Ten minutes later we began our “Career Parade.”
Adriana swaggered about in a nurse’s outfit. She had added her own personal style. She wore her black lace bra with purple trim
over
the white nurse’s uniform. She twirled a pink parasol and tottered on Bella’s pink heels with cheetah print toes.
Bella model-walked, hips waving, in a blue jumpsuit uniform, a lot like a mechanic might wear, only she had thrown her lace scarf around her shoulders, unzipped the top of the jumpsuit to the waist so her purple camisole showed through, and rolled up the pants legs to her knees to show off Carlotta’s knee-high leather boots.
Carlotta was wearing a pink tutu and pink tights and a green silk shirt. To make it more “Carlotta-y,” she was wearing all of her jewelry and all of her sisters’ jewelry and a black fur hat. She was also wearing Adriana’s sage designer heels.
“I love coming to coaching class!” Adriana said. “I love it!”
“You’re the best, Madeline,” Bella said. “I feel so careerish right now! Don’t you, girls?”
“Yes, we have a Ca
Rear!
” Carlotta said.
“I’m a nurse like Mary Poppins!” Adriana said. “Fun and fun!”
“I’m a mechanic for a soft porn show!” Bella said. “Wicked naughty!”
“I’m a ballerina slave for a leprechaun!” Carlotta said. “Fantabulous!”
They pulled their cats out of their baskets—one who spit, one who rolled her eyes, one who
was
asleep—and strutted around my office.
Who knew the world needed nurses who wore black bras over their nurses’ uniforms, mechanics in purple camisoles, and ballerina slaves in pink tutus.
Yes, this is my life.
At least the Giordano sisters aren’t liars.
“Your next client is here, Madeline,” Georgie said. “It’s Aurora King. She’s got her sparkling pink fairy dress on today. She’s wearing a tiara, too. She wasn’t wearing a tiara when I met her in Spirit Yoga class and told her about you.”
I smothered a laugh. Diane Smith had changed her name to Aurora King so she could be a whole new person. I respected that. I liked whole new people and I liked Diane / Aurora. “She wants to talk about my fairy dust, doesn’t she?”
“She says she’s seeing it in your aura. In fact, she says she’s seeing a threat. A threat to you and your very essence. I’m quoting her. Apparently you have, what is it, Aurora? Okay, she says that there is something lurking. She thinks it’s an emotional hurricane with a scary train ride and the Pyrenees Mountains. What else? And a tree with branches that criss and cross and a horse-man.”
“Send in the fairy and her dust for my aura. But tell her not to throw glitter at me like last time.”
“Don’t throw glitter at Madeline,” I heard Georgie say as she disconnected.
I opened my door to Aurora.
She threw pink glitter at me.
Two days later I was still picking it out of my hair.
Late that night, completely wiped out from work, I drove up the winding street to my modern house with the geometric decorating that I don’t like. I dropped my keys and purse onto a modern, black metal statue shaped like a person with an octagon for a head holding a tray. I slipped off my boring heels and passed my black leather couch—not the cushy type, the hard type. Hanging over it was a light made out of chrome that resembled a giant, spying eye.
I headed to my bedroom with the modern bed frame constructed of shiny steel. I did not open the doors to my closet to put my suit away. I didn’t have to, because I have no closet doors in my entire house. Not even my pantry has a door. First thing I did when I bought this house was to take off all the closet and pantry doors everywhere so my mind wouldn’t short-circuit every time I wanted to grab a skirt or syrup.
All of my suits are lined up nice and neat, by color, same with my low-heeled shoes, my slippers, my tennis shoes, my sweaters, my ironed blouses. Obsessively neat. Everything is in tight, methodical order. Clearly a control freak jacked up on high octane obsessiveness did this, but I cannot have it any other way. I have to have order.
I have used both closets in my room for clothes, and I hang the hangers about four inches apart. Why? So I can see clear through to the wall behind it.
Clear
through.
Instantly I need to know if any sick, demented people are hiding in my closets, so no doors, and no cramming.
Where did I get this quirk from?
My childhood. Why?
He used to leap out of our closets.
Sherwinn
leaped.
Right at us.
Boutique
Magazine
A Life Coach Tells You How to Live It
By Madeline O’Shea
Vasectomies and You
After particular sessions, I ask my clients if I can print what they’ve said to me in order to share a tidbit of women’s wisdom with other women who might need this tidbit.
My most recent client, we’ll call her Tess, agreed. “If I can help one woman out there deal with a man who’s afraid he’ll never be in heat again like a horny dog if he gets a vasectomy, it’ll be worth it.”
Tess is five feet one, a hundred pounds, with blond hair that she calls “The Frizz Blast,” and, in her words, “outsized brown eyes. I look like a raccoon with blond hair and the teeth of a cow. They stick out, you know. See?”
Here is Tess’s story:
“My husband did not want a vasectomy. It was like trying to get a drunk bull to squish through a tire. I am freakin’ tired of birth control. The pill makes me vomit and dizzy. Diaphragms are gross and condoms are what you use when you’re a teenager rolling around naked in the back of an El Camino. Do I look like a pesky teenager? No, I don’t. So I told him he needed to go in and get clipped.
“He acted like I’d asked him to give up his whatsits on a plate with a garnish of pickles and relish. I have given birth to five children, two at one time with the twins, and I have never, ever whined like that man did. But I told him no sex until you’re castrated, whack and whack. It took him a week and he finally caved in, but he was pale white, like a ghost, so I trailed after him going, ‘Booooo boooo.’
“Anyhow, I had to drug him before we even got to the hospital that morning. A double dose. I had to drag him in like a dead dog. If he could have cupped his jewels with both hands without looking ridiculous, trust me, he would have done it. So I hand him over to the doctor and the doctor claps him on the back like, Buck up, man.
“Honestly, I pushed five kids through something that is normally the width of a grape, and I didn’t moan and piss like that. So I’m in the waiting room and I brought a flask of whiskey with me—I needed it after what I’d been through—and I start reading my romance novel and I’m perfectly happy. His mother, Hatchet Face, is with the kids and I am finally alone for the first time in months. Even when I pee the kids come into the bathroom and fight with each other on the bath mat. Anyhow, I am sitting there hoping the vasectomy takes five hours or there’s some earthquake-sized complication and we have to be admitted overnight. I mean, wouldn’t that be great? I could stay overnight in a hospital! No kids and hopefully my husband would be out cold. But no! The doctor is a man and doesn’t understand. Way too quick, and right when I’m in the middle of a hot sex scene, as if I have the energy to think that sex can be hot anymore, the deed is done, he’s been sliced and diced. The nurse comes to get me. I wanted to cry when she said my husband was “ready.” Darn it, though, I wasn’t ready!
“So I trudge to the room and there he is, lying down, his face gluey white. And I let this man get me knocked up five times? This coward? This ghost? ‘I think I saw smoke, Tess, and I smelled it,’ he whispers, his eyes staring wildly, like he’s seen the hounds of hell running around his balls gnashing their teeth. ‘There was fire. I think I saw flames. I was
on fire!
’ That man got teary eyed over
his testicles
. It’s not like they were removed and put in a jar of formaldehyde.
“ ‘You had a vasectomy,’ I hiss, pissed off there weren’t complications. I wanted to read my romance! It would have been great if the knife had slipped and we’d had to stay a week in the hospital. That would have been a treat. ‘There wasn’t any fire or flames,’ I tell him real snarky.
‘I’m not a man anymore,’ he moans.
‘Yeah, you’re a man.’ I roll my eyes. ‘You still got your pecker.’
‘I’m not a man. . . .’
‘If you’re not a man, you’re not a man, you eunuch, so maybe you won’t pester me so much for sex anymore.’ I have had sex hundreds of times, Madeline. How many more times do I have to have it?
“So, after a lot of irritating whining, so bad I wanted to smack him, we went home and he lay in bed with an ice pack on his balls, still moaning, and he reminded me of my childhood dog, Frisky. Frisky ran out and chased down kids and bit them, letting out this terrible howl. He would dart out the door before we could stop him. He even had a girlfriend dog that he would visit every once in a while, even though the girlfriend’s boyfriend dog chewed him up a couple of times. My mother used to have our neighbor’s Saint Bernard chase Frisky down and get him home.
“Anyhow, as soon as my mother got that dog castrated, the ol’ balls cut off, he settled right on down. No more gallivanting around, no more cheating with the ladies, no more biting kids on bikes. So that’s what I told my husband when he was in bed groaning about the fire and smoke again. I told him about Frisky and said, ‘You two got something in common. Now shut up and quit whining.’
“He complained for days from bed. By the fifth day, when he yelled my name three times and I walked back to the bedroom, carrying the baby, the toddler hanging on to my heel, and he whined, ‘Can you refill my orange juice? And I need another blanket. I’m chilled. Do you know where my gray socks are? No, not the white ones. I need my gray fishing socks. Can you put them on my feet?’ I let him have it. I told him that I’d given birth to five kids. I’d been pregnant for most of our marriage. He never took care of me when I got home from the hospital, even the time I got sick with the flu after the third kid. Didn’t even take a day off work to help out, but two weeks later he was able to take six days off to go fishing with his buddies. I hadn’t lain in bed for five days after I’d had the kids. In fact, on the second day I was up and taking care of him and everyone else. He never brought me a meal in bed or so much as orange juice. He never brought me socks and put them on my feet. I told him all that and I told him I was sick of his being a baby and I poured an entire pitcher of orange juice on his crotch and told him to get his slack balls out of bed.
“I kicked him out of the house. I packed his suitcase and threw him out and told him to go home to Momma, the Hatchet Face. I threw an ice pack at his head, too, I was so mad. I felt like years of fury were bottled up in me and they all came out. He works eight hours a day, an hour off for lunch, comes home, lies on the couch, and makes derisive comments about how I, ‘don’t work . . . he’d like to stay home all day and watch TV, too . . . it’s
his
money, not mine....’
“I called a lawyer, and the lawyer served him at work, told him what his child support was gonna be for five kids. He came home three days later on his knees after being with his mother, who is a tyrannical dictator. I told him to stay with her for three months because I needed a break from him. The next weekend I dropped all five of the kids off at his mother’s house—thank heavens I’m done nursing the baby. I also dropped off all the crap he has stacked in our garage that he refuses to throw away, plus his beer bottle collection and the lights shaped like beer cans. My daughter said his mother left for a hotel by Saturday morning. By Saturday night my husband was crying because the baby wouldn’t stop crying, my two-year-old kept fussing, and the other three kids were driving him crazy and wanted to come home to me.
“I had the best three days of my life, Madeline. Can’t wait to drop the kids off in two weeks again. He’s begging to come back home.
Begging
like a fiend
.
You know what the lesson here is?
“If you’re going to have balls in your life, make sure they’re good balls. If I’m going to allow his balls back in my life, there’s going to be huge, huge changes. If he doesn’t want to make them, he’s out. He causes me too much stress. My life is easier,
easier,
Madeline, without him, no question. He’s more work than my kids, and he never gives back to me. He takes. Sucks me dry emotionally. I need to go ball-less for a while. The kids and I and none of his balls. And, hey, twice a month, I get free weekends, Friday afternoon to Sunday evening, and every other Wednesday I get three hours to myself. Plus, he’s paying through his nose for child support and alimony. Loses more than half his check. Now that I don’t have to pay for his gambling and beer runs, I’m way ahead.”
Tess left later, and I thought about what she said.
Ladies, you don’t
have
to have balls in your life. It’s a choice. Remember that. You can be on your own. You can be
very happy
on your own. In fact, much happier than you are now if you’re living with a man who sucks the life out of you.
Think on it. Balls or no balls?