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Entries from November 1, 2007 - November 30, 2007

Friday
Nov302007

Today, I took off my wedding rings

Just before I signed the Dissolution of Marriage papers several weeks ago, I paused for a moment with my pen hovering above the line with my name printed neatly below. I'd let them sit idle on the table next to my laptop where I was working for an hour or so while I processed what my pen and my heart was about to sign away. Then enough was enough and just once more, I read through each neatly numbered item -- the factual remains of a ten-year relationship that produced a son, few assets and more pain than my swollen heart could ever have dreamed -- and then dashed my handwriting across the page.

The fax machine buzzed productively and I felt the weight of the months and lies and betrayal and appalling behavior rise up out of me. I felt lighter. I felt a great sense of relief. The end was beginning and that was right.

While I waited for the papers to be served, my grrrlfriends and family tightened their circle around me. Molls and I agreed to plan a ritual, a blessing of the wedding tiara I hopefully passed on to her to wear in her own wedding next March but now felt tarnished. For me, we decided we'd make a ceremony out of removing my wedding rings, of offering the hope embedded in them up to the universe for greater things to come. In the weeks since, I've turned those rings around and around on my finger anxiously, sentimentally. As the sad weight has been subtracted from my body, the rings have fit more loosely and maybe that's why I've noticed their presence more than I did when they were shiny five years ago.

Maybe it was because the rings came to represent something unfelt, uncommitted, unattainable, untrue. Or at least almost all those things. Still, I held on to that ritual, to the vow to myself that I'd have a deep sense of knowing when the time arrived to slip them from the finger that traced to my heart.

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Thursday
Nov292007

Thursday shuffle

Sassycuts Today, the goal is to be calmly productive, fierce in measure as I envelope myself in deadlines, interviews and personal business that needs more attention, energy and cleverness than I have -- or at least would have measured at 7:12 this morning when Lil E woke up ready to go and I was still holding out to that ridiculous parental hope that it would be the one freak of preschooler nature morning he'd sleep in until after Oprah.

I've chosen a lovely cocktail of stimulant-depressant-stimulant-depressant to pull up my skills and keep my focus steady. At other points (the old and glorious grad school finals week days, for example), that pattern may have manifested in a tequila-Big Gulp-tequila-clove cigarettes frenzy. In this life, that just means, coffee-CDs-coffee-CDs.

I grabbed a bunch of music from the apartment last week, so I'm doing my shuffle the extremely low-tech style, with a constant stream of CDs in and out and blaring from my laptop. Thankfully, I've had just enough coffee to keep that pace up while I post away.

Here's playlist just for today:

Treat Yo Mama - John Butler Trio
Climb On (A Back That's Strong) - Shawn Colvin
Maybe Katie - Barenaked Ladies
Jolene - Mindy Smith (cover of Dolly Parton)
Happy Birthday Helen - Things of Stone and Wood
No Radio - The Junction*
Fidelity - Regina Spektor
Cannonball - Damien Rice
If You Tell Me Yours, I'll Tell You Mine- Missy Higgins
You're Beautiful - James
Made of Steel - Christine Kane

Now share the love: What's coming through your speakers today, kittens?

*this band has been defunct for years but damn, they were good

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Wednesday
Nov282007

It took almost as long to write this Thanksgiving recap post as it did to get prints of the three-year old birth photos

Gratitude I've been sitting in my office all day, distracting myself with posting about everything else other than Thanksgiving. There have been strings of thoughts through my mind that could easily work themselves into sentences and then paragraphs and eventually fulfill my feelings that the holiday must be discussed. It has just been difficult to weave it together. More difficult than I imagined.

This makes sense, I suppose, since Thanksgiving was more difficult than I imagined. I tried very hard to convince myself that the near eight-hour road trip with my dad and grandmother sitting in happy silence in the front seats and my mom and I nestled around Lil E in the carseat in the back, would be the beginning of a get-away. I really hoped that the hotel room my boy and I shared that adjoined to my parents' room would give us a bit of a retreat from being long-term guests in their home while also having some support for the inevitable late-night wakings in a strange bed far from home. I so wanted to escape the upheaval that has become our new normal.

That's not what happened. As much as I hate to put these words to keyboard or screen or into the universe, I was - quite honestly - not feeling very grateful. And that's where it began to unravel.

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