falling down is also a gift

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 [email protected] if you'd like the password.