Fallen Woman

Pulling the pantyhose up each leg made this feel more glamorous than it was. There was a time in my life when I loved to dress up. I couldn't get enough of the fancy clothes, the shoes, the beautiful jewelry. I didn't have that life for long, but the years I did were unforgettable. Sitting on the edge of my mattress, getting ready to interview for a menial job, I realized how different my life is now compared to the prosperous one I'd worked so hard to obtain. It was like playing dress-up in someone else's clothes-it was all a façade. I shimmied my skirt down my thighs, slipped into my shoes from a previous era, and stared at my reflection in the mirror for final adjustments to my overall look. I no longer recognized the woman in front of me and didn't much care for the person I saw. When I was in my teens or even my early twenties, I never imagined the curveball life would throw at me. I never had much, but I worked hard and kept my nose to the grindstone, determined to escape the hell the kids in my neighborhood endured. They all lived under the same assumption-they'd never be free. The belief we would live the same tarnished lives as our parents wasn't one I was willing to accept. I came from trash, but I'd be damned if I would stay in that dumpster. I was bound and determined to escape. By the time my senior year came around, my dad had disappeared and my mom was strung out. I knew what it was like to be hungry and cold because the bills weren't paid, and if I hadn't kept the forms filled out for our section eight housing, I would have known what it was like to be homeless, too. My entire life depended upon my getting a full ride to college, so I invested every waking moment in sports, school activities, and academics-one way or another, I would make it. In the middle of my senior year, Dartmouth awarded me the full ride I was so desperate to obtain. I counted down the days until my departure to Hanover and never looked back at the filthy streets I came from. Ryan and I met my freshman year-he was escaping the confines of his own hell. He'd come from a family with tons of money, but with that came an abusive father and an alcoholic mother. We were thick as thieves throughout college. He was the only man I had ever loved, and to this day, I doubted I'd ever love another the way I did him-regardless of how things ended and the legacy he'd left me to deal with. After graduation, Ryan got a job on Wall Street, and I followed him to New York and Madison Avenue. We did the obligatory family thing with his relatives a couple of times a year, but after we had married, that ended abruptly. At our first New Year's Eve party as a married couple, Ryan's dad was rip-roaring drunk, and I said something he took the wrong way. When he slapped me in front of a hundred of their closest friends and relatives, Ryan bowed out of the family-and their money and prestige. He had a fantastic job, and I was doing well. I'd never had anything that resembled family anyhow, so I wasn't all that disappointed, but I knew my husband was. He kept his head held high, but shortly after, the greatest recession of my lifetime hit, the stock market crashed, and Ryan and I lost everything we'd earned. I was pretty young at the time, a newlywed, with twins on the way. Ryan and I had only been married a year, and I was six months pregnant. Suddenly, thrown back into my past, money was an all-consuming obsession. I had done life by the book. In every way possible, I followed the rules and played it safe. I figured the stock market would bounce back; I assumed Ryan would have no trouble finding another job. But I quickly realized, we were in deep, and everyone around us struggled to stay afloat. Barely able to tread water, the weights holding us down kept getting heavier-the ability to swim without drowning became almost impossible. And there was no one on the horizon with a life raft to save us. When nothing else could go wrong-it did. The details of then led to now, but the intricacies were no longer important. The only thing that mattered was I was a widow with three kids under the age of five and didn't have two nickels to rub together, much less food in the pantry. I couldn't remember the last time I ate a decent meal or held down a respectable job. At that point, the only things I cared about were my children eating and staying warm-I could survive a lot longer than any of them...but I was beyond desperate.