Before my marriage ended, I saw divorced moms as untouchables, a class of people whose lives had cast them into a dark and lonely sea, tossed about by the waves and dragged in and out with the tides, perpetually removed from the brightly lit shores of happiness. I remember feeling unabashed pity for a divorcing mom I met when Natalie was in first grade. From my secure perch, I looked on at what I perceived to be the misery of her dreary new life and thought, That’s it for her. But lately, I’ve been noticing that the divorced moms aren’t necessarily more miserable than the married ones. In fact, many of them seem to be unapologetically happy.

I spot a fellow divorced mother, Kari, at Jessie’s school. She’s wearing cute low-rise jeans and a ball cap and laughs mischievously into her cell phone while the other mothers straighten backpacks and chat with each other. She doesn’t have the trademark beleaguered and frazzled look most of us sport as we shepherd our kids through our morning routine in our gray sweatshirts with a couple of coffee stains dribbling down the front. Kari wears clothes from the juniors’ department and has the smug air of the WFW, the well-fucked woman. She and I start talking in the parking lot and quickly exchange divorce stories. She’s a year and half further into the process.

“You seem like you’re doing okay,” I venture, hoping to find out a little of her secret.

“Well,” she laughs, “I have a boyfriend. That helps!”

“You do?” I’m a little surprised how open she is. No tone of guilt here.

“Oh god, yes! And he is fabulous.” She pronounces this last syllable with the breathy emphasis of a drag queen.

I drop my gaze to the pavement and whisper, “So do I.”

“Co-ol!” She calls out, nodding and giving me the you-go-girl look.

A few weeks later at basketball practice, one of the married mothers is idly cleaning out her purse as a cluster of us sit hunched on the bleachers, only half-watching our kids’ attempts to dribble balls down the court. Sighing, she passes me a Victoria’s Secret coupon from her discard pile. “Do you want this?” she asks, with a tone of despair. “I’m afraid you’re the only one of us having the kind of sex that requires good underwear.”

I take the coupon from her somewhat guiltily, as though the whole world will now know that I’ve broken the one-year rule.

The notion that you have to wait at least a year after a divorce before introducing your child to a new significant other is so pervasive in our culture that I can’t say when or where I heard it first any more than I could tell you where I first learned about the mechanics of JFK’s assassination or the Golden Rule. It’s public domain. You just know.

While undoubtedly humane and well founded, the waiting notion is predicated on the assumption that the newly single parent will be dating eligible candidates living within a thirty-mile radius of her home, in a dispassionate, even clinical manner—meeting discreetly on her evening off for a sequestered dinner, movie, maybe even a round of Scrabble and a quickie at his place. In my image of this type of dating, the newly single parent is no more attached to these various candidates than she might be to blouses on the rack at Macy’s. She’s merely trying them on. Nothing she can’t live without.

Even my friend Nancy (also split from her husband but normally far too sensible to become hypnotized by the competing voices of advice books) cites the one-year rule to me as if it’s recorded in stone and kept in the Ark of the Covenant.

“Aren’t you supposed to wait a year?” is her only response after I tell her about Markos coming down to my house for the weekend, even though I’m careful to add that he slept on the couch and that I introduced him as just an old high school friend.

 “Yeah, you are,” I say in an irritated voice. “But sometimes your life just happens and then you have to work with that.” For Nancy, the electrician, the world works as a binary system; something is either on or off, A or B, yes or no. For me, there will always be a thousand steps between on and off: almost on, flickering, close to off, dimming, ostensibly off.

“All the books say a year,” she returns.

“Okay, but couldn’t there be an exception?” I plead, unsure who I’m more anxious to convince—Nancy or myself.

And what if the newly single parent falls dizzily in love with someone who lives too far away to be kept partitioned off from the rest of her life, whisked in and out between Friday at three and Saturday noon when she turns into a pumpkin once again? What sayeth the rules then?

But like I said, it isn’t just Nancy. For a divorced mother of two, sensible people seem to agree, falling in love should have a waiting period, like the purchase of a handgun. And, in my heart I agree with them. Obviously, it’s not a good idea for the kids to be exposed to a constantly changing cast of characters, to be told this guy’s important this month and then next month this other guy’s the one.

But I just want them to know one guy. Maybe, though, it’s one too many. They’re still tender from all the changes that have already happened. They want every aspect of our lives, particularly my life, to stay the same as it was before the split. They want—and I want this too—for me to remain in my role of stay-at-home mom, even though I am no longer married and no longer have either the emotional or financial support needed to maintain that role. They see my life as something like the bedroom of a child gone off to college. Secured museum-tight, the room holds time still, a tribute to an era forever past that no one quite has the heart to disassemble.