Brenda Perlin's Blog, page 6
October 29, 2012
Monday passage from Home Wrecker
“I was brought up in the San Fernando Valley and lived there until I was old enough to know better.”
This was an era when most wives stayed home and cooked for their families while their husbands slaved at their jobs. I don’t think woman’s liberation was even a consideration. Women didn’t have a lot of time for themselves. When the husbands got home from work, they expected their dinner to be on the table. At least my dad did. He never would have been expected to cook.
“Sadie, what’s the matter with you?” he would say if the food wasn’t ready. “I have been gone all day and the least you can do is have food ready for me when I come home. ”Let’s just say my dad wasn’t the most understanding person. He was rough around the edges, which often made me shy away from him until he’d calm down. My mom was used to his volatile behavior; I never heard her complain. Anyway, the divorce rate then was much lower than it is today. Couples stayed together to avoid the embarrassment of what their neighbors would say.
October 20, 2012
Home Wrecker LOVE
Passage from “Home Wrecker” the book
“Ever since Bo and I had known each other, there was something so organic in the way we were with one another. Everything just came together so spontaneously. Somehow, there was a bond that even we didn’t understand. What I did know was we were going to ride out this storm. Even if it was difficult and time consuming, we would come out victorious because I believe we wanted it enough. That was half the battle.”
Home Wrecker “Girl Fight”
A page from the book “Home Wrecker”
One morning while I was in the shower, I received three calls on my cell phone from Bo’s wife, Ruth. My boyfriend’s lovely better half was not sounding too pleased with me. She started out business like, but by the second call she was practically screaming into the phone and demanding I call her back.
“I am going to come after you and I will get you. I know where you live and if I don’t find you at home, I will look for you at the gym,”she added.
“Thank you, Gerard,” I said to myself.
That was when I decided this was getting out of control. It was enough that my husband was describing my bowel movements to this woman, but now she was a talking psycho on my unlisted phone number. I went directly to Boardwalk and called the cops. In less than an hour, Officer Deed was at my doorstep. I felt like I was in a reality show. It was very surreal.
If anyone had told me three years earlier while I was stuck in my hospital bed that I would go on to become an adulterer and have to chase away the nutty, soon-to-be ex-wife of my lover, I never would have believed them. Ain’t life grand? See, good things do happen to good people!
October 13, 2012
Home Wrecker Bride
“Before we even started talking about a wedding, I swore I would not get obsessed. But once I was sitting in the midst of it all, I couldn’t help getting somewhat consumed with all the details.”
When I first considered getting married I didn’t plan on having flowers or a classic wedding dress. I was dead set on walking down the aisle in combat boots and maybe even a black dress! I had this whole vision and this vision did not include china patterns, dress fittings, harp players or wildly uncomfortable pointy heels. I never had traditional ideas about having a wedding.
At that time I was just turning 30 and just started writing Home Wrecker. Since I was getting married I really thought it would be fun to write about what a sham the wedding business was. I was going to uncover the whole shady business.
I could have been described as was the anti-wedding grinch. I found the whole wedding trade to be a crock.
Yet, as soon as the engagement was official something changed in me. I guess you could say I got bit by the wedding bug. I could not pass the grocery check out line without examining all the Bridal magazines I saw. I became preoccupied with woman’s wedding rings and could not stop myself from grabbing stranger’s hands to examine their ring settings. I am sure this happens all the time but I really even surprised myself. I started to see the business of weddings a little differently.
I got caught up in the details and I started wanting to look like the brides that graced the covers of bridal magazines. Basically, I started buying into something that I was originally against. This didn’t take very long for this to happen. From the very first detail, which was picking the venue, I had a change of heart. All of a sudden I wanted something that I had never wanted before.
This surprised my soon to be husband. He was prepared for a simple off-beat party. What we had were harps, “here comes the bride” and a very generic ceremony. My alternative attitude started becoming very conservative.
Sometimes planning a wedding can be a real Home Wrecker. A wedding should be all about the love the two people share but often the details get in the way.
To all the brides out there am I alone here or dId your ideals change during your wedding planning? If so, how? For me, I felt like I would be missing out if I didn’t have what everyone else had. I know that sounds kind of lame but that is how it happened.
October 12, 2012
Home Wrecker “the book”
My boyfriend was never much of a reader but I am happy to say that after reading “Home Wrecker” he realized what a nice escape diving into a book can be.
Ever since then, he has been reading. He started with his dad’s favorite, Danielle Steele. Now I am pushing some of my faves on him. I got him Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and Upcountry by Nelson DeMille.
Before the book bug took over we would go to the pool and play endless hands of gin where I would get crucified. Now we can still have our time together but read at the same time.
October 10, 2012
Falling in love with another man is a Home Wrecker
It was a fine line and we were headed toward a point of no return. It was a choice and I would be lying if I said I couldn’t help it.
I knew I was betraying my husband’s trust by allowing this man to become a part of me. I knew it all, but I was drawn to him like a bee to honey. I couldn’t get enough of his sweetness. At the gym, we would have silly conversations about the inevitable. He outright asked me, “Would you ever leave your husband?” In the beginning I said, “Never,” and meant it, but after a while, I started toying with the idea of us being together. As the months crept by, our friendship blossomed. We started seeing each other outside the gym. I never thought I would do something this bold and blatantly wrong, but I felt I had to find out more about him. More than that, I had to know if we were really “meant to be together.”
-Home Wrecker
October 7, 2012
My dad was a Home Wrecker for not helping out my mom with household chores
“I was brought up in the San Fernando Valley and lived there until I was old enough to know better.”
This was an era when most wives stayed home and cooked for their families while their husbands slaved at their jobs. I don’t think woman’s liberation was even a consideration. Women didn’t have a lot of time for themselves. When the husbands got home from work, they expected their dinner to be on the table. At least my dad did. He never would have been expected to cook. Who was a Home Wrecker here? It was my dad because he expected my mom to do all of the household chores by herself.
October 5, 2012
Children Used As An Excuse Can Be A Home Wrecker
This post was written by a great author named John Emil Augustine. He wrote “Love Seen From Hell” and “Love Seen From Heartache.”
It was late evening in Downtown Minneapolis, 1998. The campus was quiet and the library lights were on. From my car we could see the occasional student walking this way and that inside the long-windowed building. It was spring. The snow continued to melt in the fifty-degree night air.
We had broken up, Maggie and I, earlier that winter. I wasn’t enough for her. It was about her. I was a thing, an ornament. She could do better. She knew that. I doubted it, but I really had no say. She just moved on. Until two weeks earlier.
Two weeks before we found ourselves in my car in front of the library, we had met accidentally again and had a drink. Then we had two drinks. The attraction was still there. She was curvy. Voluptuous. She was close to me that night – physically, I mean. She couldn’t keep her hand off my leg. I didn’t want her to. I wanted her hands to touch me again as they had many times before. I wanted to feel her skin against mine.
I soon did. We went back to her place and it was as if nothing had ever happened. It was as if the entire “you’re not good enough” speech from earlier that winter was complete bullshit. She pressed against me and breathed her warm, sexy breath in my ear. I wanted to stay inside, there in her apartment, where it was smooth and soft; where I slipped so easily back into her heart. I wanted to stay folded into her exactly as I had always been.
But it was just a night. Just sex. Just the effects of alcohol. It was just these things to her, anyway.
Two weeks later she found me and wanted to talk where we could be alone. I was parked in the lot in the cool evening, so I opened the door and she slipped back into my car; back into my life. She had something serious to tell me. The library glowed its yellow light out into the night and onto the melting snow in front of my car.
She had missed her period. This would change everything, she said.
“How will this change everything?”
“Because I am pregnant. It will be ours – yours and mine.”
“But you don’t love me.”
“This is different. I want to get married.”
“Come on. No you don’t.”
“John, this changes EVERYTHING.”
I had to think about it. This would not end well. I knew it at the moment. She wasn’t…I wasn’t…we weren’t…it. We both knew that. We had no home together, no relationship, and all I could see was that this baby would force us into the problems we could not handle as a couple because we were not a couple. The baby would be the excuse for everything. And the excuses would be our Home Wrecker.
In the end, she wasn’t pregnant. I was relieved beyond words.
Four years would go by before I would find a similar bullet un-dodge-able. That’s right, four years later I screwed up. The next girl, Cindi, was pregnant. And I did the right thing. We were married. Then we were separated. Then we tried one last time and ended up with a stalemate in the spring of 2002.
I remember standing in the garage where we would go to smoke after I had put Charles, then over a year old, to bed for the night. The driveway, a square of red brick with a well-grown crabgrass lawn over the top of it, was our focal point in the evening sun.
“It almost seems like we are business partners,” I said to her as we stood puffing, otherwise silent.
“Yeah. I guess we are in a way.”
“Yeah. Seems like we’re not married. Not really.”
“No, not really.”
“We’re just kind of here at the same time.”
“I know.”
I would scoot myself up to her in bed and would be pushed away. There was nothing between us; nothing except Charles. ‘Us’ would only last a few more months. Charles was not the Home Wrecker; he had just been the excuse for the home which was already wrecked. And he would become her excuse for everything she would do to me. She would try to use him to wreck my new home with my new wife.
Even so, my wife, the girl I met after Cindi, is now my constant reminder of what an unwrecked home should be. I messaged her yesterday and asked why we couldn’t just stay in bed all day and forget that the kids exist. The lack of alone time can be, if not a Home Wrecker, at least a relationship wrecker. She told me we can’t spend that kind of time because we were stupid: we had two more kids. She thinks she’s pretty funny. Then she said, “It may not be all day, but we will find a way in the next week or two.”
She reminds me that our children are not Home Wreckers if we don’t create the excuse. She reminds me that the time we take together is important to them, too. They need us to be synced. She knows that we, as a couple, need to exist as a couple and as parents simultaneously. I am discouraged by this quandary and see it as a problem often. She never lets me go down that path too far. By being cognizant of the root of our relationship, she does not let the children become the focus of nor the reason for the relationship – as once was true for me. Instead, the children are a good result of the two of us being connected. Still.
Put in the time. The excuse, the children, do not have to be a Home Wrecker.
John Emil Augustine
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
September 30, 2012
Relationships after divorce can be a Home Wrecker
“I never thought walking away from my marriage would affect as many people as it has.”
When I left my husband back in 2010 I never even considered what kind of impact it would have on the other relationships in my life. I thought it was really just between the two of us. I was so very wrong.
Everyone seemed to have an opinion, not just opinions but strong judgments. I guess, I just took it for granted that my friends would stand by me no matter what.
The hardest part for me was losing the people in my life that were “family” to me. I had known my husband’s family for close to twenty years. We were very close. When my marriage dissolved so did this “family.” Now it was not “proper” to be in each others lives. To see my old sister-in-law or her mother, who really were my best friends, started to feel sneaky to me.
After Home Wrecker was published my life really became an open book. Everything then was exposed. By the time that rolled around, it didn’t feel like that much of an invasion. I figured, what do I have to lose? I really had nothing left to hide. My entire life was now under a microscope.
Retirement is not a Home Wrecker
When I retired I had 2 goals in mind. One, I would read constantly. I have read thousands of books in my 38 years of retirement and enjoyed every word and almost every book. Two, I did not have time to play enough golf. I made up for that quickly. I played a game of golf every day of the week for 5 years. I improved my golf score by 14 strokes which goes to prove that “practice makes perfect” has a lot of truth to it.
I kind of got tired of golf and looked for another interest. I have always loved cars and wanted buy a 1957 Ford Thunderbird. I live in a mobile home park and noticed an elderly lady driving a willow green and white TBird daily in our park. I contacted her and found that she was about to buy a new car and was willing to sell her TBird. I bought it for $3600 and had a ball restoring it. I had never been a mechanic but found that I had a latent mechanical talent for cars. I did every thing to restore it except painting it and overhauling the motor. After having it for 15 years and restoring other cars like Mustangs for profit I sold my beloved TBird for $30,000, making a very nice profit.
I looked for another hobby and found there was a need for help at our local abused children center. I performed several maintenance jobs for them, one of which was repainting a play house for their playground. I really enjoyed this as I was in the middle of the children in the play yard. They would come up to me and ask me “What are you doing Mr.” when it was readily obvious I was painting. It was their way of seeking some personal attention to them. Having raised 2 children I enjoyed every minute of their queries. I found that they had a need for toys for the children so I started making various type of wooden toys for them. It gave me another time filling project and my toys were readily and happily received by the center. I found that I became an efficient carpenter with this project.
These projects proved to me that I could do things I had never done before and made me proud of myself while helping others. In the interim I bought a computer and became proficient at that and still enjoy it at age 88. I am still doing that after 38 years of retirement and enjoy every minute of it It also convinced me that keeping busy in retirement is not only a necessity but it also gives you a lot of personal satisfaction.
