Beth Jones

I'm sure that for some families (particularly on the Hallmark Channel), the second Sunday in May is a daisy chain of handmade gifts, brunches where children eat asparagus, stimulating conversations with extended family who truly enjoy each other's company, sunshine, conviviality and a blissful holiday of joyful togetherness with the...

We were three single women approaching 40. We had great careers, plenty of short-lived relationships, but no enduring romantic prospects and no children. Just as it seemed least likely that we'd ever be parents, one by one, we got lucky.

When Carey hit the biological midnight of her 39th...

My son is six-years-old. He's the child of my second marriage. Somewhere in my attic are the photos from my first wedding, and envelopes of photos from vacations, family visits, and everyday life with my first husband. Interestingly, even after seven years of marriage I never made an album out...

My divorce took nearly two years. Between the icy night when my ex and I split and the sunny spring day when the gavel finally struck, I behaved like a wild 18-year-old. During that 20 months, I had a series of romps, returned to my long-abandoned smoking habit, got stoned,...

Is there a statue of limitations on dissing your ex? I think not. Or I hope not, since I've gotten a lot of mileage out of mine. The first chapter of my book is about how badly he behaved when we were married, and how he left me for a...

A long-divorced friend was at a dinner party recently and she raised her glass to congratulate a woman who'd been separated for a month. "Is it okay to do that?" the separated woman asked. "Toast to end of my marriage?" My friend assured her it was. And, I suspect, many...

A few weeks after my ex-husband left (and moved in with his personal trainer), I signed-on with a therapist and she promptly set me up with a psychopharmacologist. I was a shaking, babbling, wreck. My body knew how to walk, which was good, because the rest of me was largely...

Don't listen to everything you hear.

The volume of posts on this site is an indication of how everyone, everyone, has an opinion on divorce. Recently, Jessie, a twice-married, once-divorced, currently-separated friend asked me for advice about how to deal with her second husband and her end-of-the-rope frustration with...

After nearly seven years of marriage, my ex-husband came home one night and told me that he wanted a divorce and didn't want to discuss it (he also chose not to mention that he was having an affair with his personal trainer).

I hadn't expected him to leave, but...

I was married to a pack rat.

When my ex-husband left, he took only what he wanted: his clothes (which, for reasons that are now unclear to me I had neatly folded and bagged), our financial statements, his comic book collection, and pictures of his beloved, deceased, mother. I...