Yesterday the ex dropped the kid off at my new house.  For the last 2 plus years he’s usually alone and though he does the slow ride by nearly still moving while the kid gets out…it’s usually uneventful and I rarely even see him or his vehicle.  I just see he kidlet walking through the door. 

It’s a tad bit different now, first there’s a giant window in my living room from which I can see anyone that comes around.  Plus my doggie alarm will let anyone know that someone is approaching.  However, yesterday I was in the library (yes I love saying it and typing that phrase) and the kidlet walked in the front door.  I asked him if he had trouble remembering how to get to my house.  He said no.

Keith told me that the ex’s wife came along for the ride.  This is highly unusual and yet it makes total sense.  She felt the need to spit her gum out near my new driveway.  Yes….because she’s 7 years older than me and this is how she behaves. 

Apparently she’s been quite cranky and bitchy lately and my son has expressed his annoyance about this to his father.  His father told him to “be nice, she’s going through menopause.”

Let me clearly state that menopause is no laughing matter.  I realize this.  However, I find in her case, this to be highly amusing.  She has some sort of competition in her own mind with me.  I have none with her.  She dyes her hair (it’s totally gray), she speaks incessantly about dieting, she clearly is insecure.  It might help her if she stopped wearing those Laura Ingalls flowered dresses with the $9.99 K-mart shoes.  Yes ok ok…I’m not spitting my gum in her driveway but that is immature of me to say.

I, on the other hand, am not insecure about any part of my life. Sure I have self doubt’s from time to time, but I can tell you that I love myself.  I love who I am, I love my hair, my face, my Italian nose, my feet, my big butt.  I have come to terms with whom and what I am and I’m comfortable in my skin.  Each life change that I have faced, particularly in the last 5 years has been done by examining my options, learning about my fate and moving through things with as much grace as I can muster up.  I’m far from perfect, but I perfectly love myself and who I have become.

Not this woman.  She fears him talking to me.  (yes because I’m happily remarried and would ruin that for the former asshat? Please someone explain this way of thinking to me)  She will turn the TV up if I call him because this impedes his ability to hear me.  She tells my son inexcusable things like, “you are a bitch like your mother, just like your mother.”  I find it hard to imagine how I am a bitch when I didn’t sleep with her husband, she slept with mine!”

Regardless of my opinions of her, I find it all quite amusing at best how insecure and immature this grown woman behaves.  She came for the ride yesterday because she simply “must know” where I live.  I’m sure in her head she must compare what I have with what she has.  After all there was a point not so long ago when she did that same comparison and decided my life was better than hers and she set about being a home wrecker (ok ok so the home was half on fire and gutted out in the middle…but still) to take my life from me.  Funny how now that she has it, she still wants to know if what she has is better than what I have or not.  The answer would be a resounding no.  I read in a self-help book that woman who intentionally set out to be a home wrecker do it partly because they want to be “better” than the wife.  For them it becomes a test of which woman is more desirable.

So taking all of this into consideration when my son told me her menopause woes, I advised my son to tell his father the following. “Tell Dad that menopause doesn’t take 6 years, she’s a bitch only because she’s a bitch.”

Of course later I did tell Rick about this exchange and her spitting her gum in our driveway…..and I told him, “Perhaps I should send her a sympathy card and write inside of it, ‘I’m sorry to hear of the recent loss of your womanhood.”

DO I think that menopause is a loss of womanhood?  No.  But this is a woman who once told me she was going to have children with my ex-husband. I suppose he never told her he had a vasectomy when Keith was less than a year old.  Ha!  Thanks for taking that lying bastard away from me.

Maybe I’ll be nicer and just send her a hand fan.

How about a tube of lube….??