Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

Ann’s rushing and running late—again. This time to the doctor’s office.

No car. No time for a cab, or nerve to hitchhike.

She hauls up her bike from the basement, dashes out the front door and swings her leg over the bike seat to catch the pedal.

But, uh-oh, her fanny flies into the air like a dog in heat. Damn it. Her ex did it again; raised her bike seat.

Ann catches her feet on the pavement, stops dead and lowers the seat. She also forgets to wear her bike helmet—all the way to Georgetown. She hopes that no one shouts about the dangers of riding helmet free.

But none of that happens, only the aggravation that persists from her roll-the-eyes living arrangement with her ex husband.

*  *  *

Financial pressures have forced me into a too-close-for-comfort lifestyle.

Since my divorce last November, my ex (now roommate) hasn’t regressed to the point of leaving the toilet seat up, but he has begun raising the seat on my bike.

Yesterday marked the second time it’s happened. Next time I hop on my Cannondale, I’ll check.

A too-high bicycle seat, however, isn’t the first thing I notice when I search for my bike.  My ex likes to change its resting place.

Lately, he’s laid it across the steps that lead to the door of my basement apartment. That creates a tripping hazard when I come in late at night and the lights are off. From his perspective, I think that’s the point.

Another thing he did to aggravate me (actually, pissed me off) was to remove pictures of myself with the kids from the fireplace mantel.

Oh, he left like one and then heavily populated the mantel with Dad and kid pictures. He even removed a picture of my younger son with my Mom and Dad. I thought that showed particularly bad taste.

When I asked him about it, he said, “You don’t live here anymore.” He’s constantly trying to push me out of my children’s lives since I asked for the divorce last year.

The way I got back? And, maybe I shouldn’t have, but I removed pictures of him from the remaining picture frames and tore them up.

We also go back and forth on changing the personal greeting to the house phone. The point is not to change the message as who’s voice a caller should hear.

The tensions run high in my little house in Northwest Washington—too high for comfort, which is not unlike my bicycle seat.