Kat Wilder

Kat Wilder
PUBLISHED: February 19, 2008 at 12:00 a.m. | UPDATED: July 19, 2018 at 8:26 a.m.

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IT HAD BEEN about two weeks since I’d seen Sean, the single dad I’ve been spending time with, when I came to a sudden – and urgent – realization.
“I’m really, really horny,” I whispered to him on my cell phone because I was still at work.
“So what else is new?” he laughed, a little too heartily if you ask me. “Sorry, but I can’t help you out for a while – I have appointments every night this week and then I’ve got my daughter. You’re going to have to take care of yourself or find another stud to do it for you.”
Hmm. Isn’t one of the great benefits of being in a relationship the knowledge that certain things are no-brainers – like having someone to twirl us around on the dance floor, a hiking partner, someone to split the large bag of popcorn with at the movies, a shoulder to cry on, a sympathetic ear for when your teenager is messing up and a warm body to satisfy all your, um, needs, 24/7?
But maybe putting all our eggs in one basket – wanting someone to be our best friend, Prince Charming, confidante, fantastic lover, emcee of all our fun as well as someone to help us pick out the right flat-screen HDTV (and then program it) – isn’t so great.
I’ve started to wonder – are we expecting too much from our partners?
And that’s something I think we boomers might have brought upon ourselves.
I don’t remember my parents spending every second together having “quality” time or mulling over their feelings. In fact, I remember them trying to get away from each other – my mom to her poker games with the ladies and my dad to his AM radio talk shows. They didn’t take vacations together either. My dad would join us for a few days wherever we vacationed – usually visiting family – and then return to work, happily, and to a quiet, empty, woman-free home, where he’d drink soda and eat steak, two no-nos under my mother’s house rules. I know they loved each other, in their own often confusing way, and they each threw their talents into the mix. But my mother didn’t hand over her self-worth to my father and vice versa.
I don’t think my parents were unique either. Sociologists say that looking to our partners to make us whole and happy is a relatively new thing. In fact, most college students in the 1950s said they wanted to get married so they could have children or own a home. Not a peep about finding the perfect partner or even everlasting love.
Now, most of us are hoping to find true love and happiness. Oh, and that elusive soul mate. (“Nothing has produced more unhappiness than the concept of the soul mate,” says psychiatrist Frank Pittman.) We’ve raised the ante on what a partner looks and acts like, and we expect perfection.
And why not? Aren’t we the generation that wants it all?
Mia was wondering the same thing. She and Rex, her lover of two years, recently spent a lovely weekend together, cooking, doing Sudoku, watching movies, hiking and enjoying the pleasures of the flesh. So she was hurt when instead of making plans to see her during the week, he made plans to hang with his male friends and – horrors! – be alone, and he didn’t see anything wrong with that. She sure did.
“We get close and then he pulls away,” she sighed.
“I’m not so sure he’s pulling away. Maybe he just needs some down time. I mean, he’s a guy. He needs to be with guys doing whatever guys do,” I said as we lingered over lattes on the back patio at Northpoint Coffee. “Maybe you should make plans to see each other on the weekends, and that way you can each do your own thing during the week. Then you wouldn’t have to feel so anxious.”
“Just the weekends? But how does that build intimacy?”
Good question. But it does, or so says therapist and self-help author Terrence Real: “The paradox of intimacy is that our ability to stay close rests on our ability to tolerate solitude inside a relationship.”
In other words, space to be alone or not – but just not with each other.
It was a concept I didn’t fully understand when I was married. I thought I needed to hang with Rob no matter what. I looked forward to weekends when we could be together and do things – a bike ride, a hike, going into the city for dinner, taking Trent to Traintown. But Rob would come home Fridays from a long week of work and want to do nothing but relax. So I’d be by his side on the couch, bored and restless, while he channel-surfed because I felt I should, instead of going for a bike ride or hike by myself or with a friend. And when he would sometimes have a drink after work with his co-workers or friends, I was miffed – why not be with me?
Yet that’s what helps determines a healthy – and happy – relationship. Women are pretty good at keeping their female friendships intact. Well, men need bonding time with men and time to unwind, too, and studies say the happiest marriages are the ones in which the wives give their blessings (and probably their encouragement) to his need to chill and to be with his friends and have fun.
And, I’m guessing here, maybe not drag him off to the mall every weekend when he wants to watch ESPN. Or expect him to want to “process” the way her girlfriends want to do.
Or even, evidently, take care of her, um, needs all the time.
“So, how’d you handle your little ‘issue’?” Sean teased me on the phone later that week as he prepared a chicken Parmesan dinner for himself and his daughter.
“Well, I went looking for a stud as you suggested, but in the end decided that I’d take matters into my own hands, so to speak.”
“Hmm, I sure would have liked to been around to see that!”
Right, because that makes for a healthy – and happy – relationship, too!
Kat Wilder is the nom de plume of a fortysomething divorced Marin mom whose My So-called Midlife column appears every other Tuesday. Read her blogs at http://blogs.marinij.com/katwilder. Rants, raves and marriage proposals cheerfully considered at katzwild@sbcglobal.net.
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Kathryn Wilder is the author of the memoir Desert Chrome: Water, a Woman, and Wild Horses in the West (Torrey House Press, May 2021), a 2022 Colorado Book Awards winner in Creative Nonfiction, Silver Nautilus Book Awards winner in Memoir, and winner of the National Indie Excellence Awards in Regional Nonfiction: West. Her work has been notably cited in Best American Essays and has appeared in such publications as High Desert Journal, River Teeth, Midway Journal , Fourth Genre, Sierra, and many anthologies and Hawai`i magazines. A graduate of the low-rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Wilder was a 2022 finalist for the Ellen Meloy Fund Desert Writers Award (also in 2019, 2016, and 2007), and a 2018 finalist for the Waterston Desert Writing Prize. She lives among mustangs in southwestern Colorado, where she ranches with her family in the Dolores River watershed.
“Testimony to the healing power of wildness . . . a candid memoir that interweaves a trajectory of loss, pain, and hard-won serenity with a paean to wild horses.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Wilder’s love of horses and the land is the theme threaded through her, and her writing makes a heartsong of it all.” —LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, bestselling author of Verge and The Chronology of Water
“ Desert Chrome journeys through parched valleys, on wild rivers, and into deep rock canyons on a unique quest. In this authentic, hard-won account of her life, Kathryn Wilder finds the warm, true hearts she’s been seeking and that deserve our humanity, healing, and a hell of a lot better future than they’ve been dealt. There’s a quiet heroine at the center of this story, yes, pointing toward a beautiful world. It can be ours if we’ll love better, lean closer, and listen to the voices, like Wilder’s own, well worth heeding from birth.” — REBECCA LAWTON , author of The Oasis This Time
“A raw and honest journey of addiction, love, trauma, and redemption—grounded in a deep love of place and all things mustang. The best memoirs reveal the deeply personal in order to see the larger world with renewed clarity and insight—this is one such book. As Wilder moves from heroin to horses, we see a substantive journey of recovery and strength—and ultimately, of resilience.” —LAURA PRITCHETT, author of Stars Go Blue
“I learned so much reading Kathryn Wilder’s book, Desert Chrome —about wild horses. About desert and water. About Kat. We were neighbors years ago, but the new paths along which, with smooth and stunning prose, she leads readers into the depths of her life suggest how little we know those close to us. And how huge life can be once we commit with our whole hearts to wildness.” —BROOKE WILLIAMS, author of Open Midnight
“For too long, the lone cowboy myth has corralled the American West in the barbed wires of dominion and destruction. Tangled in that telling are women and mustangs—their wildness, togetherness, and vulnerability. In Desert Chrome , Kathryn Wilder bucks against a story as desiccated as the deserts she has dwelled in—kicking hard enough to free what was bound, to redeem what was broken. Listen now, to the thundering of hearts and hooves. They’re coming for us, at last.” —AMY IRVINE, author of Air Mail and Desert Cabal
“A powerful coming-of-age story, into the age of a woman’s strongest power, when, with complete awareness of her past, she can, with might and strength, will the future before her.” — CMARIE FUHRMAN, author of Camped Beneath the Dam
“‘Blame it or praise it,’ Virginia Woolf writes, ‘there is no denying the wild horse in us.’ Desert Chrome is the story of a landscape and the many ways the land sings us into being. It is the story of one of our most iconic North American species, Equus caballus , the wild horse. And, most of all, it is the story of a woman coming to know her own wildness—a wildness that is free, and sustaining, and on her own terms.” —JOE WILKINS, author of Fall Back Down When I Die and The Mountain and the Fathers
I love what Kat writes, strong and vivid. And this photo is gorgeous!
The blurbs are so well earned in this telling book. I was amazed before I was halfway through.
Thank you so much! I have neglected my blog in these last weeks since the initial release of the book and didn’t see this….
This is one of the most wonderful books I have read in a very long time. The author has such keen descriptive ability and she takes us with her in out into the desert, with the horses, into her heart. It is tender, raw, sweet, bitter and certainly provokes thought and great emotion. I applaud the author for being so brave, for telling her story as it is. It is a brilliant memoir. Thank you for sharing it with us.
Thank you so much for the gift of this surprising and touching review of Desert Chrome!
Dont know how I have missed THIS blog – remember seeing your name many times, and have been reading TJs blog for a few years. Look forward to this one.
Thank you Maggie, and welcome! TJ’s blog is wonderful, and regular!
Your book was a staff pick at the bookstore in Telluride. I bought it and loved it!
A great one to balance the harsh one!
That is so wonderful to hear! Thank you, Debra!!!
Hello Kathryn. I met you last fall in Mancos. You were with a couple of your friends discussing writing. I was with a couple of my friends just drinking coffee. You were very kind to chat a bit about your book. I bought it. I just want to say congratulation on the Colorado Book Award. Nicely done.
I remember that interaction well! Thank you for finding me here and for the congratulations.
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