falling down is also a gift

MSA

I have wonderful friends, friends who (I think) worry about me, living on my own as I am with almost exclusive caretaking responsibility for two kids, and with two extremely unstable jobs, and out there still throwing myself into the ass-kicking ring of jobhunting at 42 with the world's weirdest resume.

Because I have these wonderful friends, they often remind me how difficult marriage is, how unsatisfying it can be sometimes, how underappreciated one can end up feeling.* I know they are telling me the truth. But I also think that they are telling me this because I am a person built for marriage, and I am no longer married. Or I am as good as no longer married, anyway.

In exchange for this kindness from them, I issue my own sort of public service announcement, a Marital Service Announcement. "Don't get divorced," I tell them. "Just, don't. Dating in middle age with kids sucks. You cannot even imagine."

Of course this is not always true. There is the thrill of a first date, and the excitement of getting to know someone new. But there is also the anxiety of a first date, and the difficulty of getting to know someone new. I've met at least one intelligent and engaging man through an internet dating site who has used his newly single status to complete rethink his approach to relationships, throwing monogamy right out the window, and he is as excited as a puppy at a dogpark about his new exciting (exciting! exciting!) dating life, while also maintaining an enviably balanced and committed relationship with an equally intelligent and engaging woman.

But the fact of the matter is that I was built to be married. Maybe like a lot of women. Maybe it's an evolutionary thing. Maybe it's the way we're socialized. Maybe it's the stories we're told, and the stories we tell ourselves. But there's no denying that I would have taken my husband back, if he had ever shown the slightest interest in being taken back. I think I'm like most women that way, no matter how tough we talk.

Of course now I realize that taking him back would have been a huge mistake, for him and for me. So I guess I owe him one for that bit of stubborn unkindness.

Still, dating. Now. Shit. A friend of mine wrote a lovely piece about how her older body tells a story about her life, and I know she is right. And I love that I understand my body now much better than I did as a twenty-year-old. There's nothing like looking into a giant mirror aimed right at your vagina while you sweatily push out The World's Largest Baby (they all are) to make you get right with your body.

But on the other hand, you can never quite get away from the certain knowledge that you are getting naked with someone who would have been so much more impressed twenty years ago.

On top of all that inevitable Naked Time anxiety, then someone (her name was Esmeralda, voice of reason and also the voice of every tiny freakout I have had contemplating the possibility of Naked Time) left a comment on my last post about STDs, and reminded me that they can be passed even with standard safe sex practices, and all the Wonder of the New disappears like so much morning fog. Only a lot faster, and without any actual poeticism involved whatsoever.

Oh, yeah, that. Dating. Now. Shit.

And finally, perhaps worse but at least more poetic, there is the ouchiness of my heart. Or it would be more poetic, if I didn't refer to it as "ouchiness." And it's probably not poetic to the poor guy who has to date the idiot who constantly moans, "Yes. You like me now. I see that. But soon you will find me boring and unattractive, right? That's the way this is going to play out." And as soon as I say that, I know that "soon" just got a lot sooner. You end up steering your car straight into the wall to avoid all sorts of imagined obstacles. You buy into that stupid, nonsensical reasoning that tells you that, because one person got completely sick of you, you probably induce that sort of nausea in most men. And then it turns out that you actually have done that, with all your worrying and moaning. I guess at least it is good to be right.

Marital Service Announcement. I'm all about the MSA.

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 The divorce has gone in stages. I'm going to resist the urge to name them all, because they are legion and boringly predictable. I'm sure the moment at which our divorce became final, in my head if not legally, was when we moved into our new house. I could let go of most of the financial worry, and instead focus on reimagining my life without J, which turned out to be not so difficult. I just hadn't bothered using my imagination before, which is a shame because I have a great imagination.

But because I am a music junkie, I kept looking for the music that would symbolize the divorce for me. I was looking for some album that I could listen to and think, "Now. Now this music sounds different because I am no longer married to him. This is the way music will sound now."

I listened to The Wailin' Jennys pretty much nonstop for the first couple of months, which was probably not helpful. Although I think they could have been helpful, were I to have had the right attitude.

But the problem with The Wailin' Jennys (and also their advantage in those first few months) was that J never really enjoyed them. So they didn't really work for me to understand how I would be able to reconcile my past, which was so defined by my partnership with him, and my future.

I really thought that Nanci Griffith's Other Voices, Other Rooms would be my divorce album. It was one of the very first albums we listened to together. The fact that he, a boy from Berlin, knew and loved that album might have been a big reason he got lucky with me that first time. ("Got lucky" is a terrible, terrible phrase. But also funny enough to keep using.) Although he was very cute and very smart, so he probably would have anyway.

But I listened to it, over and over, and nothing. It sounded exactly the same, and I felt exactly the same person, listening to it.

But then I realized that the Lucinda Williams Sweet Old World album was missing from my collection, even though our agreement to split the CDs was that I take the women, and he take the men. This realization was followed by an overwhelming urge to hear that album again right damn now. It was also followed by the realization that there were probably a large number of our CDs in his office, which had not been split up, which he had simply kept.

There was this weird way I felt betrayed all over again, because he knew how much I loved that CD, and he had kept it, despite our agreement. But then I remembered that he was the one who actually gave me that CD in the first place. 

It was a party at the house we shared back in graduate school, before we were married. The party was nominally celebrating my birthday, but with the explicit instructions not to bring presents. But J presented me with that CD, and I loved it, and thought it was the best present anyone had ever given me (ever) because it showed how well he knew me, above anyone else in the world. 

I headed straight for the CD player and interrupted the party music so that everyone could hear this song I loved, about suicide. Party on, good people.

This meant that when we got married, we then had 2 copies of this album. I ended up taking the second one in and selling it at the CD store, because no way would we ever need 2 copies of that album. 

So I wrote him an email, not demanding that he give that damn CD because Lucinda Williams is very damn well a woman dammit, but asking if I could borrow it, to make a copy on my computer. I guess maybe I should have just bought another copy. Number 3.

But I picked it up late from my office mailbox, where he left it for me. I played it loud in my car on the way home, and I cried for the optimism that had led me to sell that other copy. And then I guess I got divorced in the court of Lucinda Williams.

* In case any of my friends' husbands ever read this entry (not likely), the answer is "No, of course I am not talking about your wife."

 

the world is not the same

I can't think of anything funnier than a 42-year-old woman with 2 children trying to figure out how to date again.

I probably need to watch more comedy, though, because I suspect that something involving monkeys would get more laughs, especially if they were super nervous dating monkeys. Maybe.

For instance, on one of my first dates I tried to explain that I would not be interested in any sort of  exclusive relationship, given that my life is too unsettled to expect anyone to go all in with me at this point (plus low expectations on all our parts mean less likelihood for disappointment). In explaining that he also was not interested in any sort of exclusive relationship with me, I got the reassurance that this would not be an issue, as I was just not awesome enough for him to fall in love with. Problem solved.

A part of me feels like I should find this more disturbing than reassuring, but another part of me wants to applaud his bluntness. After all, how many of us are actually awesome enough to fall in love with? There are just not enough spectacular people to go around, right? By this age we are all carrying around our little personal failings, tucked into our pockets out of sight, although we all see the bulges anyway.

It's strange to begin dating now, in a world so different than it was 17 years ago. Evidently it's all online now. No one actually knows any single people in real life, but it only takes 24 hours of putting your profile online to discover that there are at least 50 single guys nearby happy to message you with varying degrees of grammatical facility. I would probably have found fewer single guys in my area were it not for the fact that I mentioned that I hadn't had sex in a year, and that I found this fact to be a total bitch. I probably need to learn how to dial back the frankness. Actually I probably should have learned this lesson ages ago.

Nevertheless, I am trying to remember how not to take this part of my life too seriously, because otherwise it would be terrifying.

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 Then one night Frankie comes home and she is singing a song that she heard at her dad's, and it is a song from an album that I recently bought, too. So I burn it onto a cd to play in the car for her, because there is nothing I love better than to hear my daughter singing.

And suddenly I realize that I am not constantly having to remind myself to let go of the anger and the hurt, because I remember why I fell in love with him in the first place and it no longer matters that that love is no longer there. I don't have to doubt myself for falling in love with someone who eventually no longer loved me. Maybe I do still doubt myself, but I don't have to.

And it's also ok that we are off buying the same albums and therefore paying for them twice with our two separate lives that will never completely separate. It's ok because I am happy here in my little house with my girls, and our dog, and our night-attack kitties. It's ok to admit that we are clearly both happier now, and to inch toward a forgiveness. Or, if not a forgiveness, at least a more relaxed air of unconcern, which might be a more attainable goal for right now.

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Then another night comes and my phone rings. My stomach flutters; I reach for the phone; I step into the river to be swept away.

And then I answer the call.

breath and lightness

I wrote the paragraphs below in May, and then couldn't quite get them finished enough to post, for whatever reason. It's now fall, my favorite season, and we are firmly moved into our new house, which we love. I am only a little tiny bit in debt at this point because I sold the old house. We are all good, even Leonardo di Prancio, who found a new home without young children to bite (oh yes he did) because that dog just could not stop making his point (with his teeth). We miss him, but look at his four months with us as a really great foster home experience.

We have been laughing.

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It's the glorious beginning of summer, all sunshine and lawn mowings every few days filling the air with the smell of grass, and that air is not too moist and heavy to breathe, so we breathe in deeply all that grass and new leaf smell. Ah.

The girls have me drive by the house we are moving to every few days, just to check up on it, to make sure it is not getting lonely sitting there empty. We talk about putting up a tent in the backyard, sitting on the screened porch and watching the dogs play, pulling up carpet and painting the bare floor underneath it crazy colors.

There are three bedrooms, and one of the bedrooms is considerably smaller than the others. The girls fought over which of them would have to take the smaller one, and no verbal trickery ("Which of you lucky girls will get the cozy one?") convinced either of them to relent. Finally, in a show of astoundingly bad mothering judgment, I promised the one with the smaller bedroom would get a TV in her room, which is frankly ridiculous. Predictably, they both then wanted the smaller room and the fight raged on, transported to a new battleground.

When the loan came through from the bank, it turned out to be $15,000 short of what I needed. Rather than accepting the various kindly intentioned offers of help from people with a better debt-to-income ratio than I currently possess, I decided to stand on my own two financial feet and take advantage of the only loan readily available to those such as myself, a credit card. It makes me giggle nervously just to say it (or cry, as I did after I finalized the deal with the card company), because I'm informed enough to know that buying a house (or, not to exaggerate as I dearly love to do, a portion of a house) on a credit card counts as a show of astoundingly bad financial judgment.

Unless, of course, you pay it off very quickly. So I explained to the girls that we were going on a total spending freeze. Further, we were going to get rid of some unnecessary expenses, including our satellite TV subscription, until the credit card is paid off.

This is no sad story. These are totally luxurious choices. The girls have not missed eating out or being able to turn on the TV and flip between hundreds of channels, and I certainly haven't, either. But it does mean that I managed to use my astoundingly bad financial judgment to negate my moment of astoundingly bad mothering judgment, and I find that simply delightful.

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After my string of mopey entries, I'm trying my hardest to get my sense of humor back again. "Trying hard" and "sense of humor" don't usually go well with one another, so excuse any moments of awkwardness you may witness.

I've finally stopped removing tags of myself from every photo friends might post of me on Facebook. I'd say it's like I'm OK facing myself again, but I have no idea if that's it or not. I do notice that I seem to frown an awful lot in those candid shots, and that is totally at odds with how I think of myself. My sister gave me copies of the photos she took of us over Christmas last year, 6 weeks after J left, and I can hardly bear to look at the ones she took when I wasn't aware of the camera because I look like nothing but sad. S-a-a-a-a-a-d. I hate to think that this was the face I was showing my girls every morning. 

But lately I've been feeling so much better, and yet I am still showing up as Old Dimple-Between-the-Eyebrows-Frowny-Face McGee. I have no idea how you Smileys out there do it, showing up radiant in every action shot, all pleased looking in every group photo shot. So I'm also trying to figure out how to jumpstart my humor again, so I can go back to bemoaning how my smile makes my jowls go sort of bumpy in photos.

Since I know that the key to humor is deliberate and careful analysis, combined with a broad (yet precise) strategy for everyday scenarios, I've been thinking a lot about laughter. Specifically how I can ensure that my girls and I have a sufficient supply thereof.

One of the perks of being single again is that I am once more Boss of My Own Music. Whatever I'm in the mood for is what I can listen to, although it's true that I often let the girls choose, too (which is why my Pandora account has not only an Avril Lavigne station but also a "What the Hell" station, in case you were wondering. Annika.) 

Music is pretty much the height of happy-making, right? (When it's not the nadir (?) of sad-making, anyway.) Some of my very happiest memories are tied to music. Sitting with my college buddy, John, out on the roof of his apartment eating Haagen-Dazs straight from the container while listening to Alban Berg blasting from his very nice speakers. Going to hear Carmen with my mom in high school, an event I invited her to and therefore felt very grown-up. Sitting front row at a Bruce Springsteen concert with my boyfriend, shortly after we'd decided to get married. Singing "My Favorite Things" with the girls in the car. Crying in that weird happy way when Emmylou Harris sang "Prayer in Open D", and it was the first time I'd heard it outside of the PICU. That short time I dated a music composition major, who wooed me by humming the theme from his latest piece, which turned out to be straight from Shostakovich, but he laughed when I pointed that out and said, "No wonder I love it so much!" Dancing to the Pixies with Scott before we took off for Nairobi and the best summer job a kid ever had.

One of my favorite internet reads is Jeremy Denk, who has a knack for explaining music in a way that allows non-musicians to understand, at least a little bit, how musicians think about music. Given the amount of time, level of commitment, and sheer intelligence it takes to become a professional musician, you just know they have to hear music in a whole different way than the rest of us, which, as it turns out, is exactly right and vastly entertaining to read. 

Last summer Jeremy Denk wrote about humor in classical music, complete with audio examples and his usual insistence that classical music isn't just to be revered, but to be understood as another  gorgeous expression of our common experiences. Much of his analysis of the humor in the Beethoven sonata he uses as his example has to do with thwarted expectations. And I guess that this is how I've always understood humor, too, in the surprise of it, and it's why so much humor has such dark overtones.

It's why I (or we, when we were a "we") had our funniest moments when shit was so totally not funny .

But lately I've been appreciating the Comfort Laugh, which is the kind of happy laugh you give when stuff turns out exactly as you thought it would. For example, on the drive to the girls' and my first kayak outing, I was taking bets from them on how long it would take me to fall into the water. To their credit, neither of the girls were giving time in seconds. So when I fell into the water approximately 5 minutes after arrival at the lake, there was really no surprise factor for them at all. Maybe there was a bit of surprise for the 6-year-old boy fishing with his parents on the shore, but he struck me as the sort of kid who would have laughed, too, even if he had known me all his life.

It was the same laugh I gave when Leonardo and I were having a stare-down to determine who would be in charge at the house, and he gave me an unwavering glare and then lifted his leg and peed on my foot. I saw that one coming, and I knew it was a very bad sign that I was going to lose the battle, but it was too funny not to lose the staring contest and just sit down and laugh. With a wet foot.

It's the same laugh the girls gave when I locked myself out in the middle of the night, and they had to let me back into the house. That's the kind of stuff I do, along with making pancakes for dinner and throwing impromptu dance parties and insisting that walks in the rain are good for your constitution. It's not hilarious, but it's comforting. And still kind of funny when your mom falls in the lake, even if you saw it coming.

 

here we are

One week after the movers rolled grandma's piano up to a new wall ("Listen, guys, this is the only piece of furniture I really care about, OK?"), and I am sitting here watching Tinkerbell look out our new window. The Divorce Kitten is now a full-grown Divorce Cat, and soon she will just be A Cat. Our Cat, and a sweet one. Cleo is sprawled on the floor at my feet, and Leonardo click-clicks across the floor of every room, pacing with his terrier energy that even the hour walk we just took did not dissipate. He will make sure Frankie is in her bed, and then Annika, and then me. He likes the world to be in order, much like J, and he's a runner, too. The difference being that he comes back as long as you don't chase him. Also, it is totally socially acceptable to leave a leash on a dog at all times, just in case.

It's good that we've moved, because here is a place that I don't keep expecting J to turn up. Not that I actually did, anymore, but the brain is a funny thing and not always kind.

I have friends, mostly online, whose husbands left around the same time. Now I watch as some finalize their divorces, and some get back together. Some of my friends have already started dating again, and I think that must be nice. Because isn't that part of why people my age end up divorced? So that they can experience once more that rush of falling in love? And even if the divorce is not something I've chosen, I probably should look into that benefit to ward off the mopeys. But the fact that my primary identity is Mother means that I can't even imagine myself navigating those waters, or even launching myself from my barnacle-encrusted dock.

Not to mention the fact that I have two children attached to me approximately 90% of the time. But even that is improving. For the first time since November, the girls are back to sleeping in their own beds. Tinkerbell climbs the ladder to Anni's loft and curls up in her curly hair, and faithful Cleo snuggles next to Frankie. Leonardo snores loudly next to me. We are balanced in that way, all of us with our own places and our own wordless companions. Less hurt now, and dreaming what we dream alone. As we all do.

the world is the same

Today we went to one of our very favorite places, Sugar Grove Nature Center. The girls kept inviting friends until our car was full. When we got there, we discovered that there was a Golden Retriever group holding an adoption event, and neither girl asked me to adopt another dog. I take this as a sign of happiness, that they are not feeling a lack or an empty space or a failing we need to distract ourselves from. It is progress measured by demands not made.

The place was exactly as I remembered it, except that the girls were almost too big to fit on the tree swing, but not too big that climbing the big tree wasn't a little scary. The creek still occupied most of their time, and the canopy of trees above my head as I lay on the bench looked the same as I remembered.

Friday was full of bad news, but Saturday reminded me that everything important is still the same. I made my own Mother's Day gift with the girls, and I think it will be my very favorite one, ever.

not going to write about my dreams

much, anyway.

Because one of the great things about having a husband was that I always had a captive audience to tell about my weirdest dreams the next day. Not that I don't realize that hearing about another person's dreams is boring and a pointless waste of time, which is why you have to pay a psychologist all that money to sit and listen to your boring and pointless dreams. Also not that I don't realize that my take on what a psychologist does is probably, oh, a hundred years out of date.

But I do love my dreams, and now have no one even mildly invested in nodding and pretending to listen. That's where the practice of blogging really shines, my friends, when you have something to talk about that no one really wants to hear about. 

So the other night I had a dream that I woke up in a grocery shopping cart, with the girls nestled beside me. As I slowly came to consciousness (in my dream while sleeping, so confusing), I realized that I must have gotten sleepy while shopping and just climbed into the cart. I was in the Jewel I always shop at (the one where I cried in front of the pharmacist), so knew that they must have recognized me and decided that it was OK if I just spent the night curled up in a cart with my kids. When I finally sat up, using my fingertips to explore gingerly the shopping cart grate marks on my cheeks, it slowly dawned on me that I had been sleeping in the Jewel, in a shopping cart, every night that week.

It doesn't take a degree to unpack that one, does it?

But while I get what my overwrought subconscious was getting at, I really don't know why it is going all exaggeratedly dramatic on me. I have a place lined up for me and the girls to move to. It is smaller and less expensive than our current house, and allows the girls to stay in the same school. It is maybe not the house I would have chosen were I not trying to choose with an eye to keeping the girls with their same school friends, but I can see us coming to love living in that house. Certainly of all the moves I was contemplating, this is the one that is the least nervewracking for the girls. And given how Annika behaves when her nerves are wracked, this also means it is the move least nervewracking for me.

On the other hand, I'm still waiting on word that the financing for the house will work out, so maybe it's the niggling uncertainty of waiting that's getting me down. *

The night before I decided to put in an offer on this little house, I had the most vivid dream of driving myself off a mountain when I fell asleep at the wheel. Mostly I'm having a lot of bad dreams about all the bad stuff that can happen when you're sleepy, so this probably just means I should investigate insomnia as a lifestyle choice.

In our waking lives, the girls and I are doing very well and only using shopping carts in the appropriate manner. Well, except for Frankie, who still likes to climb in the shopping cart and then have all the food loaded on top of her, which I am hoping is not an eating disorder waiting to happen. And also except for Annika, who likes to take control of the shopping cart herself, especially when it comes to rounding the blind corners, where it's never very clear which side of the aisle you should be occupying, which is surely not the sign of a thrill-seeking teenage driver of the future, is it?

I got the girls another dog, Leonardo di Prancio, shortly after I broke the news that we would need to move from this house. He is adorable and hilarious, and he is also a total little shit. I mean it, but in a completely loving way. I have the feeling that there are not many households where this little guy would fit in (I suspect that his breed is something like Cocaine Terrier), but I am rolling with it because he snuggles up to the girls in the evening and he makes me laugh, and I would forgive a whole warehouse full of broken and destroyed household items in exchange for those two qualities. **

Cleo, sweet, mostly well-mannered Cleo, is enjoying the fruits of  Leonardo's stubborn refusal to learn the House Rules. Like the time I came home from dropping off the girls and discovered that Leonardo had knocked the box of organic, whole-grain granola with flax seed off the table, where both dogs devoured the entire box in the 10 minutes it took to get the kids delivered to school that morning. We spent the rest of the day taking frequent walks, where Cleo looked more and more dismayed as the interval between poops became alarmingly short. Leonardo, on the other hand, was clearly beaming "Worth it! Worth it!" every time he hunched up. By the end of the walk, he was barely breaking his proud stride to get them out. I tell you, he's a rock star of a dog.

Between the dogs, and the kitten, and the girls, and the working, I am busy. Not too busy to neglect updating on facebook, where you can just post the one good sentence that you can't really figure out how to work into an entire blog post, but busy enough to feel my own forward momentum. 

I was driving the girls to a birthday party the other day when I saw J walking down the sidewalk. I thought about how, before, I would have yelled, "There's daddy!" And the girls would have rolled down their windows and waved and been as excited as if they had just spotted a cheetah in the wild. But this time I drove on, and they were too busy talking to notice him out there.

This shouldn't be taken to mean that I don't think he's important to them. The complete opposite is true, and it's a big part of why I decided to stay here in town. I'm not sure exactly what it means, though. Maybe simply that I am no longer a part of their relationship with him. He has to figure all that out without any help from me, and don't think I'm so deluded that I don't realize that that might be a good thing for him. Or it could also be not so great, but let's hope for A Good Thing for all our sakes.  

Also, he was walking with a woman. I have no idea who she was, or what her relationship with him might be, but I realized that I absolutely did not care to know. I do know what that means, and I think it is a good sign.

Especially since I did not dream of him at all that night, and, as has already been well-established, my subconscious is not very good at ignoring the worrisome stuff. 

I think it's time to get packing. I've got more than will fill a Jewel shopping cart, but less than will fill this house, and that's as it should be.

 

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* As a matter of fairness, I should point out that J helped me get the bank on board with this downsizing plan of mine by using the equity in our current house. That's my obligatory sentence of fairmindedness. Funny how I couldn't seem to figure out how to work it into the flow of everything else I was writing. Fair breaks my flow!   

** Although I did move the girls' collection of pottery to a safer spot, because those aren't "household items," that stuff is ART.

springy

Spring is the very best time of year for our yard: the glorious crabapple and the flowering pears and the redbud tree and the giant forsythias and the lilac and the doublefile viburnum. Every one of them has a story behind how they came to be in our yard, and I remember planting them all. The lilac makes me the saddest, because Joerg knew how much I loved them and we went and bought one right away to plant in our new yard. It was my very first plant purchase at our new home together. Last year, after 13 years in our yard, I decided that it was looking a big rough so I pruned it down nearly to the ground after flowering. All summer it looked awful and ridiculous, but I knew it had to be done. This spring, as I knew it would, it has filled in with young and lovely growth into a full and symmetrical shape, even better than it was before, if a bit shorter.

I don't know if I should take this as a metaphor for starting over without the man I chose as a life partner, or as a metaphor for the difficulty of patiently waiting through the ugly years of a marriage to find the new shape of a relationship. I should probably just accept that gardening is easier than marriage, and quit trying to make every bush and plant into a Life Lesson.

Slowly, slowly, and sadly, I have accepted that he was truly unhappy with me, and for a very long time. No one walks out on a marriage with two kids for a woman who's been living with your family for less than 3 weeks. Not any one sane and reasonable, at least, and he has always been eminently sane and reasonable. After the initial hurt wore off, I began to realize that, despite her relative youth, she really should have been nothing compared to me. I am the mother of his children, and I am a fabulous mother. I was by no means the perfect wife, but even writing the words "perfect wife" squicks me out a little bit. I was supportive and flexible and a good partner; I am smart and funny and entirely OK with my own imperfections. I know my flaws, and I know the things about me that drove him crazy as well as I know the things about him that drove me crazy.

I know now that he must have been thinking of leaving for a very, very long time. And that's just the way it is. No mystery to solve or self-improvement to be gained by hearing his reasons. I am who I am, and he no longer enjoyed the comfort of knowing me.

A few days ago I ran into a woman I know who went through a horrible divorce. Her husband had serious problems, and she ended up mainly fending for herself while going through the emotional upheaval of her divorce. We would run into each other at the library, or at a school literacy night, or at a town parade, and she would update me on the increasingly awful state of affairs while our kids were off doing their kid stuff together. When I ran into her this time, she had a new man with her. She introduced him as her boyfriend, and I, with all my emotions just barely under the surface, told him, "I just love this woman. She is one of the kindest, strongest, most wonderful souls I know." I'm sure I surprised her. I bet she wondered what was in the Diet Coke I was drinking. But this new guy did not even hesitate. He put his arm around her waist and looked me right in the eye, "I love her, too. You are exactly right."

I guess it's easy to be that pitch perfect in the beginning of a relationship, but I still found the whole encounter heartening. Happiness is exactly what you hope to see in April, cruelest month or not.

There are so many things about my life right now that I find completely ridiculous. There's the fact that I feel like I need to tell all my married friends, "You realize that I would never have an affair with your husband, right?" And it's not because their husbands aren't awesome, but because the very notion gives me hives. But then I don't, because saying something like that implies that their husbands would want to have an affair with me, which also seems ridiculous. But now I feel ridiculously uncomfortable around their husbands, because I haven't actually said this and I feel like I need to, even though it would certainly count among the top 10 stupidest things I have ever said (and I have said some supremely stupid things).

There's also the fact that I'm considering going vegetarian again and dragging my kids along with me simply because I am really awful at cooking meat. Frankie can't help but opine that my steak or chicken or whatever is not as good as daddy's, and I can't help but agree, because that was his role. The Meat Guy. I'm not sure anyone has ever cited "culinary inability and emotional trauma" as the reason for going vegetarian, but hey.

There's also the damn closet door, which is still leaning on the wall. There's the bank guy, nearly laughing me out the door when I looked into a mortgage on my own. There's me, still with the schedule of a stay-at-home mom who likes to work, but suddenly without the luxury of a partner who makes that possible. And there's the chaotic press of two dogs and a kitten, which is a whole essay on ridiculousness every day.

But however ridiculous, I think I am coming to terms with this new life. I have let go of my yard, with all its Life Story Plants, and I'm making plans with the girls to fill up our new yard. Our new house will be smaller, but the girls will get to keep going to the same school with their same friends. They will still have their dad in town to see them on a regular basis, and at all their special events.

My last entry, the awful sad one I erased, was written shortly after I realized finally that his leaving had less to do with her than with his feelings about me. This one, the one I hope to keep, was written shortly after I realized that his feelings about me have less to do with me than with him.

I am bouncy, full of spring. My trajectory is not straight, but it is true.

you can't spell "heart" without "tear", and the leftover "h" is the sound of your breath whooshing away

Joerg* is taking the girls bowling every Thursday night now. The girls are really excited about having a regularly scheduled event with him, and I'm happy that they are negotiating a new relationship with him. "Happy" being a relative term here.

On my first Thursday free, I went to find exercise pants that don't fall down when I jog (by popular demand, sent to me telepathically by the b-ball players playing in the court I was slogging around). On my second Thursday free, I went to go hear a performance by the poet Andrea Gibson. It was preceded by an open mic for the undergraduates, at which point I began wondering if the Student Center served alcohol, because there could have been a very fine drinking game going on based on variations of the phrase "broken dreams." Which is not to say that their poetry was not much appreciated, just that it might have been a teensy bit more appreciated with a glass of wine in hand.

As a comfortably married woman, I enjoyed reading well-written romance novels (good recommendations found here, if you don't already know about the many resources to help you glean the chaff from the wheat in the vast and fertile (heh) field of romance novels). As a slightly panicked and depressed woman, left by her husband for another woman, and rejected beyond all doubt, I cannot even contemplate reading a romance. So I was relieved to have to leave the poetry reading early when she announced that she was going to end with a run of love poems. If I'd had my way with the Broken Dreams Drinking Game earlier, I probably could have just had a good cry over it all, but Sober Me left feeling a bit nauseous (and just a little bit like crying). Exploring the feminine emotional life is more than I'm capable of right now.

I wonder if I will ever feel poetic about this? I wonder if I will ever be able to step away enough to try to make something of it all? Something that I can smash into words that don't quite capture it all, but enough for me to feel like I've understood enough to move on? Right now there are so many practical concerns, so many decisions to make, and so much paperwork that poetic is the last thing I'm feeling.

I think about taking notes for an advice book instead. It's pretty well known that lots of marriages with kids with major medical issues don't last. Although I would not have identified that as a current strain on our marriage, I guess that history never really goes away. And I can't argue the fact that when Annika was at her sickest, our relationship was pushed to the breaking point. I've heard stories from other moms of transplant kids, whose own marriages have broken. I wonder if there has been some sort of survey taken on this phenomenon, because, anecdotally, it always seems to be the husband doing the leaving, and there seems to be a strong theme of Greener Pastures going on. Surely someone could gather enough data to offer some sort of practical advice? Figure out what the hell is going on? So far the only trend I'm noticing is that marriages with medical kids last best when it's not the case that one parent is made primarily responsible for child care.*** Also, that it is always the husband leaving for some other possible relationship, and I wonder if statistics don't just make it easier to leave.

My neighbor offered the (yes, slightly tipsy) advice that you should never marry an atheist, because your husband needs to believe that he will go to hell for leaving you for another woman.

I picture my husband weighing the cons, with "Life with Moreena (ugh)" balanced in one hand and "Eternal Torment in the Fiery Pit of Hell" in the other. Slowly, despairingly, he turns his head to me and nods. Go, Sanctity of Marriage!

Of course, I thought the example of my Ph.D. advisor, whose marriage was ended by her husband's affair with a younger colleague, was to tell me that valuing your career over your marriage was a good way to weaken your relationship. And so I did not pursue following her overseas to finish my degree, choosing instead to stay in town and wait for Joerg to finish up his degree. Which has now left me in the same position as my former Ph.D. advisor was in, only without a career. So I probably should ease up on using anecdotal evidence in making life decisions.

So I'm not feeling poetic, and my analytical skills are also very much in doubt.

Which mainly just leaves overwhelmed as my main state of mind. It's easier being really busy when you're not also having to make big decisions simultaneously. Mostly my life was going along a pretty set path, but now that path has splintered into a decision tree with so many branches that it's more of a decision bush.

The girls are slowly coming back to themselves, although they ask me heartbreaking questions on a regular basis. Annika's back to working at school (most days) and dreaming up new ideas before she's finished up with the last project. Frankie is back to asking crazy, specific Frankie Questions (What kid wants to know the specifics of credit-card sharing? Frankie, that's who.) I don't know how all this will affect them, and I'm trying not to focus too much on the negatives. Certainly I can forget about them learning about what it takes to make a lasting relationship (lesson #1: you don't just walk away from it with no warning, and all the subsequent lessons are now moot), but they are now learning about being flexible, adapting to new circumstances, being independent, and recovering from a big hurt. Those aren't bad lessons to learn, and I'll just have to hope that their relationships work out somehow.****

My third and fourth Thursdays were not so free, as Annika and then Frankie succumbed to the mighty Super Tummy Bug attacking GI tracts all over town. Joerg and I might be busy redefining our parental roles right now, but I'm pretty sure I'll always be the one cleaning up after the yuckies hit and making chicken broth soup that gets cold in the cup before it can be sipped down with a straw and a grimace.

This Thursday is the Book Club I had gotten too busy in the past few years to keep up with. I look back and see how busy I was trying to contribute to the financial health of our family, while still keeping up with the demands of my demanding kids, only to have all that hard work wiped out in one awful afternoon. I gave up too much to have it all go away so easily, and yet it has, and there is a lesson there that is not even the hardest lesson to learn.

Here is the one I don't want to learn:

Whatever I do at this point will be both the right thing and the wrong.

Frankie drew a picture of a heart last night with a big blue teardrop in the middle. "Because sometimes love makes you cry," she explained.

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* Umlaut dropped by popular demand, but I couldn't help replacing it with oe. I'm going to pronounce it "George" in my head for those of you rooting for petty vengeance, though. It's better (and way more legal) than setting fire to his motorcycle in the front yard. It's also completely appropriate, as I still remember one of our first conversations at our first sort-of date. We were sitting on the floor in the living room of my apartment in the complex filled mostly with happily independent senior woman. Hepburn was meowing to go out, since the happily independent senior woman fed her their leftover chicken, thinking she was a poor stray cat (despite her distinctly non-stray healthy tummy size). I asked him his last name**, and he said everyone always mispronounced it, and I said, "Give me a shot." He wrote it down for me, and I said it perfectly correctly. And he looked at me like I was some sort of genius, like I had just stepped down from Mount Perfection, and told me that I was the first person in this country to get it right. Then we married, and moved here, and had children, and he started to pronounce it the way everyone always did, the wrong way, and I never understood why he would do that. I said, "Hey. I took your name, and it's pronounced this way, not that." Now I'm giving that name back, and leaving my children with it. But they will learn to pronounce it the right way, because it's worthwhile to stick with what's right even if it is harder.

** I went on a date with a guy before I knew his last name? Apparently, I did.

*** True for many marriages? I know it is not what I had planned for our marriage, but we had to make adjustments, given Annika's long health struggles.

**** Surely true for all parents, no matter the circumstances.

begin

This is probably already the title of a post somewhere in the past 9 1/2 years of this journal, but I'm not going to bother qualifying with "again" because I'm aiming for every post from now on to be titled "begin." At least in my head.

We made it through our first round of holidays without anyone losing an eye. All my fellow Left Women* have told me that the first holiday season is the worst. Thanksgiving was torturous, but Christmas eased into melancholy, and by New Year's I didn't even need to lay flat on the bed to zip up my Big Girl Pants. Of course this is probably because the magical Divorce Diet has helped me lose 15 pounds.** I've thought about writing that diet book to solve all my financial issues, but realized that Step 1: Lose your Husband to the Love of a Younger and/or Prettier and/or More Successful Woman, might be a bridge too far for many dieters out there. Also, step 1 is also pretty much the only step, so it would be an extremely short book.

I ended the year trying my best to pull together all the documents and numbers I need for the financial affidavit portion of the Divorce Fun Times. Since the financial stuff was never my marital territory, I did not exactly have a leg up here. My lawyer seemed a tad appalled that I couldn't even give an accurate reckoning of how much money I had been making per year, but that's the way I rolled.

I finally realized, though, that my best strategy for the financial affidavit was to slow down a bit, because it turns out that a lot of the numbers I need actually get mailed right to me! Yes! In the form of handy monthly statements! Right there in my mailbox! A-mazing.

And it also turns out that the best way to get an idea of monthly expenses for the 3 of us is simply to keep track of them for a couple of months. Going back through 12 months of bills and trying to extract our expenses from his (or reduce them down by a fair percentage) was giving me a ginormous headache.

So it's not done, but it's 3/4 of the way done, and that's enough for now.

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Every day now I wake up and try to get one major task accomplished. There are some things around the house that are falling apart in the most hilarious way possible. The bi-fold door to the linen closet, the one that always came off its track and that Jörg alone could fix, now leans permanently in the hallway, leaving the shelves of the closet completely exposed. This would not be so funny were it not for the fact that, in addition to not folding underwear, I also do not believe it's worth my time to learn how to fold fitted sheets. Also I've been asking the girls to help me put away laundry (previously they only had to fold and put away their own), so everything has been sort of stuffed and poked into the closet in the most haphazard way possible, so, even if that pink towel was once neatly folded, it's a scrunched-up ball by the time they're done with it. But, hey, it's put away enough for me. Thanks, kids! Good job!

In the grand scheme of things, we are doing OK on our own. The girls now tell me about things that make them miss having their dad around, and I can nod and say, "Yes, that is sad. Do you want to call him?" And when I say this I no longer feel like I'm being stabbed in the chest, or the eye, or any other body part. Which is certainly progress on my part, and theirs.

I've been slowly preparing the girls for the possibility that we will have to move. I went to see a financial planner at my bank, taking Jörg's offer of support and my current income and our current debt, and he told me that staying in our house with those numbers would be a huge mistake. This, of course, is another thing that makes me angry, as I wanted us to move to a smaller house with a smaller yard ages ago, back when the girls were too little to have really gotten attached the place. Instead, Jörg chose a bigger, more expensive place (albeit with less yardwork, and it's true that  I liked the place, too), which meant that we had to price our place high enough that it didn't immediately sell. And so we stayed here.

Now the girls have friends in the neighborhood. We know and like most of our neighbors. We like the schools. Annika spent most of last summer working on decorating her room to her exact specifications. The girls have helped choose the plants that we've put in around the yard, Annika's beloved swingset is here, our Hannah Memorial tree is here, and this is where they've had parties and sleepovers and every thought of home means this house. This is the place they feel safest and best. Just bringing up the topic of moving from this house makes Annika fall apart. Frankie, on the other hand, is all for moving to a completely different town, which is actually a more worrying reaction to me.

But I found a house in one place we might move to (closer to my mom and sister) that has a heated workshop, which Annika instantly envisioned as her craft and sewing studio. And, just like that, she was willing to consider the idea.

So now we start to figure out how to begin again. It still hurts. I still cannot look him in the eye when he comes to pick the girls up for a visit. But life moves on, and every day begins a new start. Just get one thing done, and make sure your kids know they are loved (by both parents). It's not a bad plan, I guess.

* As opposed to Right Women? This phrase doesn't really work, but Abandoned Women sounds too melodramatic. Feel free to offer suggestions.

** Now 20, since it seems to take me 2 weeks to finish these posts now that I'm not leaking sadness and rage all over the place.

Christmas in the Ozarks

This is the first year in forever that we've not been home for Christmas, having German Christmas on the 24th and getting up the next morning and hanging out in our pajamas until lunchtime. The girls throwing paper everywhere, which Joerg would collect for the recycling and Annika would protest, saying she has a great idea how to use that paper in her next project. So down the stairs the bag of paper would go, into the basement to join the other craft chaos. Lots of photos would be taken, and the girls' hair would be insanely messy and the dog would step happily in front of the camera for half of them, so all I would record would be a blurred wagging tail and some blonde tangles amidst a pile of crumpled paper. Then we would have lunch, something special which almost always included red cabbage and brussel sprouts.

This year we are not at home, which is, I guess, fitting now that we are undergoing a radical redefinition of what "home" will mean from now on.

We are with family, though, and family still means those who love you no matter what. No redefinition required there, at least. The girls brought along their very most favorite board game of the moment, Life. I don't know whether to be scared or amused that Frankie gets excited when she lands on so many Have a Baby spaces that she has to get a second van, and I love that Annika always wants to choose teacher as a career, even though it pays so little. Frankie, the strategist, always goes with doctor or lawyer (but then has all those kids, pretty much negating her financial strategy).

The girls are enjoying being with their cousins, even though we all are as different as can be. One of my girls' rules in playing Life is that you have to choose whether or not you want to marry a woman or a man (I'm guessing that's not the way the game is played usually in Southern Missouri, and certainly not at my sister's house). And then Annika and A.J.(from the Oklahoma branch) had a serious conversation about whether it's legal to marry your cousin or not (insert Oklahoma joke here).

But family loves you no matter what, and my girls still have that in abundance.

I hope you enjoy whatever holiday this time of year brings to you, with whatever family you have or have made for yourself.

* Not counting, of course, the three Christmases spent in the hospital. Of course those don't count.