falling down is also a gift

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 Also not that I don't realize that my take on what a psychologist does is probably, oh, a hundred years out of date.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.

hard to believe anyone would leave this paradise

No drama here. Much. I've been without internet at home for most of the week. Twelve hours after it was restored, I lost it again and it took the home telephone line along with it. *

I was planning on writing something tonight, but Annika just threw up shortly after I fixed the title on the last post**. And Frankie is crying because she doesn't get to stay home, and it's not fair because Annika throws up all the time, and you say it's not awesome to stay at home because you're throwing up, but it really is and everybody knows it.

* The Internet Dude (as Annika called him) was very kind and completely adorable in an I Can Fix That Problem, Ma'am kind of way. If that is not the best sign yet that I need to be in therapy, I don't know what is.

** Hat tip to Greg for pointing out that my naming convention made absolutely no sense. It's good to have friends who can notice these kinds of things.

 

enough, again

I enjoy my lawyer. She is catholic, has two kids the same age as mine, doesn't mind if I swear, and is simply brimming with common sense. She gave me a hard talk two days ago about letting go, about recognizing when plans change radically, about making choices in an unfair situation that aren't based on emotion but on a recognition of reality. Also, she is big on cost-benefit analyses.

So I need to take a few of these early morning writing sessions to think. Everybody already knows that being left out of the blue for another (younger, I can't let that one go) woman when you have two young kids, one of whom is frequently sick, and when you've worked all your life, but never at a full-time job with benefits, is going to be hard. Everybody already knows it's unfair. Everybody already knows that you're really sad, and now that the first month has passed, veering more toward really angry. Everybody already knows this story because it's happened to them, or their mother, or their best friend from college. It's not new or unique or even particularly awful, relatively speaking, although it feels that way to me most of the time.

But there are things that not everybody may know, such as the fact that we have a new kitten! And while kittens are always hilarious, ours is extra hilarious (probably because we are in sore need of extra hilarity around here). Yesterday Cleo ran to the window and began barking in her Big Dog voice at a little weiner dog walking by with its owner outside. Tinkerbell the 4-lb kitten shot from the living room to peer out the window beside Cleo, just in case she needed back-up.

Oh, the amusing ferocity!

And have I mentioned that when she stands to look out the window she stands just like a little meerkat? She crosses her front paws in front of her chest, like a girl at her first dance, wearing a dress without pockets and unsure of where to put her hands and still look lady-like. Then she swivels her head back and forth with a serious expression, because that is the great thing about cats. They always look serious, no matter what. It's why we project so much dry humor on them, I guess.

It's probably also why Annika keeps trying to dress her up, because Cleo just looks pitiful when Annika dresses her up. It's hard to imagine a princess with sad sad eyes and droopy ears, but our kitten makes for fine angry royalty.

Frankie was excited about getting a kitten because she was too little to participate in the naming of Cleo, so the puppy-naming was all Annika's choice. Cleo was part of a stray litter of puppies, and so she didn't even have a name (besides maybe The Black One) when we got her, but the kitten had been kept at the Humane Society for two months before we adopted her, so they had given her a name already. Frankie knew that she could change the name, especially given that cats are not especially attached to such nonsense things as "names," but the kitten the girls chose was named "Tinkerbell" at the shelter, and Frankie decided that that was actually her perfect name.

I'm not sure if Frankie only took this route so that she could later argue that she hasn't technically gotten to name a pet yet, and so she is still owed that right in the grand cosmic accounting of fairness that is continually updated by my two children.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what she did now that I think about it. I'm constantly suspecting that Frankie is smarter than I am, but don't tell her because she suspects it, too.

So, yes, we have a kitten and she is adorable, and now everybody knows, too.

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What I don't know at this point, and maybe nobody else knows, either, is why this has happened. I mean, yes, there's the story and all, with its awfulness and betrayal, yada yada yada. But there has to be more to it than that; there has to be something I did or didn't do and that I am having trouble facing. And I'm not sure at this point if it is even worth facing or not. That would have been the hard work of marriage counseling or therapy, but now I have the hard work of divorcing without too much anger because we have kids, and recriminations are not helpful in that case.

Tonight I sat with Frankie and we started to read "Mom's House, Dad's House: for Kids" together. We didn't get farther than the first pages, where there was a pencil-drawing of a house being split apart with a dark rain cloud hovering over it. Of course there was a path leading to two houses with the sun peeking through, and then to another two houses with the sun shining fully down.

I was expecting logical Frankie to say, "Wait, you mean we're going to have four houses now?" But instead she teared up a little and said, "I don't like the pictures in this book."

So we put the book away and I said, "OK. Let's talk, pumpkin." And I promised her that she could ask me anything, and that I would not cry because I was feeling better and stronger now, but that it was OK for her to cry because being sad is a part of life. I told her that maybe I would cry again some other time, but that would be OK, too, because stuff that is hard just makes you feel like crying, but you keep going and then you're through the other side.

Then we talked. And I realized how much it meant to her that her daddy had come tonight to her holiday program, to watch her be a Sugar Plum Fairy. And I had to admit that some day she will realize what a big deal it is that he agrees to wear shorts and a polo shirt in order to be an official at her swim meets.

So I told her that this was not all her daddy's fault. That it was true that it was a big surprise to me, and that I didn't know that daddy was unhappy with me, but that I did some stuff wrong, too. Being Frankie, she asked for specifics. Of course she did.

It was not my favorite conversation in the world, but Frankie went to sleep more easily tonight. Cost-benefit analysis: Win (my lawyer really is a smart woman).  And it makes sense: no kid wants a Bad Guy for a dad, or a Poor Victim for a mom.

Enough.

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I've been going back through my entries, trying to figure out what happened and when. I don't think I'll find it there, but I've been reminding myself of some things I had forgotten that I knew. Like that I once knew how to grab moments, and magnify and expand them until they were more than just a moment, until they stood for a decision about everything that was to follow. Even if you forget that decision, and have to keep making it over and over again.

Enough.

 

where I'm at

Given that the girls are old enough to use a search engine, it seemed a good idea to password protect the current content. Not, mind you, that they'd even know to search for this blog, but silly just to trust in the unlikeliness of it. Not many of my readers know the girls in real life, and it seems, again, almost silly to say, but of course the point of the password is that I don't wish them to be privy to me working this out.

So I'll be here:

http://moreena.typepad.com/shesaid/

and you can email me at moreena@gmail.com if you'd like the password.

White Sox and Sock Monkeys and Stuff

At the White Sox-Tampa Rays game tonight in Chicago Annika will be on the pitcher's mound with IL Secretary of State Jesse White to throw out the first pitch! Photos will be posted!

Also, the girls just got the very most adorable sock monkeys the world has ever seen. Photos will be posted!

Also, my last final is Monday! Maybe I will be able to catch up a bit then. But I also have a garage full of cheap craigslist furniture needing to be refinished and/or reupholstered. I can't believe Joerg isn't as excited as I am about using these treasures in a living room re-do, but I guess I'll have to settle for making our basement super-awesome.