Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

I’m eating my lunch at one of the long white table in the lunch room, the tops dirty and sticky with the remnants of the last people. I take care to brush the crumbs away, wipe the wet spots. Someone else sits down, takes out his lunch. Wags around his brown banana. I make a face before I realize it.

“What?” he asks combatively. “What’s your problem?|

I start internally, nonplussed. “I don’t have a problem. I just detest overripe bananas. I like mine firm, a little green, so they’re sweet and almost like candy.”

He scoffs. “You’re always so negative. You’re SUCH a negative person, you know that?”

I dryly chew down what’s left of my lunch, and leave the room quietly.

******************

Why is the realist always negative nelly, the dreamer the optimist?

Why can’t we have our negative thoughts without it being a detriment to us, or those around us?

When my mother died, I had the same thoughts as everyone else. That it was a relief-that she was finally released from pain and suffering and disease, and moved on to, where ever. The pain was done. But I ached and I hurt and I pined for her, for my mother, and when those pitying old ladies with the laquered hair and nude nails cooed at me and told me it was all right, she was in heaven with god and all the pretty ponies, I just wanted to ball up my 11 year old fist and pummel them within an inch of their repulsive little lives.

I didn’t of course. My mother never raised me to be a snotty little brat. So I smiled sweetly, and felt bad for, well, feeling badly. For not seeing the silver lining. For having the nerve to be ungrateful.

I missed my mother then, already. But had to view her passing as a blessing I should give thanks for.

2009 has sucked my ass. Yes I’m thankful for the blessing of stability that I have. I’m so fucking happy to not be bouncing off walls moodwise, to not stare down the front of a city bus and think about my death, to not spend my time chronicling the million ways life has let me down. I’m thankful that I’m a better mother.

But to all the people who say I should focus on the good things, and not the bad, in that twee voice that makes me cringe?

Fuck you. I own my unhappiness as much as my joy. And I value each as the lesson they truly are.

I lost my job at the beginning of this year, the first job that defined who I was, work-wise, but also a job I despised, working for a woman who bullied her employees to the point that they couldn’t function. But try as you might, to a degree, who you ARE is tied up in your job, and this hit me harder than I thought it would. Inside, I felt horrid, as my who and why crumbled and I sat desperately trying to scoop them up in my arms.

I got a handle on this, but dealt with my marriage, unsteady, with no fixed goal. But I thought it was a stumbling block, a road we were unsure of. I figured with time, we’d work it out.

November gave me the answer. He wanted to leave me.

I’ve been married since I was around 20 years old. As someone was nice enough to point out-this is the person I was with for the entire adult life so far. I hadn’t thought about it like that, and once I did, no wonder it felt like he was taking my arm as well as the couch. I loved my family. I loved the idea of having a family, of a mother and a father and children in their little house, making a home.

But he didn’t, not like I do, he didn’t want this, at least not with me. And that’s the hump that’s hard to take. That I don’t fit in his worldview anymore.

But I will survive. I will move on, and maybe I’ll meet someone and fall in love and maybe I’ll meet someone and have lots of sex and maybe I’ll be content, on my own for awhile. Change happens, and change is good.

But fuck you if you think I’m not entitled to my anger.

I’ve read posts where people offer their gratitude to the universe, and I salute them, as I cannot do that right now. I’ve read posts chatsizing people for expressing anger when they should be grateful for what they do have, and that if they’d just stop expressing anger, then maybe good things would be around them and bless them.

Fuck you, I’m angry. You hear that 2009? I’m pissed off at you!

Bad things happen everyday. I’ve had enough really bad things happen to know that it’s random in many cases, without cause. They just do. We aren’t entered in a global keno draw. And if all things are relative, no one is dead, no one is dying of an incurable disease, and syphillis hasn’t eaten my cheeks off.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, and it doesn’t mean I don’t have the right to be angry and hurt, or the right to talk about it.  Aren’t we told enough to be good kittens and keep all the bad stuff in? Don’t we get told enough times to suck it up and keep moving? I know I have. Sometimes I’m negative-I call it realistic. My head isn’t always in the clouds, and it’s who I am. I acknowledge the badness in my life, the horror and the agony, and make it mine.

I’ve had numerous people tell me that divorce is great, new people, new life. And yes, that part is appealing.

But not nearly as painful and terrifying as facing an empty bed after 12 years.

I claim my anger, and I claim it here. 2009 can suck it.

**********

I am who I am. I have opinions about things. I have emotions about things too. And this year is one I’d like to forget. This year, the end of this decade, hell, the majority of this decade-years I’d like to lose. 2009 has been my slimy brown banana, edible yes, but detestable all the same.

Let me be angry. Then let me move on to the new year, all fresh and green and hopefully, sweeter than candy.

bare floor, bare

My house is a mess.

The toys are strewn across the floors and I can’t find it in me to pick them up one.more.time, unless of course it’s into that mythical blue garbage bag of “outside for the other kids”. There’s coats and spoons and cats on the couch, magazines and books, pencils and cd’s and I know nothing is where it belongs by the corralling of these things, the hemming in, it feels impossible, unwieldy, like a broadsword strapped to my back I haven’t the energy to heft. It weighs on me, like a puff of smoke and the universe, all together, singing hymns.

It’s the same in conversation, animated, enjoyable, real conversation with people who I enjoy, with brains that engage me in ways I so rarely find, who challenge my words in a good way, make me think. But I find myself staring bemused into the distance, barely able to marshall my brain around to focus, to sit in this moment and be with these women, enjoy the giggling serious talk I’ve been craving for so long. I stare at my hands and wonder why it’s so hard to stay in this place, with these voices. I drift, that puff of smoke sitting on my head, wiser than I yet not, tamping me down like tobacco.

It’s like I’m not even here, floating around like a whisper. I hear the voices of my children but they’re dim, I hear the mutterings of responsibility but dash them off with a flick of my hand, determined to slip past it. The pressures of being alone, weighty, hug tight to my scorned back, slow me. My pennant in this race is black and red with ire.

Ribbons

We talk and we still feel it.

To deny it would be suicide, and at first, I thought it just me, feeling this ribbon between us, the soft ties. But no, he shakes his head, tries to fight it, yet feels it just the same.

A platform we alone live on. A space for us. The buttery smooth forever we glide in.

We don’t know. I don’t know. He doesn’t know. Does love have an expiration? Can you still feel it, not the biased love you have for family or the durable one reserved for children, but the thirsty love you have for the one meant for you, can you still feel that even if there’s something so irrevocably broken you can’t actually see around it? Does love play hopscotch in time, finding us 15 years ago, but then not again for another 5, or 15?

Can we love and yet still be completely and utterly wrong for each other, the us now, the us tomorrow as well?

There’s an ache when I imagine him gone-utterly foreign to me, not like losing my mother or being adrift in the world. The ache I imagine you’d feel if someone took your arm-the space once occupied never quite empty. He belongs with me, we belong with each other. Our souls know, somehow, and if I believed in other lives, I’d think we’d known each other then.

But maybe now wasn’t good either. Perhaps we should wait for another life, when we are both cats sipping on cream.

My heart, my head and my body are so woefully confused, conflicted and sad. What we have isn’t working, but being able to see the what was, the what could be-it’s so painful, like daggers.

I have not stopped loving him. I just do not love who he has become, and likely, this goes in the reverse. We aren’t those people anymore, but we just can’t seem to find each other right now. And it hurts. It hurts to watch the past wave in his eyes, and crave him then.

Maybe there’s no hope. There’s so much between us, and yet, there’s this rope, this line that pulls us, magnets to each other, and we both stand wondering if it means anything at all, too confused under it’s power to figure it out.  I just want us to be happy, together, or apart. I just want happy.

My Christmas

I don’t know if I can do this.

Walking down the wet street in the dark, stumbling with my latte on the way to work, my one payday treat, it suddenly starts to snow, on Christmas Eve, the slow fluttery pieces from the sky landing gently on my face. I can’t stop it. I start crying, right there, in the middle of the sidewalk at 7:14am.

I stop it before it can really start, before the heaving I feel can bubble past my outdoor defences, the walls I’m rapidly building up against everyone for safety. I want to collapse and sob right there, surrounded by all the trappings Christmas Eve should give-the sparkling lights, the softly falling snow, people and packages moving swiftly past me. I envision this in my mind, lying in the wet, my ankles bent under me as the city wakes and wanders by me.

Instead, I let a tear, one tear only slouch down my cheek before I wipe it off. I owe myself that much.

*********************

I’m very angry today.

I love Christmas. It was my mother’s favorite holiday, closely followed by Halloween, and her love for it, for the sparkle and the glitter, transferred somehow to me. Not that I’ve ever had Christmas as I imagine I should, made lame by grief or people who can’t be bothered to feel joy. Being joyful alone is almost worse than being joyless really.

I can’t even find the joy this year. I find myself staring, hostile at Christmas displays, unwilling to locate Frosty the Snowman on TV or even take the girls for a walk to look at the lights. I want to bury my head in the sand and not see any of it, removing it only when January 2 or so comes and I can wake up nursing a hangover and dreaming of next Christmas when certainly, it must be better.

And I’m pissed. I’m fucking pissed that life, that someone leaving me, telling me I’m no longer enough or changed or whatever the fucking reason is, I’m angry that my Christmas has been buried underneath all of this shit and I can’t even raise my head enough to see through it. That I feel worthless enough to not care.

I want to care. I want to breathe in the beauty that this season usually affords, the strength it gives me in touching the beauty that is people being good and kind. I want to not cry when a customer is joyful and wishes me health and happiness, a woman I’ll never meet, emphatically telling me she wishes me only the best for the new year, meaning it. I want it to matter.

But it doesn’t. There’s an empty hole where this season should be for me this year, stripped bare much as the rest of the facade of my life has been. I feel empty and hollow. Even wrapping presents, something I normally adore, was a chore that made me incredibly sad. All these things I’ll need to be for my children alone now, really alone. All these things no one will do for me.

All this alone, the finality of it. It’s bad enough being alone in a relationship. It’s even worse being alone outside of it, and facing a life with kids, one where odds are, no one else will want to join. The idea of Christmas forever being, from here on out, something only I can build up and make lovely.

Why can no one ever do this for me? Why am I so unworthy? Why do I always have to make it for everyone else?

The hurts of a lifetime, magnified by the empty boxes and heart under my tree.

**********************

I’ll walk home later, in the softly falling snow, and cry again. Stunned by beauty, saddened by a life that kicks me just enough that everytime I get back up I wonder, really, is it worth it this time? Everytime I think I have it right, bam. Down again.

I’ll cry because I will get back up. Because I will hold my head up and believe I’m worth more than being treated like a mistake someone made. Because I’m the only woman in my daughter’s lives. Because I’m the only one willing to give them the Christmas they deserve, the joy and magic.

But I’ll cry because it’s lost to me, and I want it back.

That Christmas

That Christmas there were more presents under the tree than I had ever seen.

Instead of it’s usual place in the tiny library, mirrored and panelled, or tucked in a corner beside the TV, someone, likely my aunt and cousins, had decided to place it under the spiral stairs, the concession my father had made for my mother after trying more than once to make them. He called in friends, drunks really, but masters of the torch and steel, and in two days, we had beautiful, stark, painful metal stairs, black as night.

Underneath these, my mother’s pride and glory, sat our tree, it’s old painted lights, crocheted Santa, gold glitter stars morose on the limbs. My brother and I had moved some around. Santa goes near the top. The Shillelagh on the right side to hang loose, our kindergarten paper trees each on one side, near the bottom. Wordlessly we made these changes, glancing at each other rarely, moving our memories into their rightful places.

You could barely move around the tree for all the presents.

In spite of myself I was thrilled will all the gifts-the gilt ribbons shiny in the lights, the small Santa’s and beribboned dogs grinning on the paper, the sheer mass of it meant to alleviate the pain of that year, of this one last Christmas. We didn’t speak of it, or at least, it wasn’t spoken of around me. But my mother’s family was never with us at Christmas. Ever. And this year they were, and what’s more, they brought presents. I could feel the tense waiting, the shaky ancient pain biding it’s time in everyone. The inevitablity of it all.

I’d sit and fritter away spare moments I could find in between all the people, sitting next to this pile, this hoard of stuff, pretty packages with my name written neatly on tags, helpless love transformed to something tangible. My fingers would drag across the smooth glossiness, imagining what lay behind the wrapper, the wonders we might hold in a few days. I’d stare at the lights on the tree until red-blue-green became imprinted on my skull, and I’d have to blink for minutes to see the faces frowning at me, telling me to get up, quit hiding.

Surrounded by family I barely knew, and a mother who was home hurting, her body swelling up and turning once again on itself. Remission they had whispered, but we all knew better. This was one last Christmas, and the birds were home to roost, swaddled in smiles and stories and the blunt knowledge of eulogies and endings. Surrounded that Christmas by sadness, I clung to the pretties under that tree.

That Christmas was the one in which, if I remember correctly, and maybe I don’t because my memory is something I let slip from those days, my mother began my initiation into womanhood. Camisoles and lessons on applying skin cream. A radio for my room, with a tape recorder, since I was growing older. Her permission to look forward, to become something else, and yet, held back, remote. The denial, the natural snap back of a mother watching her daughter becoming a woman. She couldn’t quite take her hands away.

Yet my favorite gift that year, the one that most meant I was growing up, was a cheap plastic jewellry box, bright pink, with a flower on top, given to me by my mother’s sister. My Aunt G was gaudy and loud and owned a tarantula and a snake and ate sardines from the tin while smoking menthols. She had feathered hair, and was divorced, her last name and that of her kids different, and confusing. I loved that woman. She was everything my mother wasn’t-being fun, and interesting and exciting, exotic really for me. My mother was sick and boring, and my Aunt, well, she gave me what I wanted most-unapologetic womanhood, the ability to BE a woman however I wished.

The jewellry box was what I had wanted to be for so long. Pretty and frivoulous and me, just for the sake of it. I owned nothing worth putting inside of it-it was the principle of if someday I HAD something, I had a place to put it. To my mother, growing up was a betrayal, just another thing she must have known somehow, she’d never be around to see. Her sister encouraging it, likely seemed an even bigger betrayal. The places she would never know.

Somehow, I felt that too. That gift, which on one hand filled me with glee, wafted a sadness around me, the reality of the female things in my life, in my future, being so sparse and few. I held that cold plastic box in my hands and felt empty somehow.

4 months later she would be dead, and we all knew it. My father spent that Christmas buying things to keep her warm, cover the pathways radiation had marked on her. She couldn’t get most over her head for the pain and swelling, and returned all his efforts. Straggling behind her on these trips to the store, when she pushed herself past the pain, and tried, vainly, to find something that would fit, that would work, I witnessed yet another type of womanhood-the strength and power of hope and dream. Sheer will. The refusal of pity, and yet the need to look quite lovely.

Even dying inside, rotting slowly to the core, her lipstick was perfect, her wig washed, her handbag matched her shoes. Death didn’t have to be ugly, and no she’d say I don’t look as sick as I am do I?

Petals

This can’t be real, says the voice in my head. This part of me, this part of my soul and my body cannot be leaving, cannot be separating from me in such a way, cannot be moved from me. The longest we’ve ever been apart is a week, maybe two, every other moment in the last 12 or so years of this lifetime spent almost close enough to touch.

My heart doesn’t feel the parting emptiness it should, and my mind is left confused.

I should be hollowed, vastly echoed by him leaving, by the acts of taking stuff to his new place, and packing that drawer I haven’t touched since Vivian was 2 months old or so. I should feel as if I’m missing a limb, and gape at the awe and pain I feel.

I knew him you see, somehow. I’ve always known him, my heart has always recognized itself in another body and to be away from each other, to imagine a morning where I’ll wake up and he’ll be gone like a ghost, a pale memory on dirty sheets…it’s a pain I’ve been sheltering myself from, a future I’ve been refusing to really see.

I don’t fear being alone. I feel being bereft.

I want to be able to stand up and say I don’t love him. But that would be lying. Every inch of my body loves him, that person inside I first loved, that person who may not even exist anymore. But has that ever been enough?

Flex

I like to think the lines under your eyes

the dark swirls like entropy,

aren’t the unreasoned answer to

the question we’ve thrust forth.

That bluebird of a nose still crinkles. The rich

brown eyes still shine through sunsets. Yet

there’s a foot stamp in the snow we can’t see,

steel behind six year old words which I can’t fathom.

Tell me you’re really as flexible as the wind daughter.

Secrets and Lies

People tell me their secrets.

It’s a heavy thing. I don’t ask for it. I’d prefer not to know the things I’ve been told, the rape passed off as “sex”, the uncles who touched, the mother’s who didn’t. The fear, the pain-I’ve found myself in the past, full up on these things. Not mine, but the borrowed suffering I would inhale and take the burden of. They’d come to me without question, and I would accept it. Pain shared is pain lessened.

Today a mother told me a story of her daughter, and grandchildren. Her grandchildren, her grand babies, hurt, bruised, scared, her daughter changed, a woman who sounded so completely different from the one I met not four months ago. The vibrant, loving young lady, well mannered and full of laughter, described now as hateful, deliberately mean, shutting down and out. Protective of the very man who kicks a baby in a face, leaves hand shaped bruises on a toddler’s face.

This is all second hand. But who would make it up?

She’s close to tears this mother, and my heart tears at itself, it’s hands wringing themselves. My chest tightens and I swallow my tears, imaging my girls, my daughters, the lights of my life, under the thumb of a man, suffering after two pregnancies in 2 years, almost exactly. My fists draw themselves in at the thought of anyone ever, EVER harming my children, or their children. When I joke about taking the fucker into the woods with a rifle, I’m not quite joking. We put rabid dogs down after all. I leave my face impassive and sympathetic as the story falls from her mouth, stumbles almost. She busies herself with lunch, her scarf, her timer, anything to keep the weeping in check.

Her eyes are normally soft and full of laughter. Today they are tight, dilute like a watery grave. She’s not a close friend, but someone I’d fiercely defend as a friend, her heart is this good. Salt of the earth some might call her. To me, she’s just one of the best and kindest people I’ve ever met. And her kind heart is torn.

I had a friend call Social Services. If I call, she’ll know, and it will be worse. As it is, I worry she’s gonna just take off after SS has been there, and I’ll never see the babies again. I’ll never know.

I remind her to focus on what she can control, and nothing more. To use her EAP and consult a lawyer about the situation. To talk to a counseller about what’s happening, her fears, her worry, before it eats her alive.

She yells at me and tells me that if I call them, all she has to do is say “Don’t give them to my Mom!” and they’ll go in the system and she’ll never see them again!

I tell her I don’t know about that, but regardless, if there is abuse, if her daughter is in thrall to this “man”, she needs to speak to someone about custody for their safety. She needs to take pictures of the bruises, especially the hand shaped ones that she’s seen, so she has documentation. She needs to form a plan.

She needs to see if there’s anyway to have her daughter evaluated. The woman I met was neat and clean and engaged, giggly, a joy to be around, like her other daughters. Then, she went on vacation. Her daughter was firmly set to leave this “man”, had seen what he was.

A week later, when her mother came home, the sun revolved around his starry eyes, and her daughter was bewitched. Her previously well behaved, tidy daughter now leaves filth around, clothing strewn thought the house, dishes left for months, spills uncleaned and growing mold.

I make all the relevant sympathetic noises, murmur about postpartum, psych evals. I saw the lost look in this mother’s eyes, the helplessness and felt her pain for moments. The elastic nature of not knowing, the fear of a phone call, of picking up a dazed or screaming child…the worry of loss.

I want to reach out, I want to lay my arms on hers and make it right. I want to find the answer. I want to be able to explain to her why a woman would allow a man to slap a 1.5 year old across the face. But I can’t. I don’t know.  There’s no real answer is there?

I left her with nothing more than I started. Except a heavy heart.

****************

Any advice, especially Canadians? She’s terrified, absolutely TERRIFIED about losing contact with these children and getting a pair of RCMP on her doorstep some night. And from what little she told me, I don’t wonder why.

Ros, The New Place

Rosalyn get positively excited at the thought of seeing Daddy’s new house, and grins like a fiend while I slap her Hello Kitty hat (salvaged from Frenchy’s) back on her heard.

So, Daddy’s gonna live there now? He’s gonna sleep over and then come home?

No Ros, Daddy is going to stay at his place. YOU will sleep over there a few days a week. Then come home.

Rosalyn doesn’t get it, not really. She’s not naive-she’s just gloriously almost 5, playful and joyous, in clouds of her own making, full of children of her mind, kitties and puppies and bunnies to cure. (oh, please don’t ask about that last one. Online games, I shake my fist at you.) She’s smiles and wonder, a delight to be around, most days, aside from when she spills milk and pitches a fit that goes through the kitchen, up the stairs and on to the bed next to me and my still aching head.

We walk over, and on the way, she asks

If Daddy is at his place, who will be our new Daddy?

I’m amused and completely deflated by this question, the main reason I’ve promised myself I will not get involved with anyone to the point of meeting the girls for at least a year, if not more, liaisons staying outside of the house because questions like these? Not fair.

To her, he’ll just not be there. And while Vivian understands that Daddy is at his house, Rosalyn won’t understand until it happens, until the comics and the drums and the desks are gone from the other half of the house, until I begin to rearrange the house to match the newness, until they trudge over to his house in the cold night air, following the stairs to his oddly seventies styled new home. Until they lay down to sleep in a tiny room in a house I hope I can help get clear, surrounded by the few toys and books, and is Rosalyn’s case “new panties” that they love.

They walked around his new place, opened doors, looked out windows, insisted on trying the toilet, even as I grimaced, wondering what exactly was on the seat or, frankly, any of the surfaces in the place. The sought out the spaces that would be theirs while I marveled at this, a place he would be but I would, rarely, if ever be. How my life didn’t fit in here, and my brain actively resisted planning any images, where things would go, how things could be. It wasn’t my place.

I walked them into their room, small but cozy, and asked if they liked it, if they could imagine living here. Vivian just stared at me with her big eyes until I reassured her that she could maybe get posters with Daddy for the room, bring her things over. Rosalyn just continued to grin. A grand adventure.

Her small hand falls into mine as we walk, clad in soft white gloves, and I squeeze back. She still wants to be close to her Mummy. She still calls for me if something is wrong, waving everyone else off with a growl or a grunt. She squeals when I find Cookie or Brownie the cats. I ask if she has any questions, she shakes her head no so innocently I wonder if she means it.

“The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

It’s starting to roll off my lips easier now.

Divorce

My Ex

The father of my children

Cold, sheltered descriptives, indicative of the past, foreshadowing a new future. I still stumble and say husband occasionally, laugh inside as I remember how saying husband felt weird for the longest time. Then I wonder, is we’re still technically married, do I still call him husband? Or is the split, the one I felt and ignored for the longest time, is that what’s meaningful?

Cause I’m black and white in some ways, and with people I’m a fucking lightswitch. I’m on, or I’m off. And the switch, it’s taped down McGuyver style now, those married life feelings tucked away. Maybe, like the clothing I’ve held on to from high school, I’ll only look at them fondly once in awhile, but maybe, I’ll shake them out in a few years and try them out with someone else. But now, they are stored, like cargo, and my heart is freer for it.

I’ve had people tell me you are so different lately! So happy, so much prettier, that I even sound better. And I probably do because the weight of being in pain, of wondering why trying to love hurt, it’s gone. The weight of all these years, of wondering what in the fuck is so wrong with me, what I’m not doing or what I am doing-it’s fluttered off and I was glad to see it go. I feel joy, and happiness, just the sheer plain peace of not being sad, not being tense. I feel like I’m starting to be whole person again, instead of waiting for someone to meet me half way.

I’m going out. I’m talking to other men, other women, I’m laughing, really laughing, I’m singing again, I’m going out in public and not feeling anything-no anxiety, no worry, because there’s this exhilirating freedom in my chest now, and I want to squeeze it until it bleeds. Even just the simple act of going to the bookstore is ripe with possibility.

How I have missed possibility.

Don’t Explain

I’ve put them to bed, after a particularly animated reading of Jason and the Golden Fleece, and the requisite argument about when, exactly the big light will be turned off and how long Rosalyn has to read before she needs to consider how early Vivian’s day starts. More water. Let the kitten in. Let the kitten out. Fix my blankets. Find my bear.

I think I’m done, and I go in search of dinner, now that it’s 8:30 and my stomach is pleasantly but insistently reminding me I haven’t eating since 2pm, aside from that greasy handful of peanut M&M’s around 5 from the vending machines at work. I’m humming that Health song I’ve been obsessing over, and mulling my options when I hear a door open and small feet pad across hardwood.

Mummy.

Yes Viv.

Mummy, exactly why do you and Daddy not get along anymore?

Sigh. Well…..

–I could mutter and mention that we don’t have the same goals, or really, goals at all or I could mention that we’re so far gone that any little thing, leaving trash on the counter, not saying thanks, is misconstrued as being something it isn’t. Or how Mommy just can’t take being married to someone who sits up until 4 am and sleeps until 11 or so in the morning but has no time for her or how Daddy obviously wants something Mommy isn’t and no one can really explain what that is since all Mommy is trying to do is be an adult and a mother and live a life full of those things, for now. I could blather out any of those things, stretching all the way back to wondering if I should have taken his name or if I should have somehow given the girls his name as well but–

I don’t say anything. I stare at her intently, this girl child, this woman to be, and I hold her close, her tiny, wiry arms wrapping around me, her body pressed up against mine. I can feel the silent urge to scramble in to me, to become part of me again, to find that place where it is safe and the world makes sense. I remember what I felt when my parents told me Mom was sick, THAT sick, and dropping ache that sat in my stomach like a piece of cheap meat. I hold her shaking body and hope she doesn’t feel this.

I explain, In the sky there are clouds, and they are perfectly happy clouds together, fluffy in the blue sky and all, but that sometimes, each cloud has it’s own bath, and they aren’t together. Sometimes, the clouds smile and go their different ways. Daddy and I, we’re like the clouds, except we’re happy when we find our paths, not when we’re sitting still together. We’re happier apart because there’s no fighting, no yelling and screaming and crying and being mean to each other. Just, friends. We’ll always, always be friends.

She looks at me unconvinced.

The best thing Vivian, of Daddy and I, is you, and Rosalyn. We love you, we will always love you, to the moon and back, to the moon, to infinity. That will never change, for any of us. We are always connected. We’re clouds in the same sky, all of us.

Dubious she looks. And I don’t much blame her. In a few days, we went from the family she knew, that which she felt safe within, to a place she doesn’t quite understand, a place that scares her. Daddy moving out. Daddy having a new place.

She doesn’t quite know where to put it all. And it fills up her chocolate eyes each night, leaving me to decipher her tears into something I can manage. But what can a 6 year old fear that I can make better? I can rationally know that this will be better in the long run. But she forgets what day Tuesday is sometimes. Time is not negotiable at this age-it’s ether, floating, all days together and yet not. She only sees, fears his back out the door, gone from her.

I can’t find the right words to fix this hurt, and maybe it’s not my job to do so. But the hurt in her eyes, the keening wail from her throat, I recognize them, and it’s a legacy I wish I could slice out from her. I was never my wish to do this to her, my precious child.

These tears should have been saved much much longer.

****

Tonight she was pretty much crying when I got home, at the littlest of things, my normally resiliant girl forced to tears over, well, anything. But the look on her face is what caught me. Instead of the usual “I’m not getting my way, let loose the dogs of whine” look, there was one I’ve felt so often in the past-the look of a person who has utterly lost the pulse, fallen from control. It was like her sense, her self was spinning outside of her, and she couldn’t catch it.

Into the bath with a few battles. A few stern moments about the whiny voice. Screaming about having the hair combed, even when I wasn’t combing. Dried off, into bed. Told tomorrow we’d read for her again, tonight was for Ros.

I HATE the sharing in this family! tears…

I sat with her and held her some more, murmered that I loved her. Asked if she felt out of control. She nodded yes.

Well Viv..taking a deep breath and hoping I got it right…sometimes we need to cry. Sometimes we need to sit and be sad or mad and find a way to let it go. I cry-I feel better. It’s normal and good and I know you’re sad and frustrated and confused right now, and I want you to feel better. I’m sad too Viv. I’m sad too. Please, cry if you have to. I understand. I get it.

And I love you. To infinity and beyond.

some snuffles. What’s infinity. Is it a descriptive word?

It’s forever hun. I’ll love you forever.

She lays down with a few more sniffles, concerns herself with the cat and demanding Rosalyn turn the light out soon. I shut the door behind me.

It opens when I’m 10 feet away, and I steel myself.

I love you past the universe Mum. Past the universe.

Perspective in a peach pie sky.

I waffle.

Right now I’m blissed out on my fine self, my hair dancing around my face as I find myself totally in love with this band, every cell responding to some weird call, music I shouldn’t like but dammit, makes my body shake and quiver. I’m excited-change makes me happy, change opens my eyes to what can be, what should be, who I can be. A new, fresh start. Shiny.

Then later, as I go to sleep alone, my arm stretched out across the other side of the bed as it has been for so many months, the distance between up palatable and real, I feel the ache and the raw red void that describes my heart, and I want to weep and mourn but instead I swallow the drugs I innocently asked my doctor for and pass out into a dreamless sleep, waking in the morning blank and new, like a baby, smooth and pink.

I want to cry myself to sleep. I do. I want to be wounded and surprised and angry and all those things I feel flickering across my brain. Gods, I want something to talk about other than this fucking divorce and how scared I am that despite my being ok with being alone and occasionally having a “friend”, I’m terrified that I’ll never find someone to fill that place in my heart that’s currently sweeping out its corners and cobwebs while muttering “dammit, why did no one take CARE of this place!?” I try and focus ahead on my future but then little things like money or my ugly fucking bathroom intrude and my happy place expires until I can bring it back with simple, simple words.

Darling, it simply doesn’t matter.

And it doesn’t. The material things, the stuff I surround myself with, the house and the books and the dog ugly fucking bathroom-they are merely things. They do not love me, they do not hold me late at night when life scares the tiny bubbles from my lips, they do not hold me up when the world steps too solidly on my back. They are things, and they can be taken away.

Every morning I step off a bus on my way to work, and walk into the sunrise. Almost every morning, despite the cold I can’t quite shake, despite the itch to my dry tired eyes, I am face to face with the most glorious sunrise, likely the same as the day before, but each day still able to shake me from my slumber and self pity and remind me that a world with something this quietly beautiful must have more to it than my shattered heart. Perspective in a peach pie sky.

I have grieved before in my life. I know that I’m approaching acceptance at a frightening pace. I know that it won’t last, that I’ll slip much like an addict and likely find myself some day in a month or 3 holding something breakable and contemplating throwing it, hard at someone or something. I’ll be flush with rage.

But, it will be ok. It will pass and I’ll look at a daughter or a lovely backyard covered in snow or bloom and see my future. All things pass. All things become new. This back and forth I feel, the cowering and the crowing-all normal. This hurt-it’s less than that I’ve felt before, maybe because it’s stretched for years. But I started mourning this marriage ages ago. And I’m, mostly, ready to let it go.

Because there’s still beauty, and it’s waiting for me to find it.

 

Two Weeks

                          

  Two Weeks-Grizzly Bears

Two weeks or so.

I don’t want him to go. I want the security of him next to me. I find myself, in short intervals, wanting to scream for him to stay, beg for him to work with me, with us to find the right answer, the right combination, that which has eluded us for so very long. I want to hold him tightly through the night.

Then, a bit later maybe, I realize that I cannot wait to exhale, to settle my feet down in my own space for the first time in years. To finally not feel like I’m intruding, or that my request for silence will be met with anger. A place of my own, after all this time. (Not to mention, I’ll finally get to mop the damn floor upstairs)

Goddamn I’m so conflicted. I suppose after 13 years of being with someone, nearly 12 of that married, it’s only normal. I wish I could hate him. Hate would be so much simpler than whatever this sweet mess is in my mouth. But I love him-as the father of my children, as a friend who can still make me giggle. I hate my body in how it betrays me, even still wanting to lean into him, drag my fingers and lips across. How can there be so much space between us, and yet I can’t turn my libido off for him? When will that end? Is it proximity? Is it blind raw need?

It’s staring at both of us. January 1. And I know I’ll be upset, staring at the empty hole in my heart, manifested as comics removed and drums packed away, barren places in the bathroom where his razors have sat for years. I miss already just talking, even though that had long since disappeared, the ability to have a conversation. Too much. Too late. I don’t know.

I know that right now, I don’t want anyone else. I want him, the him that was, and I can’t have that. I haven’t had that in years-so why is it awake now? Why can’t my brain bury the good so it won’t hurt me?

Told

I tell them they need to come to our my bedroom, that we, their father and I, need to talk to them. Vivian bounces around the room oblivious, Rosalyn continues to chatter to herself, her world made up of straws and markers and people only she can see, tucked away inside her head as Vivian sings to Rudolph.

We sit them between us. My eyes start to fill but I beat them back by lashes.

I tell them that no matter what, NO MATTER WHAT, we will always love them, their father and I. Vivian looks up at me with her big brown eyes, wide and glistening. And stares into me.

I stumble, but continue as her father’s arm tightens around her shoulder. Daddy isn’t going to live with us anymore. Daddy is going to have his own house. As reality hits, as the words flutter down her chest like dying moths, her face crushes itself and the tears come, the tears you shouldn’t have to shed until you’re 17 and some boy just broke your heart. The tears I should not be staring at while my 6 year old freezes in her father’s arms.

I can’t stop it. My chest wraps itself inside out and a snake slithers around my heart, watching her. Rosalyn squirms in my arms, twisting and still nattering, but Vivian has a crashing realization of what this means, and she sobs a death call for us, and I await the requisite banshee outside my window.

Never. Never ever ever do I wish to do this to my child again. I am her mother. I should be protecting her, not wounding her, not shifting her world ten paces to the left, a little out of the sun.

I hold her hands tightly as she cries, and mutter all the pithy words I’ve read she needs to hear. We still love you-we still love each other, just not like a mommy and daddy should together. Two houses will be fun! You’ll see me all week and Daddy on the weekend and we can do stuff together now and again. If you need one of us, you just call.

But no, we won’t live together here. Daddy is leaving after Christmas.

Rosalyn asks where we’ll live. It’s the only sign that she’s been listening after all, her sunny side up disposition unaltered by the conversation. She’s young enough, immature enough to likely not be bothered.

Once Vivian’s tears have subsided, once she’s swallowed I remind her of how Mommy and Daddy haven’t been getting along, and how this way, we’re happier. She looks me in the eye and sees that I believe it. A weight goes off her shoulders much as one went off mine weeks ago.

We flip through the Sears catalogue to look at little beds for his house. We tell them that just this once, they get to pick which one they want.

I bend, remembering to whisper in their ears. This is not your fault. This is us. You have done, and can do nothing to fix it.

And we love you, more than you can ever know.

******

I refused to insult either child by telling them this is best. I still don’t believe that. I don’t believe that we’ve worked, TRULY worked on making this marriage work, and I will likely be resentful about that until the end of time. Maybe it’s because my parent’s had a good marriage, and Cancer stole it, and I wanted a real chance to have what they had-a home, a loving marriage, a family.

I have never thought Divorce to be the best option in cases where there is no violence. Not without trying to work stuff through.

But it’s not totally up to me. And if we can’t or won’t work through it, then this is best. Even if it crushes my heart, and makes me realize how I truly am a mother since only a mother would hurt herself this way to make it better in the long run.

I don’t know if we’re doing the right thing.

We took them to dinner, mostly to underscore the “we will still do things as a unit” point, and to give them a break from that tension. We walked to see where he’ll live, just a few blocks away, and smack dab between the walking trail, two parks and the corner store. A quiet, dead end street. Walking home, Vivian asked to play outside for awhile, the new snow too much to ignore. She asked her father to play with her.

She decided to play house with Rosalyn.

I’ll be the mother. You be the daughter. There is no father here.

How many times exactly, can a heart break in one day?

Telling

In my memory there is a line.

When my mother was alive.

When my mother was dead.

Two people lived there for a moment-two people entered that hospital room, two little girls. One left. The other curled up on that hospital bed, curled against the cooling body of her mother, and never left.

I have spent years putting that little girl properly to bed, while knitting this one back to something resembling a whole person. I have begged, wheedled, cajoled, screamed and wept at the fates, wanting to turn the clock back, build my family once more into the unit it was, 4 people who loved each other, 4 people matched against the world. A family. I wanted my family back.

Tomorrow we face our daughters, and explain that soon, Daddy will have his own house and not see them every day. I want to believe that we can do this with little pain for them-that neither will have that terrible rift seethe through their bodies, that neither will spend their nights crying in pain because their world is not the world they deserve or even want. I want to believe we can get this right.

But then I imagine Vivian’s face when the reality sinks in that her father won’t be home any more, or Rosalyn’s as she computes that the her parents are no longer a unit, and wonders if that means we could stop loving her just as easily.

I see their tears, and can hardly hold mine in, even now. In that moment, I will be inflicting a most horrid pain upon my daughters, the one I swore I’d protect them from, and yet still was helpless to prevent it. In that I am a failure. I could not protect them from this.

Tell me they’ll be ok. Tell me I’m not breaking their little hearts-tell me they won’t hurt forever.

Tell me this won’t hurt them as much as the thought is killing me.

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

2 bed.Big yard. Jan 1. That’s one thing off my list.

This is real.

********

Part of me wakes up each morning and thinks, briefly, that I can just reach over and touch him and it will be as it was, his arms welcoming and warm. That I’ll go downstairs and feed the girls and smile at the thought of him, of seeing him later, and we’ll be happy our hands linked, fingers entwined, skin burnished by each other.

But the fog lifts from my head, the tiny insects of futures past buzzing out from me, a moving halo. Much as when my mother died, and I watched her body let her go, he has left. In his head, his heart, he is long gone, even if his body and voice remain with me for now. My husband is leaving me. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. My husband, who once looked at me with lust in his heart and care in his words, has lost the pulse, let go perhaps, and the eyes are cool.

I’ve started calling him my ex, the words stumbling off my lips awkwardly, but yet not. In my dreams he’s still my husband, my lover, my alternate. In the waking land he’s yesterday, he’s what was,  he’s fading, much like my dreams. Standing still in the dark morning, breathing deeply, I miss him. I miss us. I miss that foggy dream.

I warn Vivian’s teacher, about the impending conversation, and she touches my arm with such concern that I find myself near tears, surrounded by schoolchildren and mothers. I tell her it’s fine, it’s for the best my worry, my only worry right now are those little girls and please, be gentle if she’s not herself for awhile.

I think back a year, a little more, standing there with him, and I wonder where our strength has gone. How I’ve gone from worrying about my first born, my baby going to school, to wondering how to break her parent’s divorce to her with as little trauma as possible. How did we get here? How did I get here?

Why can’t I wake up from this nightmare?

*******************

I’m more than a little toasted on a large friendly bottle of Pinot Grigio, and we share joking texts about when I’m coming home and how the stairs aren’t my drunken buddy. I’m warm inside, missing this calm friendship we’ve always had, that we had first. I don’t want to lose it. I want the father of my children to be my friend, to share a joke, once the smoke clears. I don’t want to lose him completely.

And I realize, through the damped fire of my anger and fear, that I need this too. I want this too. There’s a weight lifted from my chest, an effort I was so tired of making, the dank pea soup of two people trapped against each other, the oppressive daily unhappiness that had become us. I’ve missed whomever I’ve been, so wrapped in bondage to this thing we called a marriage.

I feared no one loving me. But now that it’s here, the ache is less than when I tried to force a reluctant hand.

Breathe. I can breathe.

It’s real.

WWMD? Sing.

Sing.

I like to sing.

Now, after years of abuse, smoking, colds and not singing, my voice is mostly gone. That little girl who could hit every note in How Great Thou Art without wavering? I’m not sure where she’s going.

I have always loved to sing. There’s a certain place you find in song, when the words are pure and the notes ease from your skin like honey, and comfort and joy descend upon you. There’s a bliss to be had when singing. But singing, making true my voice, has always been tied to comfort and happiness.

When boarding with a friend’s parents, I didn’t sing for  a month, not even in the shower. One day, sitting in a corner reading, his mother commented that I must finally feel at home, for I was singing. I hadn’t even realized I was, but I knew she was right. I felt accepted, and for a time, happy.

Years before my daughters I felt like singing, and would, it being the easiest way to purge bad thoughts and poor feeling. It made me, simply, happy. I could sit and lose an hour or two feeling the rush of my lungs cross my lips.

Once the girls came, I’d find myself crooning to them, song I considered magical if only for the potency in their lyrics. Never Seen Blue, Sweet Dreams, Lodestar, Came On Lion..many songs but mostly those, simple in their loveliness, their wishes for love and peace. I’d sing to quiet them at night, or to bring closure to their day, rocking back and forth in my arms as I stood waiting for their eyes to close.

Lodestar: Sarah Harmer

But then I stopped singing. Came the bad time and my voice shuttered. Came the time when my house didn’t want to hear my voice, hear the voices that sustained mine. And I stopped, struggling sometimes to sing in the shower perhaps, or shout along with my daughters to a theme song or christmas carol. But once shamed to silence with the roll of an eye or a sigh, you just stop. Something is snatching from your chest, and the power isn’t there anymore.

It just becomes an empty hollow place.

I never thought it would be painful, but it is. A piece of me, pushed down, huddled there, almost stunted because she just doesn’t know what to do anymore. C’mon Billy came on shuffle last night, one song I’ve always loved for both it’s power and brevity, and I just…didn’t have it in me. I didn’t feel safe or happy, able to split open and let loose what’s been held.

C’Mon Billy-PJ Harvey

 

I’ve felt this way for longer than I care to admit. I hate to admit to myself that I let this happen. I stayed in a place that didn’t want me to sing.

Who wants love, who wants security, who wants the simple comfort of not being alone if it stunts their soul? Why did I think I want that?

One of my favorite bands includes a saying on their CD’s-Sing While You May. Shouldn’t we all?

Belladonna: Legendary Pink Dots

(Quadelle had a fab idea to do a series of posts based on phrases from Mary Schmich’s commencement address . [You may remember it better as a "song" by Baz Luhrmann] I thought it was a great idea, so, I stole it. Or copied. Whatever. Imitation is the soul of wit. Or brevity. Or both.  )

Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering.”

I rub raw the space on my right ring finger where the cheap ring he bought once sat. The stone was cheap, but the sentiment, the presentation so sweet, hidden in a bag of children’s jewels, the ones that came in bulk at the Disney Store, hidden in a pot of mums. I remember being touched, truly touched and pleased that day, content with only the flowers and the pretend jewels from my daughters, prodded to find the ring deep inside.

I took that ring off yesterday, and don’t plan to put it back on.

It’s meaning is less than one which would rest on a left ring finger, vein to the heart. That meaning is carved onto my wrist, a forever which never came, but did at the same time, in the form of two small persons. I stare at it, my Mobius, my idea so long ago, and wonder, should I cover it? Change it? Leave it in stasis? I can’t just take it off. Unlike a wedding ring, I can’t heave it at his head or drop it down a drain.

But I could take that other ring off, once a symbol of love, now, just another cheap piece of metal and glass, lying forlorn on my writing desk. My hand absently looks for it, to twirl around my finger, to fiddle with. But it doesn’t miss it. My hand might gasp a startled question at itself, forgetting for a moment it’s not there., but it shrugs and moves on. That ring was a ghost, a cypher. Obligation made round. A reminder for me, of the burden I always was.

A reminder as well, that my future will include, eventually, someone who wants to buy me a pretty ring purely because it will make me happy, bring a smile to my face when I look at it. A reminder that I want in my life only someone who will look at me and smile, happy with their life, with me.

A reminder that the good things, the happy things in life should be so great, so many, that I will hardly remember each one. A reminder that love shouldn’t hurt.