…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.

I do. Yes, me. Pragmatic me.

Tonight is a reading by my friend Hope Edelman from her new memoir, The Possibility of Everything. In the book, she and her husband take their daughter to Belize where Maya is treated by shaman healers. It’s an adventure tale, for sure, but more so the book is about faith. It’s an exploration of what we can allow ourselves to trust. Where and when can we let go, even a little bit, and let powers beyond ourselves support us?

“Trust the Universe,” is a phrase that annoys me. (And Hope, it seems from her book, agrees – or agreed.) I take this phrase as be code for “give up trying.” And I’m all about trying. I work really really really hard to keep everything going. Too hard, some would say. But if I stop, then what would happen? It would be as though The Universe (ah, yeah, that again!) would see me not working hard enough and any little bit of goodness it was thinking of sending my way would evaporate. This is my fear: stop and all will collapse. Keep going, and I’ll eventually be rewarded.

After this January, I have no idea where I’m earning my income. The temporary job I have ends then. The local job market is as dry as it is everywhere else, and relatively small as my town is only 60,000 souls. So the reality of poverty – along with my anger over the child support pittance – can wake me up at night. This giant worry I’ll call Financial Woe, comes and sits on the side of my bed and hisses fear in my ears. Many nights, she is there, coiling her long legs around mine and not letting me come up for air. “It’s all going to collapse,” she snarls. “The worst is going to happen.” She is sure. And by 4:30 am, I am sure, too. What “the worst” is, I don’t exactly know. It’s a feeling. A color. A shape. Nothing concrete. Just utter fear and failure.

But then, as if by magic, there are days like yesterday when I’m sure it’s all going to work out. Some time in early January, just in the nick of time –  maybe even in early February – something will appear in my lap – some job or project. It may be just enough, or it may be bigger and better than anything I can imagine right now. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it will appear. And that experience – just like so many others like it I’ve had over the years – will help me to extend my belief in the possibility of everything. Again. Little by little, step by step, this Pragmatist has been becoming a believer. Walking just like Indiana Jones across the invisible divide. Getting up every morning, knowing even on my darkest days, that somewhere, somehow, it will work out. That hissing lady is still there, and it may take years longer for me to totally rid her from my life; but in the meantime, I’m doing better at floating – laying my head back and knowing that the water will hold me.

Can anyone explain the math involved in child support payments? How is it that a father can be told by the state to pay $225 a month for two kids when the mother  makes less than he does and has the children 5 nights/week, and also pays for 90% of their food, 75% of their clothing, all of their incidentals (e.g., toothpaste, birthday gifts, violin rental, laundry detergent) and does 95% of the work involved in keeping them going, e.g.,  appearing civilized and moderately groomed, getting their homework done, arriving in the right place at somewhat the right time. It seems to me that the courts ASSUME that somehow the mother will come up with the rest of the money that the $225 does not cover in monthly expenses — whether it means borrowing or working crap jobs that take her away from her kids or renting out more and more of her house. How this adds up to make any kind of sense whatsoever is beyond me.

Elizabeth sent me this link to a funny essay by divorce memoirist Suzanne Finnamore about how it takes two years to get over your divorce. I’ve got admit that while this sounds like good advice, it just doesn’t jibe for me.

Finnamore writes:  I got through the First Christmas. The First Valentine’s Day. The First Wedding Anniversary. The First Divorce Anniversary. It slowly eased up; the psychic damage was beginning, if not to disappear, then to taper. I stopped wishing him dead, and started wishing him rich so he could send us more money. This did not happen.

As I wrote in a note to a comment a few weeks ago, I think we’re all on our own schedules. Some of us have been consciously mourning our marriages for quite awhile – letting go in stages – accept various “deaths.”  I know Alex and the kids and I will have Christmas together for years to come. I’ve never cared about Valentine’s Day. And our wedding anniversary hasn’t had any resonance for me since the one four years ago when I figured out he’d had an affair. (Yes, on our anniversary, after weeks of asking him to tell me the truth, I discovered a smoking gun email that made it quite clear he’d a) had an affair, and b) lied to me about it. Gosh, Happy Anniversary!)

I remember when my dad died from cancer and I didn’t have the immediate grief response I thought I should have. But then I realized that in so many ways I’d been grieving and letting go for the year of his illness. I’d already done quite a bit of the work. Not that I was “all better” or ready to get on with things as though nothing had happened. Not at all. But I’d already moved beyond a certain point of raw grief. And I think the same is very much true of where I am with the end of my marriage to Alex.

This weekend I watched Away We Go, a very sweet film about a young couple who are trying to figure out where to live and how to be as they prepare to become parents. There’s a part where a song is playing that says, “Promise you’ll always wait for me.” The context of the song within the movie makes it clear that this means:  when I fuck up, when I’m slow to learn — wait for me. Promise.  And this — much more than any holiday — really got to me. Because I feel that Alex and I grew at different paces. We took different paths at some point. And maybe I didn’t wait for him long enough? He didn’t ask me to wait – but maybe part of the deal you make when you get married is that the other person shouldn’t have to ask, might not even know at certain points in his/her life that they need to ask — but you wait anyway. And I didn’t.  This is the question I’ll come back to for years.

Wondering what it means that on my Mondo Beyondo list I had these two side-by-side entries:  #24)  Live in France.  #25) Learn Spanish.

Sylvia Plath and her children.

In the midst of holding my daughter while she howled over having bitten the inside of her lip, as the 92-year old dog (in dog years) tripped yet again and fell to the ground, as Thomas screamed that he couldn’t have desert because he’d already been given two sugar cookies (before dinner and without my permission) at soccer, as no freelance work appears on the horizon and no new metier makes itself clear, as the bills overflow on my so-called and poorly named “communications table” … I wonder if I’m really going to be able to do this on my own. This is not what God intended – and I don’t even believe in God. But who/whatever created this great soup of life surely did not intend for one woman to care for two kids on her own while trying to make a living. It just doesn’t add up.

When I was pregnant with both kids and living in a different house — a very narrow, old farmhouse with a single toilet downstairs — I’d invariably have to go to the bathroom at 2 a.m. on frigid nights. All the way down, gripping the banister that a thoughtful friend had installed, I’d repeat mantra-like: “At least I have a bathroom. At least I have a bathroom.” It got me through many nocturnal pees with my grace intact and without rancor. I’m looking now for my mantra.

I’m afraid but not even sure what of. It’s a big amorphous feeling. A force. The fear has been in my dreams:  In one, I was working at a bank in a non-descript white room at a desk that I’d had since childhood. I went out for a break and came back to find the desk gone – as was my job. Just like that. Gone. This is a fear tied to the local university’s announcement of a job freeze and to the news of Gourmet’s shuttering, a story that feels like a bell weather to me. In the next dream, I was suiting up to go downhill skiiing. I’ve never been downhill skiiing and am very afraid of heights. There was to be no instruction. They were just dropping me on the mountain – by helicopter – and leaving me there. Last night’s dreams were a bit gentler, but only just. I had 24-hours to outfit an empty house with appliances and furniture without any money — I had to do it by luck and charm — or I’d lose it. By the time I’d awakened, I’d managed to have a Viking stove come into my possession and the memory of Sylvia Plath had fleetingly occurred to me.

I made it a goal when Alex and I separated to eschew fear, to kick it out of my orbit and never to embrace it again. Fear has been such a constant bedfellow to me for years, prohibiting me from becoming my best self. And yet here it is. This gaseous dance of colors and sounds, a force field.

Last night in a scorching hot bath, I picked up Eat, Pray Love and opened it to a random section. Gilbert was remembering a trip she’d taken to a remote Balinese island a few years earlier – before deciding to leave her husband and light off around the globe. She’d sat on the beach and recognized each fear, each sorrow, each anger, and each shame from her life. (How she’d magically remembered them all, she doesn’t say — I have a habit of draping such memories in blackness so that they become hard to find later.) She acknowledged each one and then let it go. When she was finished, she felt cleansed and empty – void of the gaseous dance. But she knew that new shames and fears and angers would take their places. Again and again she would do this dance until she came to the point of, well, enlightenment. Until then, each of stays in the dance. All we can try for is a bit more grace.

So here I go: out into the world. Ready to dance with my fears. With that disappearing desk and the giant stove, with the mountain of sheer ice.

Alex is down. He is thinking of moving away. Not far. But away. To a place where he has more friends. It’s a  move that on some levels makes sense and seems inevitable – more work possibilities which means more money for me – something that is definitely of interest as I’m currently receiving none. But it’s also away from the kids. A move that would be more than a large splinter in their hearts. A move that would speak volumes to them about love and trust.

And so here’s where I’m of two minds:  do I let him stew in his own juices – leave him alone to his own depression and whatever its outcome may be? or do I  try to be helpful in the name of my kids and provide avenues for him to feel more connected to this community, give him ideas for how to establish roots here that will help him feel less isolated and make him want to stay? In short, do I become my children’s advocate, even if that means being in a relationship with my ex that isn’t  entirely comfortable and is more than bit galling, or do I say fuck it? I think I already know the answer. But I’m not sure I like it.

Shine on, people!