching the droppers and thereby rendering them unsterile. Instead, I’d rendered them useless by hiding them and forgetting where.
I grabbed the makeup bag down and started rifling through it, eager to continue with my first order of business. However, when I found that my foundation had separated, my mascara had an odd odor and my blush had mold growing on it, I decided it was best to move on to my second order of business –dressing more cougar-ish.
In the bedroom, I stood before my closet. Maybe I could throw together a sexy, vampy outfit. I perused my clothing. The best I could manage was an adequate outfit with “probably not a lesbian” undertones. Ugh!
The third order of business was to clean out my purse which, half way through, acquired official archaeological dig status. I found a key fob in there for a car we’d sold 12 years ago. There were some Epstein files and some Blockbuster videos I needed to return (hate to see those late fees!). I think I may have found my long, lost dignity at the bottom with all the loose gum but it’s hard to tell because it’s been so long since I’ve seen it. Once the purse was completely cleaned out, my teenage daughter told me if I wanted to look like a real woman, I should probably get a real purse and stop carrying around a tool bag for a purse. Thinking of all the roomy interior I would be giving up, I abandoned my third order of business.
Perhaps I should start elsewhere other than outward appearance when trying to fend off the competition of cougars. They were way out of my league when it comes to making oneself presentable in a such a way as to attract men. I had to come up with another, less exterior-centric strategy for ensuring that my husband was not lured away by their feminine wiles in the age of divorce.
I started brain storming. How might these women act in order to ensnare my husband? I thought of how I acted when we first started dating and tried to remember the things I did in hopes of catching him. I remembered telling him he was handsome a lot. I remembered saying things like “please” and saying “thank you” when he did nice things for me, which, thinking on it were embarrassingly absent from my vernacular now-a-days. I remembered being flirty and having a lot more fun with him back then. Why wasn’t I doing that now? I guess it seemed superfluous with a bunch of kids. Yet still, with visions of divorcees working their charms on my compliment-starved husband, I resolved to work on my flirt game.
My husband came home from work one evening to me waiting for him at the door.
“Oh no,” he said, “Was I supposed to get something on the way home? Because I completely forgot about it.”
“Nope.”
“Then why are you standing there?”
“To give you a kiss hello,” I said and gave him a quick, though meaningful peck on the cheek, though he didn’t seem to pick up on the meaningfulness. “You look very handsome tonight, darling. I love how the grease on those overalls brings out the green in your eyes?”
He looked at me like I was drunk.
“Are you drunk?”
“No,” I said, helping him with his lunch box. “I just wanted to make sure you knew that I think you’re a good-looking fella and that I appreciate you as a husband, father and provider.”
It all sounded so stilted coming out of my mouth and I thought, those kinds of things really shouldn’t be stilted when a wife talks to her husband. I made a mental note to practice in front of the mirror for better authenticity.
“Ooookay?” he said. “Well, thank you?”
“Thank you for thanking me,” I said and then smacked him on the rear.
“What was that?”
“I’m being flirtatious,” I said while batting my eye lashes at him until one of the eye lashes flung itself into my eye and I had to run to the bathroom to get it off my eyeball, so crazy was it driving me. Luckily, I now knew where the eye drops were so I could wash it out.
Okay, so maybe the first attempt to re-woo my husband didn’t go as smoothly as I planned, but it actually worked in my favor.
At dinner that night, he said, “The way you were acting earlier reminded me of when we first started dating. You were so awkward and goofy but you were also a lot of fun.” Then he smacked me on the rear.
Maybe I didn’t have to go through Cougar Puberty in order to shore up my marriage and protect my husband from any marauding newly single ladies out there hoping to land themselves a second husband (or live-in boyfriend or partner or hot piece of man meat or whatever is the new thing now-a-days). Maybe I just needed to act like a second wife. I needed to compliment him and thank him and to maybe not shriek so much when he forgot to pick up a gallon of milk. And happily, the more I acted like a second wife, the more he treated me like one and the next thing I knew, here and there (mostly at the grocery store, for some reason), it felt like we were newly married again. And as long as I stay on my awkward, goofy game, I don’t have to worry when I hear him listen to Staind.
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