On the Women in My Life ...

I would have to say that there are four women in my life currently who have a significant impact on my daily life and the decisions I make in it. They are my mother, who I love and feel very close to, my soon-to-be-ex wife, who I am in the throes of divorce, although I am doing what I can to get her to go to mediation with me, my closet friend, a woman I have known since we were teenagers, and my eleven year old daughter.

Of course I care about them all in very different ways; my mom is a very supportive lady, who has been with me through thick and thin, my daughter is a joy to me whenever I see her, which in recent months has been every-other weekend, my soon-to-be-ex, is a woman I loved and lived with through the first twenty-five years of our marriage, and perhaps let my affection for her blind me to how poorly she was treating me, and my good pal and lover from days gone by has been helping me through this very difficult time in my life … not begrudgingly, but cautiously resistant to my attempts to get her more deeply involved in my daily life in some ways. As you may be able to tell already, this business gets more than a bit confusing at times!

When things began to go south for my marriage, Mom was right there for me, offering to help in any way she could, and she did so, financially assisting me with setting up my own place, and feeding me the occasional meal as well, among other ways.

My soon-to-be-ex is a different story altogether. She and I come from very different backgrounds in many ways, most notably the fact that I am Jewish, and she is Gentile. Although this wasn’t a major problem at the outset of our relationship, or for the first twenty-four years or so of it at least, as my interest in Judaism wasn’t that strong, but as my interest in developing my knowledge of the culture and religion of my ancestors grew, her consistent belittling and denigrating of it began to really bother me.