The Bag Lady Papers by Alexandra Penney

things with my son or study and paint.
    We began to spend long periods away from each other. When my son was at camp in Maine, I would take vacations there and paint the rocks and the ocean, while my husband stayed in Vermont. We had differing outlooks on life. I wanted adventure. I wanted to meet exciting people, to learn as much as I could, to have new experiences. He wanted the peace and tranquillity of his own home in the beautiful Vermont countryside.
    At a dinner party recently, a young man whose parents had divorced in the early eighties during the postfeminist period, as my husband and I did, said, “My parents split up, and a lot of my friends’ parents did, too; it seems as if it was the trendy thing to get a divorce in those years.”
    If you pressed me about exactly why my husband and I decided to go our separate ways, I couldn’t give you a specific answer. Several of my friends were leaving their marriages and they reported feeling liberated and relieved without their conjugal responsibilities. I wanted a different kind of life and was intent on having it. Ours was a mutual agreement and mostly an amicable one. We separated but didn’t divorce for almost six years. We remained close friends and we both wanted to make sure it was the right thing to do for us and for our son. The single most difficult, most painful moment of my life was telling my son that his father and I were separating. He was twelve at the time.
    My now ex-husband found an elegant but smaller apartment adjacent to Fifth Avenue, a block away from where we had lived on Seventy-second Street. Our son would stay with him whenever he wanted to be uptown. I shed my Park Avenue self and rented a small, inexpensive interim one-bedroom on the outskirts of Greenwich Village that I found in the Times Classified section. The loft on LaGuardia Place, although still available, was way out of my new budget.
    Of course I was plenty worried about money. These weren’t bag lady fears; these were fears that came from being a mother, with a primary responsibility to be a good parent. I believed that feminist fairness called for me to pay half of my son’s private school tuition and to contribute as much as I could for his food and clothing. My husband, who still had his job as an industrial designer, would give us as much as he could for child support. If we didn’t have enough, we would apply for a scholarship so that our child could go to his uptown school without interruption. Separation and living downtown in a dramatically different style, away from his friends, was an enormous upheaval for a child. Our son needed as much familiar continuity as possible. Throughout this period, I was convinced that even if I had to work four jobs and sell Avon cosmetics door to door, I would make enough money to start a new kind of life.
    And that is how I feel—most of the time—these days. I will do it. I will earn enough money so that I won’t become a bag lady. I’m not sure exactly how but I will make it happen. I will write; I will make art. I will set up a Web site. I will create something that will bring in money. When thedemons stage a full-scale assault, I yell at myself that I can do it—over and over again. And I convince myself. And I will do it.
    Although I painted the new living quarters white, they were a major comedown from our uptown home with its spacious living room and stone fireplace, its formal dining room, and its large windowed kitchen. On most weekends my son would head to Vermont with his dad and then my place seemed pretty grim. I was lonely and uprooted but I kept my spirits up by thinking, This is all my own and I’ll find something great as soon as I’m more settled financially.
    I slept in the living room, my son had the bedroom, and every day we made a game of the long subway trip uptown to his school. I would drop him off and head back to look ceaselessly for a better and larger