After All, Tomorrow Is Another Day

Life After Tara

20 boxes unpacked, 12 to go

“I’m tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do.” - Scarlett O’Hara, Gone With The Wind

Twenty-one years ago, in preparation for my son’s fifth birthday party, I spent a couple weeks constructing an elaborate birthday card to impress the other parents. It had a vellum overlay affixed with a tiny white satin ribbon that I painstakingly tied in a perfect bow 30, 40, or 50 times, I can’t remember exactly how many kids were on the invite list. Despite also having a newborn, I had ample time to conceptualize and assemble the cards because I had a nanny, a night nurse, a maid, a gardener, a pool guy, and occasionally a personal chef. Also, my mother-in-law was the real lady of the house, so the only role left to me was to make sure the little things looked good.

About a week before the party, I was visiting two gay dads in our tony Hollywood Hills neighborhood, and one of them gesticulated to my invitation, prominently displayed on their refrigerator door with a magnet.

“Virginia,” he asked, “if this is what you’ve done for the 5th birthday party, what’s left for the bar mitzvah?”

I took great pride in knowing I’d impressed the gay dads. This cheap dopamine hit temporarily masked the inconvenient truth that much of my then 39 years had been spent trying to be someone I wasn’t in order to feel worthy. By the time my son’s fifth birthday rolled around I was practically asphyxiating due to a dwindling supply of integrity.

As it turned out, I never had to wrangle the perfect bar mitzvah invitation because my son’s father decided Hebrew school would leave less time for golf lessons, therefore bypassing the sacred rite of passage altogether, and also because we got apocalyptically divorced, whereupon I acquired a whole other echelon of problems, problems so unglamorous and exhausting that I eventually stopped sending out cards of any kind, altogether.

Fourteen years later, I exited yet another relationship with the wrong person, this time to The Grifter. When I moved out of our faded glory art deco rental above the Sunset Strip, I also left behind cherished possessions I couldn’t fit in the 700-square foot box in West Hollywood that I moved into with The Daughter.

But I rolled up my mother’s prized Oriental rugs because I couldn’t bear to part with them, the rugs that had laid across the floor of every home I’d lived in since I got out of college, and stuck them in my new garage hoping I’d figure something out. A few months later, I unrolled and inspected them with my friend Michael, who was there to offer me moral support, but also to be ruthless.

The carpets had been so damaged by The Grifter’s uncontrollable Mastiff that it would have cost more money that I couldn’t spare to repair them than to buy new rugs.

“Chuck them,” Michael instructed. I sighed, knowing he was right.

As he helped me hoist what was left of my mother’s beloved carpets into the dumpster, I felt a tug of grief I didn’t have time for. Grief could take me down permanently, I realized, or it could jettison me towards a life that might not ever contain another oriental rug, but would have real value: the value that I had acquired in the process of losing almost everything, the nascent but fiery belief that the only person in charge of my self-esteem was me — not a guy, not a social circle, not a perfectly decorated house, and certainly not a show-offy party invitation.

In the then 55 years I’d spent trying to be someone else, all I’d succeeded in was burning my own house to the ground. If I thought about the odds of starting over and finding happiness, I wouldn’t be able to keep going. And so I just thought about what needed to happen. Then I figured out how to get shit done.

I spent five more years channeling my inner Scarlett O’Hara in that tiny apartment. (FYI, I am distantly related on my dad’s side to Scarlett’s creator, Margaret Mitchell). I juggled multiple jobs, wrote a book, worked the steps in Alanon, cultivated a mindfulness discipline, learned some financial literacy for fuck’s sake, saved every penny I could, grew my private practice and lo and behold, doubled my income. I did everything short of wear velvet curtains for clothes (although I did buy them second-hand for a few years), and as God was my witness, determined that I was going to own a home again one day.

This time, it would be a home that wouldn’t leave me so house-poor that I’d have to sell it. A home that would be all mine, so I’d never have to worry about losing it to a future relationship that didn’t work out. But the only way I could afford any home was by leaving Los Angeles.

So I did.

Which brings me to today. As I write this, the whir of a circular saw is echoing from the other end of the Asheville condo I own all by myself, where the flooring guys are laying hardwood in the formerly olive-green carpet-clad master bedroom. In a few weeks, the new bed and mattress I ordered will arrive, and then I’ll be sleeping in that room instead of the guest room.

There are other things I want to change — the drab kitchen floor tile, some generic Home Depot light fixtures. But it’s time to make more money before I spend it, so other renovations will have to wait.

In my previous incarnations, living in visible aesthetic imperfection would have felt unbearable. Now, with the gift of emotional sobriety, I wake up every morning basking in gratitude for the imperfect yet abundant life I built out of ashes.

My brand new flooring!

“I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.” - Scarlett O’Hara, Gone With The Wind