Yesterday I stopped by my lawyer’s office and signed the stipulation. My lawyer wasn’t there. Alex wasn’t there.Not even the entire stipulation was there – just that one page needing my signature and the date. Just me and a notary in a festive sweater. It was the definition of anti-climactic.

A few hours later, I drove the kids and Alex to the airport in a menacing rainstorm. At one point, as I squinted at the nearly indecipherable windshield, Alex said, “I just wanted you to know that I signed today.”  ”Yeah, me too.”  Pause. Then  Thomas from the back seat:  ”Do you think we should really be flying in this?” Good question, Thomas. Good question.

So it seemed done. But then today – a flurry of emails from my lawyer, who clearly isn’t concerned that tomorrow is Thanksgiving. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, he’s suddenly found ways to get the child support up. It’s now nearly double what it was a month ago — or even days ago, for that matter. It’s at a number, that while still low feels within the realm of the possible, within the realm of Realism. We have left Kafka-esque behind and are inching toward do-able. I am sighing with relief. And, dare I say, celebrating?

Tonight at the grocery store, I bought cheap hot  house flowers and champagne. I am taking a bath later. I am saying thanks that this whole process is coming to some end. We are entering a new phase, moving from divorcing to divorced. A phase that will bring its own challenges, but a different phase. And for that, I am definitely thankful.

Bea is walking around the house just now absent-mindedly singing made-up lyrics to the tune of “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley,” which she’s currently practicing in chorus:  ”You were a lovely couple, but you had to sep-a-rate.”

Sigh.

Just made a birthday dinner for Alex. The kids were so excited. I made risotto and a salad. It was ok – nothing like I would have made in the past. And his favorite cake.

The kids leave with him tomorrow for a week. I can already hear the silence they’ll leave behind. I’m torn between exhaling with relief and sobbing.

I will go sign the papers tomorrow. They’re ready. There are some tiny loose ends – numbers I still need to track down. The kids’ insurance… The amount I pay to an afterschool program …  And then. And then. Done. Like that. Done. Signed. All that will be left will be the lawyers’ bills. Years of them, I suspect.

We sat in the dark tonight. A family of four. A single candle in Alex’s piece of apple cake the only light. The kids sang with gusto, Bea giving him pecks on the cheeks between verses and Thomas pumping his fist in time. The three of them blew out the single candle together, and I knew what Alex must be wishing – that he’d be able to remain near his kids, despite the fact that he’s currently applying for jobs all over the country. A wish that has little chance of coming true.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Light out. Dark.

Four people in the dark, unsure of what will happen next.  Four wishes so hard to fulfill.

Too much.  Toooooo much is on my mind.  And it’s not turkey. Here’s a sampling from the swamp that is my emotional innards.

A medical condition – if you will – and other people’s reaction to it. To which I just want to scream (yes, scream – I’m not feeling particularly nice):  ”Mind your own bees wax! Go out and get your own condition and do with you will with it; but as for me and my body –  hands off, and most definitely, opinions off!”  Grrrr….

Work work work and applying for jobs – dreamed last night of making my way through a wooden and vined  mazed in the middle of a gorgeous housing  complex from 18th c. England. A very successful and beautiful friend was in the lead; I was bringing up the rear of our small party. The “prize” at the end was a job – a perfect job that would make me very happy. Even though I kept hoisting myself over every wall, scraping my knees and bloodying my elbows in the process, it was clear that I was not going to be rewarded with a job at the end.

Ahimsa – part of a code of conduct in a number of traditions, including yoga, Buddhism, and Jainism – which demands that we  do no violence toward others. Many people have used ahimsa as reason for practicing vegetarianism, and it’s certainly used as a reminder of kindness toward others. But what I’ve been meditating on is the practicing of nonviolence toward ourselves. I’ve been thinking about this, because frankly, I suck at it!

Children on planes – my kids are flying out east with their dad tomorrow night and will be gone for a week. I’m an inveterate flyer, as are they. I’m proud of the fact that can practically do 21st century airport security with their eyes closed. Bea even reminded me this morning to buy tiny bottles for the solution she needs to take to clean her new pierced ears because the bottle she has is too big for airport security. But suddenly I have visions of airplanes falling from the sky. I have visions of no vision of them ever again. And it stops me cold.

Cooking a birthday dinner for my ex – This fun, fun, fun event is tonight. And, I’m sad to admit dear reader, that it was my idea. It somehow seemed like the right thing to do. Now, however, that I’m not eating meat, that I”m broke, that I need to work late at my job, and that I need to go out and buy tiny bottles, it’s an idea that seems particular poor in timing and, well, in my earnest desire to see it through.

Kick boxing – the need to take out some very real, very physical anger is looming large. I’ve always walked away from anger – considered it a lesser emotion, one that a better person would not linger in. The Dalai Lama does not get angry, so neither will I. But at the moment, I’m marinating in the stuff – like some white trash turkey swimming in PBR – and I need to find a way to do battle with it. Suggestions?

Ok, the old dog needs to be walked. I promised my son I’d bring him a PB & J because he doesn’t like the school lunch selection after all. And I”m late for work.

I asked my kids this last night as we drove home on a slick and black  November evening. I’d been hoping for one of those effervescent,  magical kid comments. Like an art teacher friend who asked elementary students where the light came from in a particular Goya painting. “From a window that you can’t quite see,” said some. A few of the older kids were able to talk about perspective and provide a direction from which the light emanated. But a six-year old said simply, “From God.”

Well, my six-year old said nothing quite so soulful. “When you think someone is hot,” said Thomas from the backseat. He was snuggling with his lamb blanket and looked about three in my rearview mirror, but his words belied the little boy he has become of late. We were passing the parking lot where I drop them off for two weeks every summer to go to a day camp out on a farm with animals and art.  That camp, to my mind, is love.

On my way to them last night I’d seen a buck dead in the road. The traffic was all backed up. It was a windy road that ends with a traffic light and it was hard to imagine that anyone had been going fast enough to collide with the animal, much less kill it. I was stuck right next to it for several minutes, the lights from another car lighting up its face as though on a Hollywood set. Its eyes were wide open. “What is this?” it seemed to be asking, trying to understand its fate.

What is love?

I knew that at that exact moment, a dear friend was sitting in his office where he works as a therapist and explaining to a mother–a woman I imagined to be about my age–that her teenaged son has schizophrenia. I couldn’t even imagine how she must feel, what was going through her mind and heart. Instead, I focused on C. and the task ahead of him. The care I knew he was showing just now, but also the way in which his heart was surely breaking. I would have given anything to be invisibly holding his hand right then.

What is love?

“Ok, so yeah, you usually think someone is ‘hot’ when you’re in love, but you can love plenty of people and things and even ideas without thinking they’re hot. You love Django, right?” I ask my kids, “but probably not Syrup,” the neighbor’s cat. My kids both get this. “So why is this? And how do you know? What do you feel inside of you when you love someone or something?”

I can hear some real digesting of ideas going on back there. Why on this dark night as they cup little bits of the banana bread I baked for them am I asking them this? I know I won’t really get an answer, but I wait to be surprised. I want them to consider this, even if for a few minutes. What is love?

My capacity for love grows with age. It expands and can fill me with a grace and purpose that amazes me. There are days, too, when the source seems to be blocked – as though my access to a higher power has been cemented over. My absolute terror over money, especially, and my anger at Alex, can block it out as certainly as a tornado sky kills the sun. But yesterday, the love kept burbling to the surface at unexpected times. During a meeting as I watched a group of colleagues who were trying so hard to do the right thing in an issue involving race and gender. As I navigated my way around that giant animal in the road, its life just ended. As I thought about C. and the news, such immense and life-altering news, that had been his to discover and his to share. As I picked up my children up from their nature-outing van, holding them against me in the park where just weeks ago I’d been able to see them, and where now they were dark figures, pressing leaves and rocks into my gloved hands. I held Bea so tightly that I think I startled her, but then Thomas joined us, hugging me from behind. Two little people with backpacks and lunch sacks, muddy boots and winter coats. One mother seemingly alone and yet so enormous.

Slipping

On my shoes,

Boiling water,

Toasting bread,

Buttering the sky:

That should be enough contact

With God in one day

To make anyone Crazy.

- Hafiz

Abstaining from the “patience pills” I’ve been taking for five years now.

Abstaining from meat after a calzone in New York City filled with four different kinds of animal product left me cold – and sick.

And I spent several weeks abstaining from touch.

I’ve momentarily considered abstaining from sugar and alcohol, but this weekend’s brownies and two glasses of Shiraz indicate that’s probably not immiment.

I’m re-embracing sexual touch, but feel a long-time disassociation coming on from the former two. I’m following my heart – and my gut – and wondering where it will lead. A healthier me? A happier me? A more me me? I’m not in unknown territory, but it always takes awhile to remember what it’s like. And of course, I’m not the same me. (“The same me” – hold that thought… we’ll get to that more in a moment.)

I didn’t eat meat for nearly a decade, but when I got pregnant with Thomas, I started craving it. Preferably covered in mustard. Suddenly, I was having hamburgers every other night after years of not even accepting soup with chicken broth. As for anti-depressants, my first go-round with them came at age 30. After years of talk therapy, my very caring therapist had to admit that the fact that I had to stop at the end of every lap while swimming in order to empty  my goggles of tears was something that might warrant extra treatment. She sent me to a psychiatrist who, as pretty much was the case circa 1995, prescribed Prozac. When I came back to see her two weeks later and she asked if I was feeling better, I said it was hard to tell. “Do you feel more you?” she asked, clearly not understanding that she was dealing with a writer who could have riffed on that question all day. What is “you”? What is “more” you? Is a happier you necessarily a more real you? Perhaps the girl who was filling her swimming goggles was the realest you possible.

For now, I’m remembering that I cry a lot more easily when I’m not on anti-depressants. I cried all over New York. I cried last night. I shudder and sob and am amazed that that well still exists. I’m also shorter of patience. And I’m not long on it to begin with. So this is my work. This is the part of the “real me” that needs to recognize her limitations and find ways to stop and breathe and be with the feeling.  To not necessarily push it away, but to see if she can also be with it in a tender enough way while remaining drug-free. (And yes, in such moment, I entirely get that a glass of wine becomes a drug. A plate of brownies is a drug.)

I guess the art of abstinence is not about suffering but about winnowing away the barriers to seeing ourselves.  When you’ve drunk to the last drop and there’s nothing left to pour, what is left?

I have been traveling—away from my kids for about five days. Over the weekend, Alex sent me photos he took of them and they looked HUGE—Bea especially. Suddenly, she looks on the cusp of adolescence. So big, so fast. How could this have happened? If I blink, will they suddenly be in college?  Last week, holding a friend’s 8-week old baby in New York was another reminder of how much they’ve grown – how much we’ve changed as a family. “It must seem like you were here just yesterday,” said my friend as she breastfed baby Juniper. “Actually, no. It feels like eons ago.”

Eons since I grappled with a stroller. Eons since I fretted over the meaning, or lack thereof, of an infant’s tears. Eons since breast milk bottles sat upside down next to the sink, cleaned and ready to be used again. Eons since I’d dealt with that weird yellow poo that stains the backsides of newborns’ onesies.

Eons. That’s also how I felt when I opened this photo of my dad with Bea and Thomas. I was cleaning up my computer desktop and came across it, then had to do the math: Christmas four years ago. Four months before he died. I can parse the numbers so many other ways: Five and a half years after Bea was born. A year after Alex and I first separated. Forty years after my first Christmas with my dad. Nine months after he was diagnosed. Numbers. Irrelevant really. They’re easy to focus on, to stare at them and try to learn something from them. But like my kids’ current ages or weights or heights, they are irrelevant. What matters is the reminder – hard but in some ways incredibly sweet – that nothing stays the same, all is changing, every second.

I just got off the phone from talking with Alex. The divorce should be final this week, if all goes ok. Neither of us really understands the process, but we’ve each done our bit and there’s nothing left to hold it up. A four-month legal process. A 16-month process from separation to the final final. Or, do I start the clock on April 30, 1994 – the day we got married?

Math. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re now in a different space with each other – discussing our kids, his work, my work, our elderly dog. It’s a relationship that will continue as long as each of us is alive – be that four months, four years, or four decades. But its tenor, its purpose is changed. And I guess it will change again. And again. At some essential level, that’s ok.

I still forward more NY TImes articles to Alex than anyone else. I wonder if this will still be the case ten years from now. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised. Or sad.

…more reasons to get along with my ex.

“Yet a mother’s support of the father turns out to be a critical factor in his involvement with their children, experts say — even when a couple is divorced.”  from today’s NYTimes, Fathers Gain Respect from Experts (and Mothers)

Life has me in her grip. So much going on as I feel my small boat rocked on the ocean. Confident that I’ll get to shore, but like  Max, not sure where I’ll end up. So today, pictures only. Beautiful images to get us all through.