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The romance of being a single woman comes at a cost

Date: 2007-03-28

My baby sister is 10 years younger than me. For the past year, she has been my roommate. Our household as two single mothers -- two single women -- is not idyllic. Little girls playing with bare-butt Barbie do not fantasize about growing up to raise children in a house with their sisters. At least I didn't, and neither did Jennifer. Yet, here we are.

Now Jennifer is moving north because minus a husband with a trust fund, the cost of living in South Florida has priced her right out of the area.

Meanwhile, a thousand miles away, middle sister Janice is preparing to marry for a second time. Her first was a teenage marriage that came with all the opaqueness of kids playing grownup. Now she's older and wiser and very much in love. I'm happy for her.

When I think about what it means to be a single woman, right here, right now, I think about my sisters. And I wonder, is there a right or wrong? Is it time for Barbie to stop playing with Ken and settle down with G.I. Joe?

I love G.I. Joe. G.I. Joe is great. But what if he wants to hang dancing fish on my wheat-colored walls? Or keep fishing lures in the tackle box I've been using for jewelry? What if he wants to know where I am all the time? What if -- oh my Lord! -- what if he changes the preset radio stations in MY CAR! (Breathe, Sherri Denise! Breathe!)

In my 20s and 30s, the idea of marriage was a confusing puzzle of soap-opera images: Me with my buff young honey, standing side-by-side, peeling potatoes for our stew and reciting poetry to each other. Then we'd retire to our master suite and feed each other fresh strawberries while we watched college football and discussed our hopes and dreams.

Or I'd envision us in the future. A silver-haired power couple with an organic garden, an Earth-friendly automobile and the kind of enduring passion that fuels old-school radio stations and quiet storms.

But I'm a forty-something single woman with children living in a fixer-upper home, dealing with shrinkages at work, increased cost of living and two kids determined to grow out of their clothes every few months whether I like it or not.

Now the romantic notions have been replaced with practicality. Is American society pricing singledom right out of the market? If the cost of living continues to skyrocket, will women be able to afford their single ways?

My escrow payment has jumped a whopping $800 per month. I don't need just a husband -- I need a dowry. I need a daddy with a milk cow and a few acres of land willing to barter my hand in matrimony to some other farmer's poor, dumb son so the two of us stand a chance of having a future.

Jennifer and I resented the times when our middle sister complained that she couldn't afford to kick her live-in fianc– to the curb. Most of the time she wasn't serious about dumping him. But financially, it would have been difficult.

My freedom-seeking mother preached that I should stand on my own and not "be dependent on any man."

She told me, "You can marry when you can't do anything else. Make sure you do everything else first!" Not a glowing endorsement of matrimony.

But years later, when I repeated that mantra to a male friend and boasted, "My mother taught me to be independent," he replied, "No, what your mother taught you was to be alone."

He said "alone" like an indictment. A scarlet letter "A" to hang from my neck like an anchor.

So now that I represent the majority -- women living without a spouse -- how do I feel about being single?

The truth -- uneasy. When my sister's car peels out of my driveway for the last time, my living room, my house, will be silent in a way it hasn't been in a long time.

Single women know the sound of the icemaker, the rustle of dying palm fronds against metal storm awnings, the gurgle and sigh of the toilet. We know what alone sounds like.

And me, I'm not crazy about the sound. Remembering that sound makes me think there could be worse things than having a dancing fish on my wall or fishing lures in my tackle box.

Even so, the silence is still better than the empty buzz of unspoken resentment. The strained, ear-shattering silence of sitting next to a man knowing that if I could afford to leave him, he and his oversized television would be on the curb faster than you could say, "And take the universal remote with you!"

Right now I have a G.I. Joe. Will it turn into more? Some days I pray yes, others ... well, I'm just glad for the distance.

What I am sure of, however, is this:

I want to raise daughters who understand how to play with boys. Understand who they are as women. Understand how to hear and respect men. How to need a man without being swallowed by that need.

I love men. I love their company, the way their minds are different; how they accept praise without deprecation and the way they kill spiders with their big work shoes.

But I'm not single because I do or don't like men -- I'm just single because I am.

And it'll probably stay that way for now, as long as I can afford the luxury.

Otherwise, I might have to see a man about a cow.





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