Ramshackle Glam: The Audioblog

It's a tricky thing, writing about an incident that so clearly paints me as the sad sack, the bitter ex-actress who coulda been a star! …and then wasn't, and was instead relegated to a footnote in the storied history of a television show. I'm that guy who was almost on Friends instead of Matt LeBlanc. I'm the fifth Beatle.

A decade after my career began, I was fired. And I realized that it had finally happened. I'd been revealed as what I'd been all along: A fraud, whose slights of hand nobody seemed to recognize as trickery save for me.

I'm off the track, with no real idea what life will look like ten years down the road, and the idea of picking a partner again is a terrifying prospect. Because I've blown it all up once, and I can't do it again. I can't do it to myself, and I can't do it to my children. I want to - have to - get it right this time.

Isn't it crazy just how loud an empty house can be?

I am the weekday parent. I am the one who pulls off the covers while they beg for "just a few more minutes!" No, I say. Get up. 

I am not fun.

On the morning I moved into my own home, I walked my kids to their school for the last time. Then I got in the car outside the house that used to be ours and now belonged to a stranger, and just…left.

I know that a house is just a house; a bunch of planks and nails and coats of paint. I know there are more planks and nails and coats of paint out there that I can make my own. 

But this was our house. Our family home. And now it feels like everything we built has been broken.

The strangest thing happened over the weekend. I dropped my kids off at their dads, and then suddenly realized: Without them, I have no idea what to do. 

If we're being honest, I don't think it was my marriage that broke me. It was all the marriages. 

A little over a week ago I asked the father of my children and my partner for more than a decade for a separation. The days since have been the worst of my life. And yet they've also unearthed something I never expected; a discovery so beautiful it's shocked me to my core.