Chapter Overviews

Prologue - Life is like a closet. After many months, sometimes years, we are forced most reluctantly to weed out many of its accumulations.

The Beginning - My School Girl Fantasy - I am Jane Jetson. Like Jane Jetson, I am voluptuous. But unlike the popular Hanna-Barbera cartoon, I have a corporate agenda and the body of a runway model.

1 - In A Nutshell, Reality Sucks - “Reality replaces REM. I am not Heidi Klum. I am Abagal Smart; the midlife, divorced mom of two.”

2 - So Many Questions, So Little Time - What I have become and where I am today is a slightly altered rendition of what I once envisioned.

3 - Growing Up - Footnote #4: I was raised in an average dysfunctional family. I was truly disheartened by the realization we really didn¹t have the corner on this.

4 - The Birds, The Bees, And All That Other Nonsense - The birds and the bees story. Yuk!

5 - Back On Track - Okay, girls, let’ s face it. We were doomed from the minute Mom took us to see Cinderella.

6 - Living Out The Fairytail - I managed to find Bobby my very own “Bobby Ewing.” His specialty was designing white picket fences.

7 - The Hard Boiled Egg - Who were these women who got pregnant on their wedding nights? Were some women born to birth and others born to try?

8 - The Unraveling Of The American Dream - As I rolled over in bed one morning to turn off the alarm, instead of finding a ravaged naked body, leftover from the previous night’s sexual escapade, I was horrified to discover my body completely clothed in a Christmas Holly flannel nightgown and granny panties.

9 - What Was I Thinking - It had been over thirty years since the ERA movement and that totally ridiculous commercial about bringing home the bacon and frying it up in the pan. What happened to evolution?

10 - Breaking Up Is So Very Hard To Do - By the summer of 2002, I had become a forty-four-year-old single woman who had been left with fifty percent of the responsibility of raising my children and somewhat less than that percentage of the marital assets.

11 Reinventing The Millennium Girl - To even begin to fully understand the transformation, you need to have an accurate picture of the newly divorced, extremely idealistic woman who was clueless about a world without a husband.

12 - Finding Comfortable Ground - I equate the first wife with a first car: the demo. The nicks, dings, and scrapes don’t mean a thing because someday she most likely will be traded in for a new model.

13 - Pre-Owned Man - Basically, men at my age are like parking spots; the good ones are taken and the rest are handicapped (emotionally).

14 - When Given Lemons - Just about the time I had purchased a new jewelry box to house all my new baubles and had permanently deleted Mr. NBMNC from my cell phone database, along came Mr. Casanova.

15 - Yours, Mine, And Not Ours - I will never bring a man into my household again until my children are successfully moved out of the house, or he has been neutered and I am heavily medicated.

16 - The Continued Importance Of Gal Pals - Once again, as a forty-eight year old single woman, my single girlfriends have shifted back into playing a very significant role in my life.

17 - The New Fairytale Aged To Perfection - The main objective Bobby, his Mrs. and I have concerning the children is: get the job done and get it done right. Once that has been accomplished, we will liquidate everything and enter the witness protection program.

The Continuation - Full Circle - I have come full circle and have managed, with an adequate supply of crazy glue, to stay intact and fairly mentally healthy. A smidgeon of dysfunctionality keeps me interesting.