Pancakes Taste Like Poverty: And Other Post-Divorce Revelations Read Online Free

have to reassemble it.
    You take your time, painstakingly recreating the
monster it once was. Only now it is not a terrifying, menacing
monster. It is inanimate. It is just a shadow of its formerly
life-threatening self. There’s nothing scary about it. It is
not alive now . You are not in danger. You can stand there,
with your head right inside the jaws of this once bone-crushing
dinosaur – and feel absolutely no threat. You can
intellectually respect its former potential to kill but time has
destroyed this monster's power.
    That is exactly how emotional archeology
works.
    Things happen in life . Bad Things. If you experience those Bad Things first hand, there is a
good chance you have to adopt some sort of emotional shield to
protect yourself from complete annihilation. Then you bury the Bad
Thing and still carry the shield just in case.
    The only way we can drop the shield is to dig and
find the bad thing – reassemble it, name it, examine it –
and only then we realize that it is no longer a threat. It can no
longer hurt us. It’s friggin’ dead. As a matter of fact,
they are all dead. The threat is in the past. And I am here ,
in the present , safe and alive. I can take the armor off. I
can drop the spears. I can drop the shield.
    That is why I love doing this emotional
work. It’s amazing how placid and static your issues can seem
when you realize they are no longer doing you harm in the
present...except in your own head.

    The Hole In The Wall –
March 2011
    A year later
there is still a hole in the wall. One day when he came over, he was
doing some sort of goofy zombie walk to make the kids laugh and he
tripped over his own limbs and fell into the wall, his shoulder
leaving a massive hole.
The kids scolded him, exasperated that
we'd just moved in and our space was already soiled. He promised he'd
come back and fix it.
But as time passed I no longer saw it. It
was just the state of the wall. The kids stopped caring. And it never
got fixed.
That's the way it is, isn't it?
He is destructive
and we adjust to the chaos until it's so normal we don't even see
it.

Red Lipstick I'd
always wanted to be one of those women who wore red lipstick. It
seemed powerful and brave and bold and like you didn't have to do
much else to be “put together.” When I decided I was
going to “reinvent” myself after my divorce I made a lot
of noise about how I was going to start wearing red lipstick.Now
that I have publicly declared that I am going to start wearing red
lipstick all the time, the pressure is on. Many people are curious
about my feelings, assuming I am sporting my red lips, and I hate to
admit – I have yet to start wearing makeup.
    I KNOW! It should be the easiest resolution,
right? And yet, I have attached a mountain of excuses not to do it.
    “I need to get my eyebrows done first.”
    “I can’t wake up early enough.”
    Those are my two favorites.
    But the strange thing is that I am completely
terrified and I am not exactly sure why.
    Let me explain my Red
Lipstick Theory.
    Red lips are synonymous with a lot of things:
glamour, power, sex, classic beauty, elegance, Gwen Stefani, Dita Von
Teese…
    I’d have to say that lately my Self as
“Mrs. ______” is not synonymous with any of those
things.
    However, “Jessica Vivian” apparently
was.
    Case and point, my senior year quote, under my
thin and beautiful and glowing and hopeful eighteen- year - old
face was:
    “When in haste, walk slowly and make
sure everyone can see you.” —Marilyn Monroe
    I. Shit. You. Not.
    Seriously NOT the kind of thing a pudgy, mom of
three would say but a sexy ass eighteen year old with an ego the size of Kazakhstan? You bet!
    But here’s the deal:
    I’m divorced. My name is no longer
hyphenated. I am just “Jessica Vivian” again.
    So why don’t I feel Jessica Viviany? How do
I get that ballsiness back?
I’m gonna start with the Red
Lipstick. I capitalize it because it deserves that much reverence.
    So here’s how it