I’ve got fear of being alone. But it’s not like the fear of being alone I had when I was a young woman, when I worried someone was going to break into the house and kill me. It’s more like a social fear.

This is what I mean. I don’t like seeing myself as a woman alone. *Doing* the experience of the woman alone in the world, shopping for groceries, going to yoga, talking on the phone, minute to minute, isn’t bad, but *being* a woman alone, in the abstract? Now that somewhat depresses me.

I hate to admit this but these days I occasionally look at women who have husbands with envy. It is like that story of the woman who is having trouble getting pregnant and it seems like the whole world is full of baby strollers … My mind is like this: “Oh, yeah, she doesn’t have any problems, she *has* a husband.” 

Now this has to be placed in the “my very short memory” file. As in, “Can you really have forgotten all the reasons you made this choice? And also this. I know these women. They are my friends. They tell me what their lives are like. Everyone has problems.

Well, this is the thing. I have always been a married woman. While at first, back in the fall, I was just grateful that all the trouble that marriage caused me was in abatement, now I feel something different. My pride, my ego is affected. And I’m realizing that my social position has shifted, and not in a way I like.

So here I am. Alone. With no protector. Or admirer. Or anything. I still live in the same house, with the same job, with my son, who is doing the same stuff, I still have the same dogs, and in the evening, I still go to the same yoga studio and ride the same bike. On the same trails.

Wearing mostly the same clothes. I think it might be time to go on some sort of spiritual journey, although I’m not sure where that would start. 

Occasionally I wonder if there’s some way to escape being alone. My son in law once came up with a more novel solution for my solo situation. He suggested I should go back to California, find my first husband, steal him from his third wife, and (I guess) live in Palo Alto. I find this funny. But only a little funny.

Still, the dismaying thought: I have no husband! Or even a boyfriend! Or man who might become one of those things who wants to take me out to dinner! Or even a male friend or brother in town.

I am alone. I tell myself that actually that is a good thing. But sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.