Goodbye, Alimony

 

The morning of English placement tests in middle school my mom told me to write my essay on Marcia Clark. We knew the topic was “People who inspire you” because my sister took the test the year before, and my cousin the year before that. I was in 7th grade, and even though I watched my grandma glued to the OJ Simpson trial on the news, and the verdict played on a TV rolled into my Spanish class, I could really give a shit about Marcia Clark.

But my mom is a very convincing person, and I thought she must be right, and if I write about this I’ll surely get into honors English. Unfortunately, I lacked my mom’s passion for Marcia Clark, and wasn’t asked to join honors English, where ironically, nine out of the ten students wrote essays on how they were inspired by their mothers.

A few years later I cared much less about school, and would ditch any chance I got, spending ridiculous amounts of time wandering around in the forest with people. One time I was on such a journey with my older sister, and she convinced me to help her collect garbage bags of pinecones, that we threw into her car and brought home because she planned to sell them on eBay, her reasoning, “Don’t you think someone who has never seen a pinecone, would want to see a pinecone?”

Elementary school seems to be much more fun-filled than high school, so I see where I lost my way. My kids are always singing songs that teach them stuff, like about pronouns, and so many assignments involve with a coloring portion. Little G had his self portrait project sent home because the picture he drew was not inline of the parameters of the project.

It took a lot of convincing to get him to draw a more realistic self portrait. After he went on and on about how he hates drawing self portraits because he can't make it look like him, I told him, “No one can actually draw a life-like portrait of themselves. In my entire life I’ve met maybe three people that can draw a realistic picture of themselves.”

As a kindergarten art docent, I know a thing or two about self-portraits, the teacher told me, “Have them avoid drawing teeth, and no realistic noses, they’ll all look like pigs.”

 After G went on about not capturing his essence, I said, “Draw a picture of your dad. They’ll never know the difference.”

So he made two green circles for eyes, a semi-circle for a nose, spiky brown hair and a big toothy smile, and we were able to get on with our weekend.

This week I got my last alimony check from dear old dad. It's hard to believe it’s been that long, but with the upcoming election, I’m reminded, it was shortly after Trump became president everything sort of crumbled out from under me; I got divorced, fell off the wagon, and left the college to teach high school thinking it would be more stable, and stopping my blog so I wouldn't get fired for talking to mature audiences on a platform where any audience can read it. 

After some time, I forged a new path. I started doing stand up so I could get my writing out there, went back to teaching full-time college, and after a good go at non-sobriety, I crawled back on the wagon.

I’m financially independent now, I teach at two colleges and I even have my retail job that allows me to have cute-ass-top-of-the-line-fashions at an affordable price. The retail job satiates a shopping addiction, but when I get overloaded with school, I usually think, I need to quit that job, it’s stressing me out. But it does make me happy to be around such beautiful clothes, seeing people shopping, and with colleges online, I shouldn't turn down opportunities to interact with human beings.

Currently we are not that busy, so sometimes I wander around looking at everything. I was shoveling through these bins in the markdowns section and found a package of metal straws. I had a terrible visual of this metal straw in my cup and I sneezed and the straw impaled my eyeball, and I had a footlong Indian-jones looking metal spear sticking out of my eye-ball. It was awful. 

But not quite as awful as when customers pull you into the dressing room with them and start undressing. It’s usually older women, who are way more accustomed to getting a proper fitting when they try on clothes. I usually talk incessantly and try not to look at them until afterward when I assure them they look like a hot-piece-of-ass in whatever they’ve put on.

Today I had a chunk of time I was able to write, but instead I watched a bunch of TV and ate an entire fridge. After I got my kids and we ate Panda Express, I decided to have a mature-audiences gummy and get to writing. I’m hardly the girl I was in high school, and knew things were in full effect when I tried to spell the word lackadaisical. I spent minutes on this, and spellcheck still couldn't figure out what I was saying, and eventually it made me laugh out loud. 

Things all do work out for a reason. Had I made it into honors English I might not have enjoyed that funny moment today.