Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day until Valentine’s Day.
I started lying when I fell in love.
My marriage was on the rocks when I started taking tennis lessons from a dashing young pro. But really I was the one on the rocks. My identity as a full-time stay-at-home mom of four didn’t mesh with my perfectionistic, workaholic, creative personality.
I felt like an injured athlete, stuck on the sidelines. Did anyone see me underneath the bibs and diapers, the paintbrushes and snack baggies? I could barely find time to read, let alone write, the activities that made me feel most me. Having four kids hadn’t exactly been the plan. After having my twins, I’d tried for five years to have a third child, to no avail. Then after I’d given away all the baby furniture and all paths had failed, I became quite unexpectedly pregnant. And then after I finished nursing my daughter, I found out I was pregnant again. It was like a joke. The younger two would be 17 months apart. Four?! How would I manage?
Anxiety veered sharply into depression, where it always arrived if left unchecked. I was incredibly happy to be a mother, but I was also sinking. I cried often, hiding on the bathroom floor to just get a minute to myself. I was snapping at everyone. Overeating. Overtired. People I didn’t know well asked, “Are you okay?” I wasn’t. The advice I kept getting—keep going, come on!—just wasn’t possible. The crush of it was overpowering me. I felt like I was about to go under. I found myself fantasizing about getting into a car accident, canceling plans, developing physical ailments.
Enter tennis.
Soon my weekly lesson with the new pro in the Hamptons—a kind, warm, cute, and funny guy with an awe-inspiring tan—was the only thing getting me from nap time to bedtime. Something to look forward to. Where I could be me. For months, the tennis pro didn’t even know how many kids I had. Over time I introduced him to them, bringing one in to share my lesson, another to wander around the court for fun. When he met my baby in the parking lot, he exclaimed, “There’s another one?!”
Our conversations weren’t about the stresses in life. They were about the foods we enjoyed, courts we’d played on, songs we loved. The hour was filled with tactical, not emotional, advice—bend your knees, eyes stay down, finish high, catch the racket. Across the net, I started to fall for the tennis pro, who, it turned out, was hilarious, smart, and endearingly innocent. He had just been recruited to the club after 12 years of coaching on the WTA tour, teaching lessons, and running major tournaments in the South. Super close to his family, he shared how he’d almost become a chef instead; his Italian family was full of restaurant owners, cooks, and professional bakers. Or possibly a hairstylist; he cut all his friends’ and family members’ hair and his own. But he decided to pursue tennis, which he only started playing in high school to strengthen his footwork as a star quarterback.
He wasn’t looking for anything to happen. So we connected disarmed, soul to soul, enjoying each other’s company, bantering nonstop, really understanding each other despite our completely different lives. He was dating someone new every week, going out late in Montauk, attending dinner parties of tennis clients, and working 12 hours a day without a break. He hadn’t taken a vacation in more than a decade.
We got increasingly close all summer until we both realized: Wait. Neither of us wanted the lessons to end. Labor Day was coming, and I was heading back to the city with the kids. We started texting. Confessing. It was all quite innocent until the night I got the four kids down and left them with my sitter while I drove off to meet him for drinks. And then for dinner. The next week, the beach. Then the end of my marriage.
Getting separated and divorced was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through, a unique brand of grief. The pain of destroying my family unit, disappointing loved ones, disrupting everything stable, and knowing I would be sacrificing time with my children—which was how I measured my worth as a mother—in order to be happy myself made me physically ill. Was my happiness actually worth it? Wasn’t my job as a mom to suck it up and get through it? Who said I deserved to be any happier than I was?
Meanwhile, I was starting a real relationship with the tennis pro: kissing him in cars, giggling like a schoolgirl, and eventually sneaking off to hotels in the middle of the school day. And yet, to most people I knew, I was still hiding it.
At first, aside from two close girlfriends, our families, my ex, and the lawyers, no one knew. The school moms with whom I used to chitchat at kids’ birthday parties, pickups and drop-offs, homeroom breakfasts, and baseball in the park were all off-limits. My whole social network in New York, where I’d grown up and still lived, was in the dark. I didn’t want to tell anyone until everything was sorted and we could tell the kids about the separation.
One mom later told me she was convinced I was hiding a horrific medical condition given my significant weight loss, scattered mind, and inconsistent behavior. Used to being constantly open and authentic both to friends and on the page, I was suddenly, alarmingly, zipped up. I made excuses for why I couldn’t attend this meeting or that coffee date. I felt my skin crawl.
And then there were the kids. The younger ones were too little to understand what was happening, but my twins picked up on everything. My daughter, then nine years old, was eerily perceptive.
“Who was the man on the phone?”
“Where are you going?”
“Why are you dressed up?”
“Why are you wearing eyeliner?”
“Where were you?”
My son grabbed my phone constantly, rifling through photos, scrolling through my iPad for the latest app he wanted.
The kids were like the K9 Task Force, sniffing out any scent of a device. I quickly became well-versed in hacks like hiding photos on my iPhone. I even went so far as to get another phone, until the kids found the box. I kept changing the tennis pro’s name in my contacts to Unavailable or Wireless Caller or Unknown, even to my best friend’s name and my brother’s, until my son picked up the phone one day before I could grab it, still juggling the ins and outs of parenting a baby and a toddler, and said a big “Hi, Uncle Teddy!” and then a confused “Why did he hang up?”
Multiple therapists advised against telling the kids the truth for their own good; it was too soon. First they had to get used to their parents separating. Divorcing. Then they could start to process someone new. Six months, maybe longer. Meanwhile I was going to parties with the tennis pro, starting to tell friends, publicly coming out, but the people I cared about most—the kids—didn’t know.
Terrible mom didn’t even begin to describe how ashamed I felt. I still couldn’t eat because I was so upset leaving the kids on the days I didn’t have custody. My life had collapsed, seemingly along with my morals. How much more would I have to sacrifice to change the course of my life? I knew I was ultimately doing the right thing for me and the kids, but it was clearly not the quote-unquote right thing.
Those nine crazy months in which my new life gestated before I told the kids about the tennis pro were rife with change. We moved homes in New York; I started using my maiden name again; friends who had aligned with my ex dropped me. I started spending a lot of time in LA, where my brother and his family lived and where I’d lived after college; the pain of being blocks away from my kids on their dad’s custody days and not being allowed to see them was just too much. (Sometimes it still is.)
The tennis pro and I restarted our lives partially out West so I could be with my nieces and nephew when my own kids were off limits and since the tennis pro had always been interested in a career in entertainment. He retired from tennis soon after we got together but still plays regularly for fun. I sobbed in my brother’s kitchen on Thanksgiving, the turkey and sweet potatoes warm on the stove, after FaceTiming the kids. It was a brutal, horrible time, partially of my own making.
And yet I didn’t regret it. I had to do it. Deep down I knew that I had to find joy and happiness or I wouldn’t be able to be a parent at all, certainly not the way I wanted to.
The following Memorial Day weekend, my toes in the sand again, the therapists on board with the plan, I told the kids about the tennis pro, a secret I’d kept from them for nine months. I introduced them to him, and they also fell in love, some faster than others. I started eating again; the tennis pro even cooked for me—and soon for the kids, taking care of us. The lying could finally stop.
The tennis pro and I will celebrate our seventh wedding anniversary this June. What was once a dirty secret is now a source of pride. Over time, how it all went down took on less importance. I had found the strength to do something incredibly difficult, and I was willing to do it.
Professionally, I also changed course. I went back to work. I relaunched. I started a podcast that took off, Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books. I even ended up starting my own boutique publishing company and opened a bookstore on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, just minutes away from that kitchen in LA where I barely got through my first Thanksgiving. I got multiple book deals: two anthologies, a children’s book, a memoir, and my debut novel, Blank, which comes out next month. On the back cover: “What if you could rewrite your own story?”
After everything I am, indeed, happy. But I lied. I’m not proud of that, but I’m not sorry.