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Wives, too, are recycled. Early January was when my father, eight years ago, left plane tickets with his name and another woman's out on the kitchen table for my mother to discover. They were both fifty-five years old.
I don't know if divorce is always an act of liberation when a woman initiates it, but when a man uses up a woman, decides she's too tired and worn out to hang onto, and skips off hand and hand with a newer model to start off the new year with a new life, it's great for him, but devastating for all those he betrayed.
Perhaps this is a good time to think of all those older women in their fifties and sixties who never thought they'd be figuring out how to survive alone into their old age financially and emotionally after having given up so much for their marriages. Remarriage is very often not an option, for a variety of reasons. Sadly, many of these were women who, like my mother, prefaced statements about marriage and gender relations with the words, "I'm not one of those feminists..." Feminism had better not fail them now.
