May 2008
Moving On
I love Jakes moms blog!
A few nights ago my daughter Hannah was having dinner at a friend’s house. There, she met an older woman her friend’s mother knew from church. Hannah had just come back from a trip to Mexico and her stomach was bothering her. Since this woman said she was a nurse, Hannah decided to ask if she had any thoughts on what might be going on with her digestion. Over dinner, the woman asked no fewer than four times if Hannah noticed “a change in her stools.”
“Are they watery? Loose? Black?”
In a feverish attempt to redirect the conversation, Hannah asked where she lived.
“ I used to live down the street until four years ago.” She went on to say she married her high school sweetheart, had three kids, and gained a bunch of weight. Her husband started having an affair with his secretary and eventually asked her for a divorce. She was devastated.
“You’re better off without him,” her friends told her, and gradually, she started to believe it. She had gastric bypass surgery and within a year dropped a hundred and ten pounds. She went back to school and got her nursing degree. She bought a small condo with a view of Long Island Sound. She had never been happier.
“I felt like a new woman. I decided I didn’t want my ex’s name anymore, but I didn’t want to go back to the name I’d been born with, either. I’d come too far. I remembered what my friends told me after Fred left, the words that helped me believe in myself. You’re better off without him. That’s the name, I thought. Bedderhoff.”
At first Hannah thought this was Leslie Neilsen style punch line, so she laughed politely. But it was true. The woman really had changed her name to Bedderhoff.
Was she just guilty of taking a corny play on words too far? That’s one theory. Another theory, which I personally think is way more likely, is that she’s insane.
