Sunday, May 13, 2007

THE CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG...

Remember how I fulminated against my family's tendency to spread gossip around? How I said it would take about five minutes for anything to reach everybody? Well, it was as though I wasn't listening when I said it. Or something. I called up my mother today to apologize for not sending flowers or driving up to take her out to dinner, and she put me on the phone with my recently divorced youngest sister, who chatted amiably, and then, in her warmest, most disarming manner, asked if there were anything nice happening in my life. And before I knew what I was doing, I told her I was "seeing somebody." I did NOT go into the kind of detail on the Goat and our goating it on that I have shared here, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew that I had MADE A TERRIFIC MISTAKE.

But here's why I did it. I had told my MOTHER a while ago. Then, the other night, I ran away from the speechifying at the Big Fund-raiser and called MY DAUGHTER, who is still slogging away at the end of her first year at college, while her brother is all finished and is basically drinking himself comatose. I was so glad to hear her in a pretty good state of mind that when she asked what was new, I told her. It probably helped that I was lying down on a chaise in a hotel banquet anteroom outside a gay event, dressed entirely in leather, but in any case I let the cat out of the bag. To MY DAUGHTER. And then today, I told my SISTER. So it's only a matter of time before the mill starts grinding. So today I took the bit between my teeth and wrote Isis a note. Nothing explicit, just that I didn't want her to hear this from anyone else, so here is the story:

I am seeing someone [no quotation marks, but she's not stupid] and he is nice to me. His name is [for real name, read "Goat"].

Then I sent essentially the same e-mail to my two sons. Yet again, I feel like I have done one of the stupidest things I have ever done in my life: taken off all my clothes, not in front of the PTA, as in the elementary school anxiety dream, but in front of my entire family. I feel rather... exposed. And rather... stupid.

Well, as I said somewhere before, the cat is well and truly out of the bag. In all likelihood, the only person who doesn't know that the "word is out" is my poor Goat. And I'm not sure I want to tell him that the mill is grinding...

Well, at least they haven't met him yet...
I'll never hear the end of that one.
.

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