and the beat goes on…

A year ago:  I’d met C. and we were talking – daily. We hadn’t yet kissed. We hadn’t yet envisioned a commitment. We were curious and mutually pleased to have found someone with whom we could talk so freely, with whom we shared so much, by whom we were challenged to re-consider all that we knew about relationships.

Now: C. has moved in. His clothes are hung in the closet. His shoes are by the front door. His razor is on the bathroom sink. His almond butter is in the fridge. It’s both comforting and sweet but also a bit maddening to live with another adult again. And yet I go into this experience knowing that the relationship is a teacher; that I am in it by choice to learn more about myself, to show my children what a daily commitment looks like, to learn patience and grace and see it mirrored back to me.

A year ago:  A. was about a month back from Africa. He’d moved into an apartment nearby and we were actively getting divorced, as opposed to the slow-mo events of the previous eight months while he was gone. He was signed up for online dating services and subtly complaining that there were more interesting women everywhere but here — DC, NYC, Italy …

Now:  We are about eight months officially divorced; 2 1/1 years officially separated. I’m not sure how many years this was in the making. I’m ever amazed by the hints and crumbs I find in old letters and diary entries that suggest this break up was years and years in the making. Why didn’t I see the writing on the wall sooner? I was committed to trying, even when trying was about the same as hitting my head against a wall. A. is now in love with a woman he met via me. (Yeah, I know – potentially messy.) She’s down to earth and someone I’m happy for my kids to be around. Selfishly, I also hope that she will keep him here, but I know he could just as easily take her elsewhere. Although there may be love, there’s still no apparent work for him.

Last year:  Bea was very anxious for school to start. She was alternately moody and lacking confidence. As I started to see C., she resisted him and  us. She was rude. She was abrupt.

Now: She was immediately excited when I asked how she and  Thomas would feel about C. moving in  last month. She climbs on his back. She holds his hand. She welcomes him with a smile when he comes home. She’s excited and comfortable to start fourth grade tomorrow. She’s moving up to her own bedrooom in the attic and is generally spreading her wings.

A year ago: I was very reliant on this blog as a place to reflect and release. It was a great friend to me, as were the many people who read it (including you!). It was really a crucial tool in figuring out what it meant to be divorced and riding the waves of this maddeningly complex process.

Today:  I am more at ease as a divorced person, in part because I see and accept – begrudgingly some days – that the waves never end. Alex will always be in my life with his spaciness and lack of foresight, with his bad money habits and sometimes juvenile habits. But he’s my kids’ dad and in the grand scheme of the divorced partners I’ve encountered lately, I’d take his bad habits over many – just as I think he’d take  mine over others. We appreciate each other as the lesser of possible evils, and still enjoy each other enough that the occasional shared meal is more pleasant than painful.

And so, I leave this space as an active spot for reflection. I am writing regularly over at Mothers of Invention (though this blog is currently being attacked by some kind of gremlin who keeps affecting its appearance – maddening; anyone know anything about blogs being broken into and changed?) and would love to have you join me there!

holding

I am at yoga camp (which I’ve written about here and here). Don’t think camp as in retreat. Think bootcamp for the soul. The day starts with 6:30 am practice and pretty much goes straight through with more yoga and many many classes and lots of talk and more OMing than you can imagine until Lights Out at 10:00 pm. I am in a dorm room of 22 women who range from 48 years old to 20 years old. We are all very together – like it or not.

I am just completing week two of this four week experiment. The laboratory is my emotional landscape – much more so than my physical one. I’ve experienced a huge gamut of feelings – from intense and stupid frustration at the heat, which was miserable last week, to amazing heart opening toward my classmates. I am silly putty – stretching and picking up  new images.

And yet some things are deeply programmed – not beyond stretching but really deeply held. I came up against one yesterday when Alex failed to have the kids ready to Skype with me. Most of my classmates with kids have already Skyped with this kids several times, and I haven’t at all. I’m really missing them. Given the tight schedule I have here and the very limited wi-fi access, it is tough to schedule such a visit, so I was really looking forward. I sat with my computer for an hour. Waiting. Hoping. And then crying.

All of that disappointment quickly formed into a ball of anger at Alex. The fact that he didn’t pay my June child support until a few days ago – and with little to no explanation – had only fueled my ire. As did the fact that a friend at home told me he’s been driving my car without asking. None of this would matter all that much if he would TALK TO ME. But he doesn’t. Just as he never has. Clarity is not in his make-up, nor does it seem to be an area that he desires to improve.

We learned last week in anatomy (can I just say how unsuited my brain is for the study of anatomy?) that our body holds memories. We learned exactly how they are imprinted on and within us.

Clearly, the disappointment that I have in Alex is one of these body memories, coming out and exploding just as powerfully as the love and release I’m also experiencing here. I’d love to offer it to the Universe and let it burn off. It may take more time. Patience, patience patience.

volition

I leave tomorrow for 26-days at Kripalu for yoga teacher training.

Fear. Excitement. And everything in between. That’s how I feel now.

But I keep coming back to the one indisputable and thrilling fact: I made this happen. I am going completely of my own volition. I am following my path.

About a week ago, we had a crystal clear day. A day with no humidity. No threat of storms. It was about 80-degrees. A most unusual Iowa summer day. My kids were at day camp, and I was here alone with my work and my Self. And I swear I could see all the way to the ocean — all 1,836 miles. There was no fear. Not even excitement, per se. Just a deep knowledge. A memory that I tapped of how I am. How it is. Of the way. Walking that path is the greatest beauty, the greatest gift we are given.

drowning by numbers

A New York Times’ article gives enough numbers to make your head spin and your blood boil.

Try this: 49 percent of men said they provided most or an equal amount of child care. But only 31 percent of women gave their husbands that much credit.

Or this: 59 percent of fathers report some level of “work-life conflict,” compared with about 45 percent of women.

Perhaps most maddening are the generational changes that seem to be taking us even further down a rabbit hole in which each of us suffers from emotional/spiritual inequity – the kind that we look to relationships and family to heal but which now seem only worsened by family ties. For instance, in 1970, about two-thirds of married couples had a spouse at home (usually the wife). But today, only 40 percent of families have a stay-at-home spouse to handle domestic demands during the workday. Couples now work a combined average of 63 hours a week, up from just 52.5 in 1970, according to a 2009.

Numbers like these sometimes read to me — oddly — like some sort of argument for single parenthood. I haven’t done the algebra – it’s just a gut feeling. But it’s 100 percent mine.

father’s day

Since my dad died four years ago, father’s day has become a bitter pill. A day when I don’t have anyone to go visit. The fact that it’s also become a somewhat awkward day in terms of my kids and their dad, doesn’t help. I try to do something – to help them have a sense of honoring their dad. Alex tries, too, though this year’s mother’s day breakfast was mainly a cause for me to clench my teeth and wish the whole thing were over so I could get on with my day. It was very kind of him – above and beyond what most divorced dads do I’m pretty sure. But he didn’t make what the kids wanted – in fact, he made something they plain didn’t like – an egg and spinach salad, an old favorite based on a dish we’d had in San Francisco years ago. Not involving them made me sad and them grumpy. It led to a sense that this was some ritual Alex was bestowing on me out of necessity and duty. (Which, of course, is what father’s and mother’s day are for a lot of people, no matter their marital status.) I’d much rather have had a take out croissant and a bunch of hand-picked dandelions. As it was, Thomas’ enormous, perfume-drenched tissue flower he’d made from school and brought home squished in his backpack was my favorite moment of the morning.

Helping kids to honor another parent when we know that parent’s imperfections can be tough. I know that the way in which I miss my dad is sometimes discomfiting to my mom. I keep some of his things on my bureau and she once commented – clearly with a twinge of jealousy – that it was like a “shrine,” tossing the word at me as though it were downright icky. As someone who mindfully keeps a shrine (albeit a messy one), I wasn’t bothered by the word – more by her hurt, which I didn’t really know what to do with.

Tomorrow will be pretty easy since Alex is away. The kids and I got a photo mug made for him from a silly picture of the two of them at the end of the school year. They’ll give it to him next week when he returns, proudly feeling that they remembered.

harder gets easier

A year or two ago I was sitting with Jenny, my Kripalu teacher. “I thought that if I went deeper, if I understood more, then it would get easier.”

She laughed – a big, kind-hearted grin, but the same laugh you’d give a little kid who just hugely misunderstood a basic principle of life. Like that ice cream will keep melting no matter how fast you lick.

She laughed and I got it – sort of. But not really. Because I’ve stubbornly held on to the notion that as I expand, grow, learn, and become more me, surely this hurt and confusion and anxiety will GO AWAY – disappear, like mountains in a rearview mirror.

Last night, I woke up suddenly at 2:28 AM when my cell phone rudely decided to buzz. I’d been snugly tucked in – totally out – and just like that, I was totally UP and worriedworriedworried about my kids, the State of the World, the oil, the cell phones – so many cell phones, my aged dog, my work …

It wasn’t pleasant and I didn’t overcome it with breathing or meditation – though I tried these things. There was a victory of sorts, however, because I could see my anxiety for what it was, and I knew with something approaching certainty that come morning, it would be washed away. Or nearly.

THIS it turns out is what growth looks like. It doesn’t look like the Dalai Lama or a woman in full sideways crow pose. It looks like a 44-year old wide awake in the middle of the night feeling softness toward her fear. Knowing that it not real. Seeing worry (and fear and anxiety and depression and anger) for what they are – waves that roll in and roll out, states of mind – this is a giant step and one that takes years to learn and relearn. As we become more skillful with this knowledge, the softer the grip is on us. The more quickly we can ease out of the pose of exertion and breathe into a pose of equanimity.

Surely, there’s some skillful state that exists beyond this, but this is where I am now.

ping

I think of underwater sonar — whales talking about the meaning life — when I see these objects of a different time, a different concept of my life, rearranged now in this new Way. There’s Alex’s girlfriend wearing the scarf he bought in Paris when the weather turned unexpectedly wet and damp. I was in Shakespeare & Co. looking at books while he got it. There’s the orange spotted glass vase my friend F. gave us for our wedding. We got several vases, but this was my favorite. And the wooden box we picked up on the side of the street after a boozy dinner with friends, intending to use it in the garden.

I unpack the kids’ duffel bag which Alex sent home with them last weekend and find other things: a skort for Bea, a t-shirt for Thomas. These are new things, cycling into my house on trips without me. Things made of new arrangements and new ways, like bones repairing themselves in a way that makes most sense.

growing up

I watch my kids and wonder about their first loves, worry about crushed hearts.

I imagine the faces of their future partners, and wonder – yes, I do – where they’ll be when they lose their virginity.

I see them walking hand in hand and hope for the kindest soul possible on the other end of the grip.

I look at the faces of other kids – like today on the school bus coming home from the field trip -

and try to imagine the same of each of child:  holding hands with someone, shy, kisses, excited, heart opening, momentarily shattered.

Be kind to each other. Be patient. Take care. I want to say.

“I have a grl fred,” Thomas writes in his notebook.

I’ve met this sprite of a girl. She has wavy auburn hair, freckles and cute clothes.

As far as I can tell, I approve.

I watch them together and see no sign of anything other than an everyday boy-girl interaction between 7-year olds.

How did they mutually decide this assignation when they seem to hardly speak?

I see them in five years  at 12. In ten years at 17 –

not with each other then, but each of them growing toward love with someone –

each of them wondering:  ”Who will safely hold my heart?”

Be kind to each other. Be patient. Take care. I want to say.

You will trip, I’m sure. You’ll get bumped and bruised. Sometimes it is absolutely harrowing.

If you’re lucky, each time will make more sense and each time you’ll learn something

until one day you can stand side by side with someone you trust with your heart, with your world, with your children.

Be kind to yourself. Be patient with yourself. Take care of yourself.

And you will find your way.

hospital gown

I sat with C. in the hospital today. He was in a gown – he’d tied it the wrong way. We agreed that Project Runway needs to redesign these fiascos. We made jokes. We smiled at each other – deeply smiled. I worked on a writing assignment while the nurse asked him mundane questions, trying to get to the bottom of his tingling hands and dizzy spell. But part of me thought of how my heart was sitting on that table, her back exposed to the world, wanting nothing more than to bury her head in the chest of this tall, tall man – the doctor had to stand on a stool to look in his ears. I just wanted to stay there, breathing him in and feeling safe.

More than twenty summers ago, I spent a very hot summer with a new boyfriend. And I’m being literal: it was over 100-degrees more than ten days. Along with our two roommates, we slept on mattresses in the living room in front of the single over-taxed window AC unit. At night, we rode our bikes around town, often stopping at City Park Pool, a lovely old pool spread out under a canopy of oak trees. We’d get there just before dusk and dive into the blue water. Then we’d talk and talk, with my arms flung around his neck and his arms supporting me around the waist in that overly intimate way that swimming pools and summer encourage. I felt safe. At home. I could stay there forever.

I thought of that summer a bit this afternoon while sitting in the hospital where my father died, watching a young doctor – she graduates next week – palpate the knees of my partner and look in his eyes. Maybe it’s just me and men’s necks. But I think not. I think that when we see the person we love so much, the person who makes us feel alive and full of possibility, in a vulnerable position, our heart leaps. The end feels too close, and we want only to whisk it away and cling to the present.

“I have news for you, darling,” C. says to me just now, “We’re both going to die.” I know. Of course, I know. But at 44 this sounds different than it would have at 20. Truer. Inevitable. Maybe not just around the corner, but on the horizon and in sight.

I hear you.

Really – you do? You hear me? Fucking amazing!

I called Alex last week to vent my frustration with his rather sudden plans to leave for a bunch of the summer – specifically, the parts when the kids have no previously scheduled camps or activities. I am going away, too, but I very politely arranged for them to be busy the entire time I’m away. Like a houseguest who brings a nice bottle of wine, or a mother-in-law who does the dishes and buys extra goodies for the fridge. But these aren’t Alex’s strong suits. And I’ll also admit that his work gig came up suddenly, whereas I’ve been scheming for awhile.

Initially, I was understanding. After all, I have told him multiple times that I’d rather he worked short gigs elsewhere as opposed to moving altogether. This way, when he’s in town he’s really in town and can have a daily connection with the kids. Still, whenever it’s suddenly time for him to pick up and go (the organizations he works – international NGO’s – are never very clear about when or how he should arrive), I feel my shoulders lift up and glue themselves to my earlobes, while my  jaw sets into a sort of martyred grimace.  I survey the weeks ahead of 24/7 parenting and I think, for more than a second: “Maybe he should just move.”

So, I was nice. For about two days. I was understanding. For about 48 hours.

And then I was pissed. But being me, e.g., a Midwesterner from Lutheran roots, my version of angry is on the tepid side. I texted him:  ”Can you talk? I need to express my frustration.”

He texted back that he could talk on Sunday. Ah, no. Not what I had in mind. So I called him. And I talked. And talked. I expressed my frustration.

“I hear you,” he said. Then he said some other perfectly acceptable and predictable stuff about why he was taking the job.

I sighed. Felt a smidge better. Said something about having learned lessons for scheduling for next summer. Thanked him for his time. Thanked him for “hearing”  me. And then got off the phone in wonder at our therapist-approved, pitch-perfect conversation. My god, I thought, we could be in one of those movies they show you in those state-sanctioned divorce classes — the ones that stress the need for communication and respect.

Does distance breed respect? Perhaps. But I was still pissed when he came over and drank three of my beers tonight and don’t get me started on the $350 bike for Thomas. Ok, so maybe we’re not going to star in the movie after all.

true blue

“My True Self and my Responsible Self are having a conversation about the ‘right’ thing to do,” I tell C.

“Aren’t your True Self and your Responsible Self one and the same?” he says.

My brain sorts this out – slowly. That would mean that anything that feels true, e.g., right for me, my highest intention, would also be – in the long run – responsible. But does it not also mean that anything that is responsible, e.g., fiscally sound, measured, would be True?

In knots – that’s me.

What’s your cortisol level?

An article in yesterday’s New York Times, Families’ Every Fuss, Archived and Analyzed, about a study conducted of middle class families in which both parents work focused on the stress level in these homes and how everyone is pretty much making things up as they go: “‘I call it the new math,’ said Kathleen Christensen of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which financed the project. ‘Two people. Three full-time jobs.’ Parents learned on the fly, she said — and it showed.”

The study proves what several studies a year seem to underline – women still do a lot more housework than men; married couples – to their detriment – don’t get very much time alone; and – somewhat disturbingly – old-fashioned boundaries often work best in terms of creating the least stressful marriages. As one male participant put it:  “She does the inside work, and I do all the outside, and we don’t interfere with each other.”

Four times a day, participants in the study spat into a tube so that researchers could measure their cortisol, a stress hormone. Although the article didn’t say as much, you get the sense that most of these people’s cortisol levels are pretty dang high. And I can relate. No doubt mine is way out of whack most of the time. Finding lost soccer cleats five minutes before the game starts; tending to an elderly dog who needs in and out and in and out while simultaneously cooking dinner and helping my 8-year old with her math; negotiating with the same child violin lessons while also watching a Star Wars reenactment by my 6-year old and trying to find information for summer camp — all of this raises MY cortisol levels, for sure.  When I talk to childless friends and get a sense of their evenings – dinner whenever they want (and whatever they want to eat – rather than the never ending march of pasta, quesadillas, and sandwiches), a little exercise here, a TV show there, some light reading, and scan multi-tasking … WOW!!!! What must their cortisol levels look like?

One thing the article didn’t discuss was whether the negotiations that went on between the couples in the study contributed to or decreased their stress. In brief – is it easier to do this crazy dance alone or with a partner. On one hand, there are two of you — two coaches, two teachers, two short-order cooks, two nurses, two referees (just a few of the roles parents play on a  daily basis). As I’ve noted before, keeping up a household is a job that really isn’t meant to be done alone.  AND YET …. I wonder if the amount of negotiations that it takes to do the dance of marriage and parenting doesn’t sometimes create even more stress.

When I’ve interviewed women about single parenting, many of them have immediately declared it to be easier than parenting in a marriage — “You don’t have to worry about the other person – what he’s going to say, or how he’d do something.” “You only have your kids to take care of; you don’t have to take care of him any more.” “It’s all up to you – which is really sort of refreshing and easier.”

My own inner-judge is still undecided on this issue – she’s sweeping right now while keeping an eye out for a lost spelling list – but I’d be curious to know what you think.

can’t breathe

I’ve been completely overwhelmed by my children and their schedules and demands and my sense of what they need and my own desire to be there and their unending need of me and the baseball this and the laundry that and the soccer this and the end-of-the-year play that – not to mention the elderly dog who is endlessly baffled, needing to go in and out and in and out – and the disappearing cat who appears for food and scratches then worries us for days. I am increasingly aware that I am barely here sometimes, one of those slivers of moon-shaped whiteness on the tip of a fingernail.

I’ve stopped waiting for my angel wings, to which I used to feel entitled.

I’ve stopped waiting for my angel wings, to which I used to feel entitled. Now, more so, I try to follow those old Elvis Costello lines:  I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused. In the middle of my son’s raise-the-Titanic worthy tantrum at the grocery store – which C. admirably handled while I dashed in for milk and lettuce – I tried to be amused. When the dog nipped my daughter’s hand at the dinner table (she was holding a piece of bread that was not to be ignored) and buckets of tears ensued, I tried to be amused. Last night, when the transitional objects turned out to be over at their dad’s house and it was already 10:15 pm, I tried to be amused. When the dog tracked mud on the just-vacuumed rug, I tried to be amused. When my freelance work which needs me – really needs me – didn’t get done, I tried to be amused. When the dust bunnies began to walk and call each other by name, I tried to be amused. And now – taking two kids up to bed, neither nearly as tired as I – I will try try try to be amused.

belly of the world

Sentimental Education

by Tony Hoagland

And when we were eight, or nine,

our father took us back into the Alabama woods,
found a rotten log, and with his hunting knife

pried off a slab of bark
to show the hundred kinds of bugs and grubs
that we would have to eat in a time of war.

“The ones who will survive,” he told us,
looking at us hard,
“are the ones who are willing to do anything.”
Then he popped one of those pale slugs
into his mouth and started chewing.

And that was Lesson Number 4
in The Green Beret Book of Childrearing.

I looked at my pale, scrawny, knock-kneed, bug-eyed brother,
who was identical to me,
and saw that, in a world that ate the weak,
we didn’t have a prayer,

and next thing I remember, I’m working for a living
at a boring job
that I’m afraid of losing,

with a wife whose lack of love for me
is like a lack of oxygen,
and this dead thing in my chest
that used to be my heart.

Oh, if he were alive, I would tell him, “Dad,
you were right! I ate a lot of stuff
far worse than bugs.”

And I was eaten, I was eaten,
I was picked up
and chewed
and swallowed

down into the belly of the world.

shedding

I drove to Chicago last weekend with C. It was sort of odd to be going on Friday – my wedding anniversary, which try as I  might, I could not budge from a central place on my horizon line. I took C. to places I’d been with Alex – as well as with my parents before that – years of going to Chicago unspindled. Restaurants. Sights. Museums. Specific paintings. In each case, I wasn’t just revisiting a certain dish or a certain artist but also seeing myself at earlier iterations. There I was at 39 with two kids in tow. At 35, about to have a baby. At 29, newly married and visiting for friends’ wedding. At 25, in town on a steamy hot August trip to connect with my parents. At 20 with a college boyfriend, both of us terrified of ending up on the south side. All the way back to my earliest Chicago memory:  Being overwhelmed in Marshall Fields at Christmas time and being given a Steiff bear to help calm me down.

On the drive home, a dark sky gathering in the rear mirror, an idea washed over me. I didn’t ever need to eat the Chicken Kalamata at The Athenian Room again. Nor the stuffed medjool dates at Avec. And though it would be nice to see Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of la Grande Jatte again – if I don’t, well, that’s okay, too. Those things are in me. I’ve shared them now with C. –  made a little offering:  Look. See who I was. And now, together, we can move into other experiences. Like shedding a skin while maintaining the nutrients it provided.

The other thing I saw and felt clearly on this trip was that I am shedding the cut-out version of me from the  marriage. A person had been formed in both my imagination and Alex’s who was defined by her cartoonish traits. She was demanding and needy. Sexually abused as a child, she was to be treated with kid gloves in bed. An only child, she had to get her way – or else. To balance things, she was also organized and pragmatic, the one to make decisions about what to do on a Friday night. The one with the forethought to get the car serviced. (Total aside, but one of my favorite comments ever about my divorce came from my mechanic who, upon hearing the news, told me:  ”I’m not surprised. You take much better care of your car.”)

I carried these traits, these expectations like weights behind me. For years, through therapy and meditation and just age, I’ve been shedding layers and layers from each of these parts of me. But for Alex, they were still very much present. Even in our final year together, he would refer to one of these traits as though it were still very much present. He couldn’t forego the notion that I was  no longer that way – not anywhere near to the degree I had been, at least. The narrative of who we were and how he reacted to me was based on me continuing to possess these traits, and he couldn’t let them go.

In Chicago, on Friday night, when C. and I hit an impasse – something didn’t go quite the way either of us had envisioned – an amazing thing happened: We let it go. We dropped the expectation, let it fly right out our pocket and over Lake Michigan. It was an event that had it occurred with Alex, the two of us would have stewed over it all night and into the next day. It still would have been mis-coloring our moods on the drive home. But by letting it go – the disappointment and the story of how things should have been – C. and I were lightened. And lightened of even that small load, we moved on and went deeper and were happier than that one small scenario – had it played out – could ever have made us.

waking

At 3:51, I woke up. Sandwiched between my two children. The extra blanket that had seemed a good idea at 10 pm, was now stifling. I rubbed my face in the darkness and felt the thoughts and emotions from sleep calm and settle. I’d been thinking – I realized with a jolt – about the woman Alex is now seeing. A woman I’m working with and had even suggested to him. I had played matchmaker in a quiet, three-sentence way, and now here I was in the middle of the night thinking about her. Thinking about this seemingly very nice, bright, happy person who is ten years my junior. Jealous? Am I jealous? Or is it melancholy? The age thing – no matter the person – is always a bit hard to take. It’s difficult not to play the game:  Let’s see, when we got married, she was graduating from high school! No good. Not helpful. Imagining her with my children. Not helpful. And let’s face it, I suggested her to him because at gut level, in a nova-quick flash of insight, I knew that I could imagine her with my children. She feels safe. And while whatever happens between Alex and another woman is ultimately not my concern, what happens between another woman and my kids is. So I am choosy. I want him to stay nearby for the kids, and I know a woman will help that cause. Also – really – I do want him to be happy.

So it’s all good. Right? Then why is she there in my mind at 3:51. And now, at 4:58? Why?

I remember in high school, a few months after Eddie J. broke up with me – which he did just two weeks before prom, and after I’d bought my dress. I was standing in McDonald’s and he was working behind the counter, carefully avoiding eye contact with me. “You kissed me,” I thought. “You touched me here, and here,” I thought while the aroma of fries and the clatter of people whirled incongruously around me. I couldn’t fathom that such intimacy could have occurred and was now invisible, not only to all of these people, but to him. How could we have been so close – naked, even – and could now share this very mundane space?

This is akin to what I feel about Alex and this new woman. How can we have shared all those years together, have made these two children together, dreamed together, traveled together, learned together and now you’re there with her and I”m here with C. and we’re continuing our lives – apart but also together? I don’t get it. It’s like a complex algebra problem and math has never been my strong suit.

scared

When do we stop being scared?

Never.

How do we bear the fear?

By knowing it will always return, and that you always get through it.

too good not to share

I got news late last week that I didn’t get a job I really wanted. I’m not sure there’s been a job I wanted this much. Given my very odd combination of skills, there are few things that seem like a good match for me and that I actually want – but this was one. A few days later, a friend spoke to someone on the committee. Seems that something I very inadvertently did turned some of the committee members off. It was so small and so unintentional, that all I can do is shrug and say, “Oh well, I tried my best.” That’s what I should do. Instead, I’ve spent considerable time beating myself up.

So when I came across this quote on a FB page, it really spoke to me:  ”You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could’ve would’ve happened… or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move the fuck on.” ~Tupac

As Alex starts to see a woman to whom he seems well suited, I’m also finding a surprising well of regret about the marriage rising. I don’t miss him. I pretty much never miss Alex. But I miss what could have been. I miss the narrative. I miss the potential that it seems we frittered away.

And, as the quote speaks to, missing those things that were hardly there – at least not in recent years – does me no good at all.

gear shift

I’ve never been good at shifting gears. Changes of any kind throw my entire system for a roller-coaster  loop. A new job? Can’t sleep for a week beforehand. A trip – even the best kind – makes my innards pace. So I’m not surprised that having my kids for nearly a full week and then having to wave goodbye as they run down the alley to their dad’s apartment upon his return from a trip – their backpacks on, lunchboxes in hand for tomorrow, Bea on her scooter – leaves me feeling empty. Vide. A glass with melting ice cubes waiting to go in the dark dishwasher.

He talks about taking them to Africa and Israel. Away. For how long, he doesn’t say. And while he means well by all of this swashbuckling talk, it leaves me with dread. How long, how long are you taking them? And what will I do? What will become of me? I sound like some bloody fragile Brenda Blethyn character, about to crack.

And it’s crap and rubbish because if anything I seem to be a person who can keep herself busy.

But.

But it’s still scary. And there’s still the grinding as I try to find the new gear – the right gear for that particular day. Is it the day with kids, or without? The day with C. or without? Or that day I know l east of all, the day with me.

surreal

I’ve landed in the surreal land of giving dating advice to my ex-husband. It was bound to happen, but still feels, well, a bit like that stinky and mysterious slice of cheese on the playground of the Wimpy Kid. Not sure which ways the winds are blowing and if I’m even looking at the right map.