Painting With A Twist. January 28, 2011

I’ve written before (actually, so many times I probably sound like a broken record) about how much I’ve enjoyed my female friendships lately.  For so many years they took a backseat to other demands.  When I was married, the “we” always came first.  Pre-kids, the “we” was made of two; post-kids, the “we” became 3, then 4, then 5.  Making time for other friendships seemed like a luxury, and since The Ex didn’t really have any other friends (partially because he went to high school and college nowhere near here, and partially because he’s not much of a “people person”) any time I spent on my own nurturing other relationships or interests felt like selfish time.  It came with a hefty dose of guilt and a not-unsubstantial feeling of “I owe you,” so at some point I pretty much just stopped doing it.

These days, my noncustodial time grants me more “me” time than I’ve had in 15 years, and I’ve loved rediscovering and reemphasizing the importance of close girlfriends.  Tomorrow night I’ll be celebrating five high school friends’ 40th birthdays with a big bash sure to generate some post-worthy stories (or possibly some stories that will never, ever see the light of day).  Last week I spent an entirely lovely evening with some wonderful ladies, drinking wine and … painting.

 

 

It should be said that I am *not* an artist.  If you put a blank piece of paper and a pen in my hand and tell me to draw, I will always, always, always draw the same house (square, two windows, one door, chimney with some smoke on top), tree, clouds and flowers in grass that I have drawn since I was six years old.  I kid you not—I’m seriously that pathetic.  I cannot draw.  I cannot paint.  I cannot sketch, design, etch, draft, depict, or shade (why, thank you, thesaurus.com!).  Whatever part of the brain controls the visually artistic is not an area I am able to access.

So it was with some trepidation that I agreed to attend a local painting class during a Girls’ Night Out last week.  A local studio (Painting with a Twist) specializes in art instruction nights; they choose a painting for the evening, provide all the supplies, allow you to bring in food and drink (brilliant) and then walk you step-by-step through creating the featured work.  It was a blast.

It was also somewhat stressful at first.  Being Type A and doing something for which I have zero skill is not really my idea of a good time—there is absolutely no relaxation in it.

Me, thinking: "Establishing my suckiness is not a fun night out."

 

Me, thinking: "It's only 15 minutes in and I've already screwed up and have to dry the too-much-paint-on-my-canvas with a hairdryer."

 

Knowing their clientele (frazzled housewives, working mothers, suburban ladies trying to be superwomen and then some), the instructors solved this problem artfully (haHA! no?  ok, fine.  puns are never funny) and periodically rang a little bell to remind everyone to stop, take another sip of wine and remind ourselves that we were having fun.

Me (after a few bell dings), thinking: "At least there's wine."

And we really had a great time.  We painted and laughed and compared our own paintings with those we thought were better and those we thought were worse.  We complimented each other.  We made fun of ourselves. And we all went home with a lovely parting gift—a canvas that we have absolutely no idea what to do with.

The entire class of Wannabe Warhols.

 

Still, it was a fantastic night and was something completely different to do.  It was breaking out of the comfort zone, trying something new, and nourishing that part of ourselves that needs the company of other women.  I always thought that great girlfriends were hard to find, but maybe I just never looked in the right places.

This evening's version of the GNO Sanity Club.

 

 

My Heart. January 24, 2011

Last night, way too long after bedtime, Avery came out of her bedroom and begged me to come and see something.  “Please, please, please,” she said.  She made me close my eyes.  She led me by the hand through her doorway.  Before she said “ta-da!” she prefaced it with, “I promise I’ll clean it all up” (because, as I’ve said many times before, this kid *gets* me).  And then she showed me this:

 

 

Marbles, shoes, stuffed animals, school supplies, lip glosses, a basket and a toothbrush thrown in for good measure.  For no reason whatsoever.  Just because.

 

My precious girl, full of love and life.  I heart you, too.

Mr. Tom and Mikey the Wonder Dog. January 20, 2011

Mr. Tom and his wife have been friends of my parents’ for a long time.  A few years ago, Mr. Tom and Owen became fast friends, too.   This was partly because Mr. Tom was dog-dad to Mikey the Wonder Dog, the most beloved and most fabulous black lab of all time.  And this was partly because Mr. Tom had the ability to be a big kid himself.

Whenever Owen would go visit my parents, Pop and Owen would go visit Mr. Tom and Mikey.  The four of them swam together in the summers and year-round they explored the woods behind Mr. Tom’s house.  Together they all went on grand adventures; they hiked trails, found treasures and got good and dirty—just as a dog and a little boy should.

In between their visits, “Mikey” would send emails to Owen, asking when he was coming back to play and promising that Mr. Tom would take Owen fishing the next time he did so.  Mikey sent snail-mail letters to Owen, too, forwarding photos of his dog-self and putting the biggest smile on a 4-year-old boy’s face that you could imagine.  Owen always responded, writing Mikey back and over time establishing a very sweet friendship with Mr. Tom that was treasured by them both.

Eventually, Avery was invited into the boys’ club, and Mikey and Mr. Tom became good friends of hers as well.  At Christmas a couple of years ago, Mikey (by way of Mr. Tom) gave Avery and Owen one of their most treasured gifts: a figurine bearing a remarkable likeness to Mikey, with a tag around his neck reading, “Owen & Avery Are My Best Friends.”  The gift still sits, much loved, on a shelf in our family room.

Last Friday, Mr. Tom lost his very brave battle with cancer.  He had beaten it once before, but this time around it came on hard and fast and no amount of fighting the good fight proved to be enough.  The kids were with The Ex when it happened, and I waited to tell them the news in person after they came back home.  I didn’t know what to say; I didn’t know how to make them feel better.  I told them as gently as I could.

Owen’s first reaction was, “But I loved Mr. Tom!” … as if that would have (and it should have) been enough.   Amelia asked if Mr. Tom died just like Molly and Buddy (the two dogs of ours she has lost in her little lifetime).  Sometimes out of the mouths of babes come the direction we need—I told them yes, and with that little unexpected shove I told them that Mr. Tom was in heaven playing with Molly and Buddy right now.  That as much as Mr. Tom loved dogs and as much as Mr. Tom loved Avery and Owen, I bet he went and found Molly and Buddy just as soon as he got there, and that they were all giving each other extra special love and attention, and that they were all looking down on us and smiling.

Avery and Owen asked if we could still visit Mikey.

Of course we can.

Owen wrote a note on a scrap of paper:  “Mr. Tom wus a grat man.”  He asked if we could take it to Mr. Tom at the cemetery. 

Of course we will.

Rest easy, Mr. Tom.  Know that your kindness to and friendship with my children made grateful hearts in all of us.

We’ll look for you on the other side; there are many more adventures to be had.

Yes, But. January 19, 2011

Sorry for the shortage of new posts lately.  For the second time today, I find myself using the excuse that lately life has just been very … life-y.  A mixed bag of good and bag, frenzy and relaxation, custodial and non, and the never-ending struggle to find the balance in it all and the ability to keep the whole process in perspective.  Toward that end, today I am reminding myself that:

 

YES two of my three kiddos have strep,

BUT we jumped on it quickly and got everyone all antibiotic’d up and seem to have avoided the nightmare contagion of the strep-before-Christmas.

YES the strep meant that I unexpectedly had two kids home from school today,

BUT I was able to scramble up some last-minute child care, enabling me to focus on things like billable work … and writing crappy blog posts.

YES there still exists a (small) pile of Christmas gifts/toys in my dining room that haven’t found a permanent space of residence yet,

BUT my pantry is cleaned out and organized, as are all three of the kids’ closets.

YES the scales mock me on a daily basis, proving that I may never re-lose those glorious post-divorce pounds that managed to creep their way back onto my ass when I wasn’t paying attention,

BUT I am ok with that (mostly) and have decided to be good when I can, and enjoy myself when I can’t.  As long as I can crash-diet my way into a bikini before a vacation and still squeeze into my favorite jeans, so be it.

YES my newfound love of running and I parted ways throughout the heat of the Texas (spring and) summer (and fall),

BUT the cold weather has pulled me back onto the road once more.  I am trying to ride that horse again and even though it is kicking my butt Every.Single.Time, I enjoyed a really decent and speedy (for me) run this morning and it felt great.

YES I have a pile of work to do and I don’t really want to do it and it recently cut into some seriously important girlfriend time, making me feel ten kinds of resentful,

BUT work=money and after suffering through a fairly long dry spell where no projects were coming down the pike, that work=money equation is a positive one.

YES I still need to get my house ready and put it on the market and the thought of that entire process still breaks my heart and makes me feel ill,

BUT I don’t have to do it right this second.  I still have another week or two’s worth of procrastination time left.  Hooray for sticking my head in the sand!

YES Amelia is still resolute in her refusal to even DISCUSS the issue of the potty,

BUT I’m fairly certain she’ll change her mind eventually.  Right?

YES I am getting a little tired of listening to the kids report on things The Ex does for The Girlfriend (diamond Christmas gifts, surprise birthday trips to Vegas, regular flower deliveries, etc.) that he never did for me,

BUT really … so what?  Unless and until they are messing up or messing with my kids, who cares? He and his annoying bullshit are remnants of a past life, and have no bearing on my today … or my tomorrow.

YES my kids still have issues with the divorce,

BUT Amelia no longer cries when she goes back and forth between houses, Owen no longer misses his dad at bedtime, and Avery no longer complains that she hates The Girlfriend.  Progress, one step at a time.

YES co-parenting with an ex spouse is occasionally one of the world’s most frustrating endeavors, and I’m guessing always, always will be,

BUT so far this week, The Ex and I are working fairly cooperatively, and you gotta be grateful for those times when they come along.

YES life is challenging and aggravating and exhausting and unexpected and unplanned,

BUT it’s also pretty interesting and amazing and full and rich and highly entertaining, as long as you keep the right perspective.

And most days that’s good enough.

Begin. Again. January 11, 2011

FYI, I’m mentally erasing one of the numeral “1″s from today’s date and pretending that it is 1/1/11.  Otherwise, this New Year’s post would be ridiculous.

The first email I read on New Year’s Day was this, from my mom:

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice….
And to make an end is to make a beginning.

~T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

I’ve fallen in love with this, and perhaps with Eliot solely on its basis.  To me, this is perfection (with all due apologies to Eliot for eliminating the many lines that come within those three).  I love that it wipes clean the slate, that it makes all that has come before merely a preamble to what is yet to be.  I love that it is pregnant with anticipation, that it awaits a fresh speaker whose impact and identity are still unknown.  And I love that it inverts the final, the determined, the finished to the first, the unwritten, the inception.

For all its sadness (and there is always some sadness, isn’t there, to the passage of time and the onward march toward the inevitable end?) each New Year presents a chance for change.  Regardless of who or where you are, there are always things to improve, wrongs to right, new steps to take.  I’m not talking about New Year’s Resolutions (I don’t make them … mainly because I have never kept one once made).  I’m talking about starting fresh.  Starting over.  About coming to terms with mistakes made and about forgiving yourself for making them.  About letting go of past things held too tightly and about opening up to whatever comes next.

Great change, in whatever form, brings opportunity for great growth.  I am discovering that each day.  I am becoming actually thankful for and not just complacent about the changes of the past year or two; approaching 40 seems a fairly appropriate time to push the big red reset button.  On a smaller non-divorce scale, simply because it’s a new year, there exists an opportunity to start over.  A mini-reset.  An arbitrary first (or eleventh) day of the first month, and in this particular year an eye-catching numeric array that seems to lend even greater psychological import to the event, somehow: 1/1/11 (or 1/11/11 … it still works).  A time to box away last year’s language.  A chance to be the new voice, or at least listen to someone else’s.  To echo this post’s opener in perhaps a less eloquent (but no less personally poignant … at least, when first heard in a bar at 2 a.m. in my early 20′s) manner:

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

~Semisonic, “Closing Time”

Begin.  Again.  As many times as it takes.

Getting Rid of Ghosts of Christmases Past. January 7, 2011

I feel like I owe an apology.  In the week before Christmas, I blogged about an incredibly stressful turn of events, the monkey wrench that The Ex unexpectedly threw into the proceedings, the resulting drama created for the kids and the impending ruination of Christmas (or at least, what felt like such).  After much arguing and more than a little nastiness, The Ex and I reached a tentative agreement, and I posted a quick update about that.  And then … nothing more from me.

I posted nothing further because it all turned out ok in the end, but I think I underestimated the big-heartedness of a lot of people out there who were worrying about how the holidays were going to turn out for me and my kiddos.  Two weeks after the fact, I’m still getting emails from friends and relayed messages from friends-of-friends inquiring about the big day and wanting to know how it all went.  Y’all are sweet.  Beyond sweet.  And I’m sorry if I left it hanging.  What happened was this:

As agreed, the kids spent Christmas Eve day and night with their dad.  From what I hear, they had a day-long celebration with The Girlfriend’s family.  Which seems … weird.  I spent the day getting my head in the right space, wrapping presents and having some quiet time alone.  On Christmas Eve night my sister Caroline and our friend Ian (a British transplant with no family close by) came over.  We drank really good wine, ate really delicious chocolate dessert things concocted by super-chef Ian and watched movies.  It was a stress-free night filled with laughter and it was a lovely way to spend Christmas Eve.

On Christmas morning, I drove to The Ex’s apartment, car loaded down with presents and stockings.  I arrived just in time to see the kids as they woke up—just in time to get gooey-eyed hugs and excited “Mommy!”s before leading them to the loot.  The Ex had made coffee and breakfast (or rather, undoubtedly, The Girlfriend had), just as I had last year.  He and I were civil, if not warm.  It was arm’s length, but there was no veiled anger that I could sense (at least, there was none on my part; I’ve decided my days of attempting to decipher The Ex’s passive-aggression are over).  The Girlfriend was absent and stayed absent—I have no idea where she was, nor do I care.  I avoided looking at framed photos around the apartment of The Ex and The Girlfriend with my kids, I tried to ignore her cat that kept running through the room (funny, The Ex always loathed cats), and I laughed (fairly convincingly, I believe) when the kids opened presents from me that were exact duplicates of the presents from The Ex that he had allowed them to open the day before.  It was cramped in his apartment and with three kids plus three kids’ worth of Santa, there was nowhere to sit.  At times I felt out of place, just standing and watching the kids open gifts, but The Ex was standing, too, or moving around the room.  We were both somewhat separate from the kids and definitely separate from each other.

Mostly, though, it was all just fine.  The whole thing only lasted a couple of hours, the entire time a flurry of ripping paper and wrestling with security packaging.  The kids were all smiles:

And that was pretty much the point.

It wasn’t the Christmas morning I had wanted.  There was no sense of carried-over tradition, no continuity from Christmases past.  My decorated house stood empty and sans celebration all day.  The Ex’s apartment, with its metallic Christmas tree and modern and not-my-taste-at-all decorations, didn’t feel at all homey or warm to me, and the surreal feeling I get whenever I walk into his apartment never quite seems to fade.  I can’t be sure, but I have a feeling it wasn’t really what The Ex had in mind, either.  There was no Christmas morning with the “new” family he’s concocted: I was there, The Girlfriend wasn’t.  Because he had allowed the kids to open his presents on Christmas Eve, their morning was mostly about opening gifts from me (albeit with Santa from both houses).  As soon as the last gift was ripped open, the kids were ready to bolt.  But it was in his home as he had requested, and it ushered in our new future of swapping Christmas locations.  Behold the New Christmas.

When it was done and the kids were ready to go, The Ex helped us load up in the car and we drove away with a bunch of “Merry Christmases” (from the kids) yelled out the window.  I texted him and thanked him for the morning, telling him it had been nice.*  And it had been, in its own way.  It was different.  It was a little awkward.  It was a little painful.  But not nearly as awkward and painful as last year.  And I guess that’s as good as it gets.  Isn’t that the path of post-divorce—lessening the misery one step at a time?

The rest of the day felt like “real” Christmas.  As we always do, we spent the remainder of Christmas day at my parents’ house, opening gifts, eating, drinking, laughing, playing games and opening more gifts.  It was exactly as it always has been, and it’s always been grand.  Last year, the first Christmas there without The Ex, I felt alone.  I felt conspicuously halved, missing an ever-present part of me.  This, year, I felt whole.  I didn’t miss anything—I just enjoyed my kids and my family and felt SO thankful to be enveloped in their ever-reliable love and support.  As we did last year, we capped it off with a sleepover and stretched the celebration out just a few hours more.

It ended up being a wonderful Christmas.  It was in part a return to Christmases past and in part a step forward toward new traditions.  Mostly, it was about family, in all its forms and all its changing incarnations.  And from today’s vantage point, now that the tree has come down and the decorations boxed away, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

*Apropos of nothing, really, but worth noting: The Ex never texted me back.

Happy Anniversary. January 5, 2011

Late last night, I realized that I had missed my anniversary.  Not my former wedding anniversary, but the anniversary of my starting this blog.  My blogiversary.  A year ago Sunday, I started this blog.  I posted my first entry (here), took a leap off into something new, stuck my big toe back into some writing again and started trying to make sense of everything that was swirling around in my head and in my heart.  To be truthful, I didn’t really think I’d stick with it, but here I am a year later and I don’t have any intention of going away anytime soon.

The blog experience has been both more and less than I expected.  I haven’t become well-known from this and I haven’t made a red cent doing it. There’s been no realization of my secret pipe dream of writing a book sprung from blog posts and no one’s exactly beating down the door to ask me to write things for their blogs or publications.  My blog is just …  my blog.  It’s a place for my thoughts and catharses, my way of cataloging remembrances and marking progress and passage.  It’s not Important-with-a-capital-I, but it’s important to me.  This blog has been one of the highlights of my year and one of the most oddly rewarding tasks I’ve ever undertaken.

The obligatory blogiversary stats: I’ve written 149 posts.  You’ve posted 967 comments (and sent emails and texts and FB messages and talked to me face-to-face about my personal story and yours).  I have had readers from 27 U.S. states and at least five other countries.  The current grand total of views of my blog: 40,582.  How did you ever find my little piece of sky? Through no effort of my own, one of my posts was linked and reviewed by a family-law-meets-family-life blog in the United Kingdom (here), and that was uber, extremely cool.  People randomly found my blog by using search terms such as “perks of divorce” and “divorce one year later” and “telling kids about divorce” and “how not to become jaded” (and also “hot cowgirls and horses” and “laughing baby face” and “two stupid dogs you cheated” and my personal favorite: “dinosaur butts”).

You have comforted and congratulated, sympathized and supported.  Thank you for reading.  Thank you for commenting.  Thank you for sharing.  Thank you for asking for posts.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  Here’s to another [Now Is] Good year.