Listening to Myself: Has there been a time in your life when you thought you knew what you needed to do, but an inner voice kept telling you to go a different direction? Did you wind up “trusting your gut”? And if so, did your hindsight later validate your decision? If you didn’t listen to your instinct, did you have regrets? How were you changed by the experience? Sometimes, listening to ourselves means being able to discern which of our several inner voices to listen to. How do you know which to trust?’ My reliable intuition told me immediately not to marry the handsome guy who swept me off my feet during the summer of 1961. We had just met, and we were so, so different. And sure enough I ended up with huge regrets. Thankfully, I was able to put an early end to it, but that marriage decision changed my life forever. It was the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I was student at the University of Wisconsin, a well-established journalism student, a member of … [Read more...]
The No Good Ex
I hadn't thought much about my ex husband until I heard he had recently died. We were divorced in 1965. If you’ve had an ex-husband or wife you’ll probably get this. That no matter what happens it’s always the ex’ fault, right? Mine did everything wrong – aside from being as handsome as a young Marlon Brando and having, at least in my mind, a terrific job as a film editor at MGM (he won an Oscar for "Towering Inferno"). He drank too much, he smoked weed, he went bar hopping with his high school buddies instead of staying home and paying attention to me, and he also fucked around. But none of those things were why I decided to leave him. I got pregnant. And at first he seemed to like the idea. So did his parents. They believed my having a baby would mean I finally would stop working and become a real housewife and mother. After all, it was the 1960s and that’s what most women did at that time. They didn’t have good jobs or think about their careers. Except I liked my job and I … [Read more...]
