Unmarried? Not a spinster, just a ‘Late Bloomer'

Amy Cohen had a plan: to be happily married by the age of 30 while juggling two adorable children and a lucrative career. Then life happened. At age 35, she found herself jobless, dumped, and mourning her mother’s early death by cancer. Needless to say, the adorable children were nowhere in sight. The only thought that kept Amy sane was the belief that there was hope. Everything would happen for her, she kept telling herself; she was simply a late bloomer. An excerpt.

Chapter one: The fixer-upper
I grew up thinking my mother had the answer to everything. Watch any black-and-white film and she always knew some obscure fact about an actor with one line. “See the fishmonger behind the ox, the one who’s yelling, ‘Slay the hunchback!’ ” she’d say. “His name was Skids Monroe. He came out of the Yiddish theater and was tragically maimed in a Ferris wheel accident.”

She knew about words.

“The term ‘steatopygous’ means characterized by fat about the hips and buttocks,” she explained. She grabbed a pillowy section of her thigh just below her tennis skirt, adding, “All of this, right here, is steatopygia, and once it was considered not cellulite, but a highly desirable benchmark of fertility!” She pointed at me. “Remember that next time you say you look hideous in a bathing suit.”

And she knew about men.

For my mother there were only two answers to any question involving love: he’d be back, or I was better off without him.

At sixteen, when my first boyfriend, Cliff Green, said we should see other people, I was crushed, despairing in a way I’d never experienced. “My life is over!” I wept.

“Sweetheart, I know you’re upset, but give me the knife,” my mother said, when I took to eating whole pound cakes in one sitting.

She began her pep talk, as she often did, by free-associating. “We all liked Cliff, and it’s probably time I told you that although you and your father thought it was your little secret, I knew Cliff snuck out of the house every morning. I could hear him tromping through the living room, then slamming the kitchen door.”

I was sitting on a low stepladder, my elbows resting on my knees, scraping the cream filling out of a pile of soggy Oreos I planned to put back in the cookie jar. My mother was standing behind me, wearing a flowered navy and yellow kimono we had picked out together on our trip to Japan. Her hair stopped just below her chin. It was entirely gray by this point, a crisp platinum, but her face remained almost without a wrinkle. Her wide, soft cheeks, modest nose, and lively hazel eyes looked much the way they had a decade before.

“I’m glad that you confided in me about being depressed about your relationship. At first I was afraid you and Cliff were smoking pot and that’s why you had the munchies,” she said, using a new bit of slang she’d learned at the “Just Say No to Drugs” sisterhood luncheon at the synagogue. She tossed out an empty quart of butter pecan ice cream I’d eaten and another of mint chip from which I’d systematically picked out all the chips. “But now that I know you’re depressed, the long afternoon naps make sense.” She stood behind me tenderly picking cookie crumbs out of my hair.

“Pussycat, trust me. I’m positive. He’ll be back.”

“You really think so?”

“Mark my words,” she said. “I promise.”

Two months later, Cliff came back.

When I fell in love with a boy named Ian, freshman year of college, who told me he loved me in a way he had never loved anyone before, enough to admit to me and only me that he was gay, his mascara smearing as he wept, my mother consoled me with “Better now than in thirty years.” She put her arm around me. “Could you really get serious with a man who wore a bustier?” Adding finally, “You’re better off without him.”

At twenty-four, Jay McPhee ended our relationship of two years explaining that, while his preferred model of love was “The Dog Bone” — namely two separate, independent entities bound by a long, sturdy bridge (he said “long” twice, as in “long, long sturdy bridge”) — my ideal was what he called “The Pretzel,” where two people are twisted together, fused in several places, preventing any opportunity for individuality. Or escape.

“I’m not a pretzel,” I said, desperately.

“Oh, but you are,” he said.

“I can be a dog bone!” I pleaded. “I can! Give me a chance!”

I didn’t think Jay and I were right for each other, but I had always hoped it would be my choice, not his, whether to suffer a life of regret and stifling mediocrity.

“He said you weren’t independent? That’s ridiculous,” my mother said, reaching for the overnight bag I’d brought to stay at my parents’ apartment until I felt better. She led me into my old bedroom, still decorated with the many cat posters I collected before we found out I was allergic.

“Not independent.” She scoffed. “Mark my words. He’ll be back.” And when that never happened, she assured me, “You’re better off without him.”

Right around the time I turned twenty-six, when I reluctantly broke up with David Orlean because he complained I was too independent and career minded, my mother added a new saying to her repertoire.

“People who want to be married are married,” she said, thrilled to have coined a phrase that could be so deep and yet so simple.

“Huh?” I said. “I don’t get it.”

“People who want to be married are married,” she repeated. “Look at that woman, the one I showed you in the paper, who’s blind now because her husband threw acid in her eyes. Even though she knew he had mistresses, even though he maimed her, she stayed married to him.”

She nodded and folded her arms, as if to say, “Am I a genius or what?”

I was confused. “Okay. And?”

“So if you really wanted to be married, you would be!” She clapped her hands in a single loud strike. “That’s the answer. When you really want it, it will happen.”

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