love — Blog — Tanya Shaffer

From Nudism to Buddhism

When I broke up with my boyfriend last summer, I did what I always do under such circumstances: fled the country. Not everyone considers this the healthiest way to deal with personal crises, but I figure it's my life, and if I want to run from it, I can. Fortunately, I’d recently gotten some moderately lucrative on-camera acting work, so I had enough cash to take off.

Since both morale and funds were low (the on-camera work notwithstanding), I decided to begin my trip where people knew and loved me and would be likely to buy me meals. My father and his wife spend every summer at a nudist colony in the South of France and had begged me to visit for years. Though the thought of being naked with my father made me slightly uneasy, I decided now was the time. Perhaps the stripping away of clothing would help me to cope with the unadorned truth of my break-up.

Of Sweethearts and Sperm Banks: A Twenty-First Century Love Story

On May 10, 2001, I sat on a mountaintop near Dharamsala, India, watching the last rosy gleam of the sunset reflect off the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, and made a decision. Throughout my adult life I’d boldly proclaimed to anyone who would listen that if I found myself 35 years old and single, I would have a child on my own. Yet for all my bravado, I’d never imagined that day would come. Now my 35th birthday loomed large, and I was, in fact, unpartnered. Blame it on the writer-slash-actor’s peripatetic lifestyle, excessive pickiness, a volatile emotional temperament, or just plain bad luck: my intimate relationships had not panned out as I had hoped.

Your Inner Dog

Years ago, before I had kids of my own, I yearned for every baby and toddler I saw. I had only to pass someone pushing a stroller or toting an infant to experience a sensation in my chest that felt simultaneously like a constriction and an expansion. I loved those babies and toddlers, every one of them, and by love I mean I ached for them with a ferocity that bordered on frightening. I wanted to grab them and make a run for it, to pour my vast untapped reservoirs of maternal affection into their little selves. Fortunately I managed to keep those impulses enough in check to stay out of jail.

Now, with my own two baby boys grown into towering teenagers, I no longer feel that craving when I encounter the three and under set. I still think they’re cute and all, but I’m perfectly content to smile and walk on by. But even though I’m also the mother of three charming canines, a huge and painful tenderness still wells up within me every time I pass a dog.

Off-Leash Writing / Off-Leash Arts