Wendy Merrill - Falling Into Manholes: The Memoir of a Bad/Good Girl

i had breakfast this morning with my girlfriend Hedy to celebrate my upcoming forty-something birthday. We sat in a gazebo restaurant on a beach in Maui, surrounded by palm trees and soft tropical air, and all we could talk about was aging and face-lifts. Hedy qualifies as my plastic-surgery expert, having had her eyes and boobs done in her thirties and a full face-lift in her early forties. Shes fifty-three now and gearing up for her next round of surgery. After inspecting my face, she said, If you just get your eyes done now, it might look like youve put a brand-new couch on a worn-out carpet. Wait a few more years until the whole face starts to go and have it done all at once. She continued, Youre at the age where it all still looks good, but one day, and one day soon, you are going to look in the mirror and realize that its all gone to hell.

Happy birthday to me! I said, and retreated to my macadamia nut pancakes, wondering if she was right and hoping she was wrong.

It never occurred to me to consider plastic surgery until very recently. I was one of those women who took her looks for granted. I assumed I would somehow be exempt from the aging process, wouldnt care by the time I got there, or would die young. I was always secretly a bit contemptuous of women who had cosmetic surgery, thinking them vain and insecure. It has since come to my attention that whatever I have contempt for, I should just set a place for it at my table, because its either already in my life or its coming.

When I was a teenager I had contempt for people who drank and used drugs, girls who suffered from eating disorders, and women who lost all their money in connection with some man. After seventeen years in recovery from alcoholism and bulimia, and having lost all my money in what I call my spectacular co-dependent bottom of 2000 with the help of my gambling-addict ex-stockbroker-turned-mattress-salesman boyfriend, it has dawned on me that I can use my contempt, which is really my fear, to predict my futureor, better yet, to change it.

A few months ago I broke up with a younger manlets call him Brad (since it rhymes with cad )who lives in L.A. and works in the music business. He was another never-been-married-or-had-a-successful-relationship forty-year-old man/boy who lies about his age from Hollywood. In retrospect, this should have been all the information I needed to stay away from himI wanted a mate, not just a datebut he was sexy as hell and I had been in a penis-free zone for too long.

Thinking that this time it would be different, I used all my powers of denial to ignore the red flags and charged ahead. I figured if I moved fast enough, it wouldnt count as a mistake, like if I eat a chocolate bar fast enough, it wont have any calories. My favorite definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, and this qualified. Not unlike the main character of the movie Groundhog Day, I seem destined to relive the same relationship over and over until Im willing to change my behavior.

My first moment of clarity came during the holiday season, when I was giving Brad a blow job and realized that I didnt know him well enough to know what to get him for Christmas. I thought this was ironic, but when I told him, he said, Yes, that is a problem around the holidays, isnt it? My girlfriends, on the other hand, understood.

My next clue should have been when we were making love and he whispered, Women your age cant really get pregnant, can they?

I thought to myself, They shoot assholes, dont they? but I was still having enough fun to overlook his comment.

The last time I saw him was when he casually mentioned, I want to marry someone exactly like you, only younger. This is not something that I will ever need to hear more than once, so I said, Good luck with that, gathered my belongings, and left.

Brad was like an abbreviated version of my love affair with drinking. At first it was fun, then it was fun with problems, and finally it was just problems. I stopped drinking years ago, but I still fall into the occasional manhole. At least I usually dont set up house and furnish it anymore. I was never a serial dater, but I was a serial mater, so after hooking up with the wrong person, I would either marry him or spend years trying to make it work. Now I can usually fall into and climb out of a manhole in about six weeks, tops. Once in a while, I can even walk around one. I call this expiration datingrelationships that last about as long as a carton of refrigerated soy milk.

My married-with-children, mental-health-professional sister Robin describes my dating history as Wendys catch-and-release program, a term used in sportfishing where the sole objective is to catch the fish and then return it to the water relatively unharmed. I used to think this was funny, until I realized that I was guilty of the very thing that I accuse men of. The possibility of a man is more interesting to me than the man himself. If I settle on someone, then the possibility is lost. When I drank, I chose men who drank more than I did so that they could be identified as the ones in need of help and I didnt have to look at my own behavior. This thinking has clearly followed me into sobriety. So whos really on the hook here? What is it that I am really fishing for?

The day after walking away from Brad, my ob-gyn called to tell me that I was in perimenopause. Men-o- pause. The coincidence wasnt lost on me, but I was startled. How did this happen? What did this mean?