I follow Ashleigh Renard, author of the memoir, Swing, on Facebook. A former writing instructor of mine, Estelle Erasmus, introduced me to her.
Ashleigh is an entrepreneur in her early 40s, and her life is utterly fascinating to me because it’s so different than mine. First of all, she is single, even though she was married when her book reached the shelves three years ago. Ashley also claims to be a witch - and has shared her full moon rituals, her tarot readings, and her advice on power outfits to wear according to your Zodiac sign. She once had an open marriage and gives guidance on sexual intimacy and “keeping monogamy hot.” She lives in an enormous house, has a fetish for specific plants, and has cameras in front of her bird feeders, so she can watch the birds eat. And she posts a lot of reels that pop up in my feed - probably because I am always watching them.
It’s unlike me to follow an author’s life so closely, reader, but Ashleigh is so open and allows me to “ooh” and “aww” from afar over her adventures with men and her luxurious life as an affluent single mama. I am 19 all over again, in love with the novelty of The Real World.
More than this, Ashleigh has these surprising nuggets of wisdom that she drops as she is eating a salad or doing her makeup. In her latest reel, she said something about expectations for women and marriage that I wanted to share with you.
To paraphrase, the author claimed that once she and her spouse separated, she kept waiting for the sirens to go off and a crew to arrive to take her back to her old life.
She feared neighbors spying on her as she drank red wine in her own kitchen. There’s the slut who made a life of her own. Let’s burn her! (Okay, that was my embellishment. You have to admit, it goes with the whole witch thing.)
And oh how mostly, kind of true all of that was for me. Granted, my separation from my husband, Eric, was just a few months, and we never officially lived apart, though we did rent a house that one of us could escape to when needed.
But I wondered if the neighbors and strangers on the street knew of my treason. Would they hold a trial in the town square? Line up to throw stones? Put an A on my chest?
Despite the guilt and the angst, there was excitement. Granted, I was a woman who’d worked part-time since her son was born - for over a decade - but I was a woman standing up for what she needed. Drawing hard boundaries in the sand. I felt empowered, an over-used, yet pretty apt description of the feeling.
After all, like many women, I had mostly lived within the boundaries others had drawn for me. My biggest breakaway had been to marry my husband in the first place; he was a man so unlike anyone my family had met, let alone had welcomed into the family. He was funny and outspoken, with a carefree-ness about him that you wouldn’t believe. He was a massage therapist, treating life like play, acting like the world was his oyster buffet.
This was a shock and an affront to my father (I can only assume), the man who raised me to believe that “nothing in life was free” and that “life was Hard” - emphasis on the capital H. Life, for Stephen, was so hard that he couldn’t open his arms to me. He remained rigid, stiff in his beliefs, and seemingly threatened by anyone living a life that was beyond his imagination.
So, if marrying the outlaw was my biggest act of freedom, what did that mean for me? Claiming my autonomy from my father and my family involved marrying a man. And that had never been clearer until I decided I might want to live without him.