Conform, conform or die..

It seems to be another dreary day of fatigue and lukewarm boredom. I have been productive to the extent that I have read more than 70 pages of a new book entitled "Loose Girl." The genre is not one that I would take into easily, but I thought I wouldn't mind reading a book that in some ways echoed my life of 'love promiscuity'. In this book, I attempt to find answers to my lifelong 'love addiction.' Believe me, it is no lesser of an addiction than drug addiction. I know deep down inside
the many lovers that drifted in and out of my life, were all attempts to find a home, a security base where I am loved and accepted under all conditions. Forty plus lovers (most of whom were not even physical/sexual, but merely platonic) later, I remain as homeless as ever. No, don't take pity on me. I am a hopeless, incurable, sentimental romantic, not in the sense of flowers and teddy bears, but more in the sense that a soul mate is out there, that there are indeed possibilities.

Speaking of love, I stumbled into my ex-husband's site which proudly declared him to be the new father of a boy. My jaw dropped instantaneously. I felt immobilized by the sheer weight of the news. Then the words 'What on earth?' whizzed through my mind like a Hawaiian hurricane. Is this self-proclaimed, venom spewing misanthrope who had in his days vowed to be childfree really, truly, deeply a father of a newborn boy (who I might add looks more like a wrinkled washcloth than a human)? So was the vasectomy he had undergone in our 3rd year of the relationship just a ploy to marry me? A die-hard environmentalist and lover of my freedom, I had put forth vasectomy as one of the prerequisites for marriage. It seems so. Oh yes, it seems so.
I couldn't help but wonder if he had just succumbed to conformity; you know the ubiquitous social pressure to be part of the herd, especially given the country he comes from. I will not name the country, but suffice to say that it is part of the Islamic Middle East.

I don't know, perhaps I don't want to know. But my mind has been a whirlwind of thoughts, and memories, as I interpret and re-interpret my past, not just with him, but all the lovers that have come and gone, come and gone, like the leaves of a tree. Were they also pretending to be someone else? How does one ever know?