Lacy expected her husband to bring her breakfast in bed, daisies, chocolate-covered cherries or a lousy $2.50 card to help take the sting out of her empty nest on Mother’s Day.
Instead, she got this:
“You’re not my mom,” Lacy’s hub, Jon, snarked on that fateful day two years ago.
“He told me to fetch him a beer.”
But Lacy didn’t get mad. Athletic with long, dark hair and brown eyes, Lacy, a desperate housewife from Sacramento, Calif., then 50, got even.
After more than two decades of marital fidelity — “I’d never even kissed another guy” — and two sons who’d moved away to college, after anniversaries and birthdays went by without “I love you,” after one Valentine’s Day after another passed without roses or mercy sex, it came to this. “I was done.”
She went online and found a lover, a married man.
Monday is the day after Mother’s Day. And clueless husbands, a surprisingly fertile breed, should look carefully at the text messages received by the women with whom they share beds. To women with children, even lesbians, Mother’s Day is more than a holiday invented by Hallmark to push greeting cards. It’s a day fraught with expectations, and a mine field for spouses.
The day after, the emotional hangover hits.
A shocking number of wives sign up with Ashley Madison, a website that connects cheater wannabes, on the day after Mother’s Day, said Noel Biderman, the 42-year-old Canadian father of two who founded the site about 12 years ago and swears he’s never strayed on his wife of 11 years — at least not yet.
“That day is a day of neglect,” Biderman told me. “It just reinforces that their marriage is going the wrong way.”
On a typical Monday, 25,000 people sign up for the Toronto-based site named after two popular baby girls’ names, Ashley and Madison, and whose slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair’’ — 65 percent of them men and 35 percent women. That number shoots up to 100,000 to 150,000 the Monday following Mother’s Day, with women outpacing men 65 percent to 35 percent.
Only post-Valentine’s Day sign-ups are higher — 20 percent higher than the après-Mother’s Day blitz, with disgruntled women making up 55 percent of new members, men 45 percent.
Ashley Madison, whose female users pay nothing — men shell out $49 for 20 connections — claims 26 million users in 37 countries, the second-biggest dating site next to Match.com. It steers clear of the Muslim world.
“Adultery is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia,” said Biderman.
When it comes to hanky-panky, women seem to be catching up with men. Researchers at the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey said 14.7 percent of American wives admitted to having had extramarital affairs in 2010 — a 40 percent hike in faithlessness over the previous two decades. The percentage of men who admitted straying held constant over the decades at around 21 percent.
Biderman insists that cheaters lie.
Adultery around the globe, including in the United States, “is way bigger — even bigger than 50 percent, I guarantee it,” he said.
Fueling female infidelity is the fact that women no longer lose their kids if they cheat. And with marriages strained by wives who frequently out-earn their husbands — a fact denied by killjoy feminists — women can feel as if they deserve some extra loving. The Internet makes finding strange men, or women, easy.
Lacy — that’s the name she uses to reel in guys online — tried the free websites Craigslist and POF.com, short for Plenty of Fish. But she met too many fatties and freaks who expected her to engage in threesomes and sex acts too disgusting to mention. Then she tried Ashley Madison.
“I would want a long-term relationship, to go see a movie, bike, hike holding hands, then go to a hotel room,” said Lacy, now 52 and studying for a certificate in finance. “I don’t just want to be a call girl.”
After more than 24 years of wedded ambivalence, Lacy’s still sexually attracted to her 6-foot-5-inch, 52-year-old construction-worker husband “with a pregnant belly!” But a 51-year-old retired correctional officer, the latest in a string of married men with whom she’s fooled around, has fallen in love with her. Divorce is not an option.
Guys, go out and buy a trinket for the lady in your life. Do it now, before it’s too late.
Oh, just stay mum, Gwyneth!
Skinny actress Gwyneth Paltrow, 41, whined more than a month ago that her life was harder than that of moms who work office jobs. The words sparked a viral open letter by The Post’s Mackenzie Dawson, calling out the star for being rich, privileged and smug.
Now Paltrow says she was taken out of context! And she slammed working gals for giving her grief.
This is what she told the E! News website in March:
“I think it’s different when you have an office job, because it’s routine and you can do all the stuff in the morning and then you come home in the evening. When you’re shooting a movie, they’re like, ‘We need you to go to Wisconsin for two weeks,’ and then you work 14 hours a day, and that part of it is very difficult. I think to have a regular job and be a mom is not as, of course there are challenges, but it’s not like being on set.”
She posted this on her lifestyle website, Goop, Thursday:
“I was asked why I have only worked on one film a year since having children. My answer was this: Film work takes one away from home and requires 12-14 hours a day, making it difficult to be the one to make the kids their lunch, drive them to school, and put them to bed. So I have found it easier on my family life to make a film the exception, and my 9-5 job the rule.
“. . . a lot of heat was thrown my way, especially by other working mothers who somehow used my out-of-context quote as an opportunity to express feelings (perhaps projected) on the subject.
“As the mommy wars rage on, I am constantly perplexed and amazed by how little slack we cut each other as women.”
Paltrow should stick to idiotic posts about “conscious uncoupling” from her Coldplay frontman hub, Chris Martin, 37. Give it up.
I’ll stick to a ‘hot tub’ of popcorn
Some 100 hipsters paid $55 apiece to watch the movie “Hot Tub Time Machine’’ on a Williamsburg rooftop last week — while lounging in inflatable hot tubs. Bathing suits were required.
The price of admission to the Hot Tub Cinema event included popcorn and wine, beer and vodka. The open bar surely helped with the post-film “tub hopping’’ period, when folks were encouraged to visit random four- to six-person hot tubs.
I’ll just watch my films dry.
Out of Vogue
Kimye was a bust. The April issue of Vogue magazine, with a cover story on rapper Kanye West and reality-TV creature Kim Kardashian, sold just 250,000 single copies, according to MagNet Data, The Post’s Keith Kelly reported.
That’s positively anemic compared with the 400,000 to 500,000 copies projected to fly off shelves. (Another 900,000 copies go to subscribers, some of whom threatened to drop the mag at the sight of the tacky pair.)
Kardashian and West are to marry this month. Expect the wedding to draw yawns.
Let monster stay in hell
“Son of Sam’’ serial killer David Berkowitz, who killed six people and maimed seven in a 1976-77 shooting rampage, didn’t show up for a parole hearing at an upstate prison last week. The pudgy predator will rot behind bars for at least another two years.
I’m relieved.