a girl in a million
The Bee made dinner tonight.
On Friday, right after we walked into my apartment, she made a snide comment about my apartment not being clean, and I kinda snapped. Those who are my Facebook friends will know that I had no water for a couple of days at my apartment this week—the frustration of dealing with that, coupled with the fact that I had spent several days in the past week nagging the kids to clean up landisdad’s house while we were all there together—made me say to her, “when do I ever have time to clean my place? I’m at your dad’s house or I’m at work. I come home and I go to sleep, and I wake up and I go to work.”
She apologized, and told me that she wanted to make dinner one night this weekend, so I wouldn’t have to. She spent a bunch of time looking at recipes on epicurious, and decided on a menu, including a dessert. She attempted to dragoon her little brother into helping—but he wasn’t interested, and I wouldn’t let her press him into service.
We went out for a while today, and when we came back, I helped her bake her gingerbread cake. (She said, “I told you I was going to cook dinner by myself, but I didn’t say anything about dessert.”) Then she took a break for a little while, and watched Spongebob with the Potato. And then she cooked.
The Bee has really gotten in to cooking over the last year. Landisdad and I set up a ritual, when I first moved out, that we would always have Sunday dinner together (barring work commitments), and she almost always helps to make it. She’s taking a cooking class right now, and she complains a fair amount that the teacher isn’t teaching them enough useful things, in the way a middle schooler can be outraged. (“She taught us how to measure flour! Seriously!”)
So tonight, she made a 4-cheese pasta with broccoli. And it was good. She also made (with the Potato’s help) a kind-of juice spritzer—with hand-squeezed oranges and lemons, tonic & water. I took pictures of all of it to send to her dad—we do that sometimes on the weekend—just send each other pictures of the kids, and what they’re doing when they’re apart from whichever of us isn’t with them.
After we had eaten, she went in to make the frosting for the cake, which was a semi-complicated affair with heavy cream, powdered sugar & lemon curd. Have you ever made anything with lemon curd? It’s like mixing whipped cream with jelly. Weird, but good.
She was frosting the cake, and I carried some plates in to the dining room. And then I heard it. The thud, and the “Oohhhhhhhhhhh noooooooooooooo!”
I went back into the kitchen, and saw it. The cake, on a chair, part of it on the floor. Frosting everywhere. The Bee, sobbing.
I picked it up and put it back on the plate. I put my arms around her and said, “it’s okay.” She sobbed, and said, “now dad’s gonna see the picture and it’s all messed up!” I told her that we didn’t have to take a picture, if she didn’t want me to. I hugged her, and told her that I was proud of her, and that I loved her, and that it could be rescued.
And then it happened. She stood up, and dried her tears, and said, “ok.” And she finished frosting the cake. She carried it into the dining room, and told me to take a picture. She cut it up, and gave it to us, and we ate it. It was delicious.
It wasn’t just the cake that was sweet. It was the maturity.
I started this blog almost seven years ago, when the Bee was in kindergarten. Throughout most of her elementary school career, she did not handle frustration very well. She got angry at herself, she got angry at other people, she got trapped in rage and couldn’t get out of it.
Tonight, none of that happened. And it was a beautiful, beautiful thing.
After dinner was over, I cleaned up the kitchen & washed the dishes. I have never been happier, cleaning up grease & whipped cream, in my life.
overheard in my car
Bee: “You can’t really know someone until you understand what ruined their childhood.”
Me: “…”
Me: “What ruined your childhood?”
Bee: “I don’t know. It’s not over yet!”
some wishes, for 2012
I thought I’d better post in December, and there are less than six hours less. Here are my top ten wishes for 2012:
- That the economy will keep getting better (though if it could speed up a little bit, that would be great). Landisdad’s job is, right now, only funded through the end of 2012, and I’m starting to worry about what might happen if it doesn’t get re-upped.
- That the Grand Old Party will continue to entertain us via their presidential primary, especially by having millions of dollars hurled into internecine struggles to be the most conservative nimrod ever to run for president.
- That, in moving into a new role in my job, I am not making a huge mistake. That the new travel, to new places, will be offset by less travel to the old places.
- That my niece, the Butterfly, who is starting to experience some ADD, will get good strategies from her new therapist.
- That the Bee will keep growing into the beautiful, smart young woman I see more and more of each day. That her eighth grade year will be filled with confidence.
- That she will continue to have good friends, who seem to be (at least from what I can see) free of the “mean girls” gene.
- That the Potato will thrive in the rest of third grade, and will continue to be the funny, goofy boy I love as he moves into fourth.
- That his love of sports will continue to play out in basketball this winter.
- That, as landisdad and I settle in to our separated state, our mutual finances will continue to stabilize…braces notwithstanding.
- And finally, that I’ll start finding something like the joy I once got from writing about my kids on the interwebs again.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
It’s an odd thing, to look back over the last year and realize how much has changed, and how much has remained the same.
Last year, the weekend before Thanksgiving was when landisdad and I decided that, despite all the struggle, our marriage just wasn’t working anymore. We decided to call it quits, but we didn’t want to ruin the holiday for everyone, so we kept it a secret. The whole of Thanksgiving weekend was spent with one of us dashing into the bathroom at his mom’s house to cry every ten or fifteen minutes or so. I’m sure it must have been hell for our family—it was certainly hell for the two of us.
This year, in some ways, a lot has changed. I live (mostly) alone, with the kids just sleeping here on weekends during the school year.We don’t travel together anymore. I went on my first vacation alone, well, ever.
But there are also a lot of things that are the same. We still eat dinner together, on the nights that my crazy work schedule (and the rest of the family’s life-schedule) don’t interfere. Landisdad and I are still a united front when it comes to all things parenting, although sometimes now we’re consulting via text and email, rather than face-to-face conversation.
And today, we’ll spend Thanksgiving together, along with extended family from both sides. I baked some pies, my brother’s making the turkey, landisdad is carmelizing root vegetables, and his mom bought the wine. It’s sort of Norman Rockwell meets the Brady Bunch.
And I’m grateful for that, grateful that we have this crazy family that accepts that we’re trying to do things in a non-traditional way, grateful that we can still be friends, even if we are no longer lovers. Grateful that our kids seem to be adjusting to the ‘new normal,’ and didn’t bat an eye when we told them we’d all be spending the holidays together.
I know it may not be this way forever, know that eventually we’ll develop some more traditional post-divorce holiday traditions. It’ll be hard, the first time one of us decides to spend a holiday with a new partner, instead of with the kids and ex.
I’m grateful we’re not there yet.
I’m lucky to have family nearby
Sometimes, I don’t know how we would get through without my nearby brother and his family. I spent a lot of time living on the opposite side of the country from my family…thank goodness we moved home before we had kids (just before, to be honest!).
Today, the kids and I went to my brother’s house–my SiL was having a photobook party, and she’d invited me. My brother took all the kids (mine and his) to our local aquarium so that we could focus on creating with our laptops. It’s nice, on these solo-parenting weekends, to get a little break, once in a while.
Not to mention the fact that my brother’s in-laws watch the Potato after school, most of the time that I have to go away for work. It’s been a life-saver, since we decided that we had to take him out of the after-school program last year.
I definitely need to get them something really good for Christmas…it’s not only been a huge money-saver, it’s also just been great knowing that he’s with people who really understand that he’s a good kid–even if he was having a tough time with the separation for awhile. I have come to understand that he is also spending a fair amount of time with their next-door neighbors, too–they have a kindergarten-aged son who is in love with the Potato.
The Potato and my niece (their daughter) the Butterfly pretend to hate each other. They’re always complaining about having to spend time together—they are in the same class at school, in addition to the after-school time—but then as soon as they see each other, they pair off and chatter away together. My sister-in-law and I were talking about it at the Halloween party—she said, “I feel like they’re more like brother and sister than they are cousins.”
I have a ton of cousins, but I didn’t grow up near any of them. I’m happy that the Potato gets to grow up so close to at least one set of cousins—and seeing the two of them together reinforces for me that we made the right choices, in letting them stay in their community.
Books for Kids: Boy Meets Boy
I bought the Bee a Nook for her birthday. She loves to read, and with the Nook iPad app, I can share books with her through a single account.
One of the e-books that I bought her was David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy. I downloaded it and read it recently myself, and I highly recommend it, for those of you with tweens or teens in the house, or folks who just like YA lit.
It’s an interesting idea, what it would be like to grow up gay in a world where everyone treated you just like everybody else. And I think the idea that gay teens would just get to make the same dumb mistakes that straight teens do is comforting, in a weird way.
update on the Bee
We did talk last night, but there wasn’t anything earth-shattering. I picked her up from field hockey practice, and she was bubbly and bright, and basically normal–complaining about another girl on the team for not trying very hard, telling me about her day, talking about their games this week. I asked her if she wanted to talk and she said yes, but that she wasn’t even sure what to talk about.
I think she’s just sad about the change to everything.
I can’t blame her, I’m sad too.
I was sitting at my computer in the dining room after dinner, and she came in and sat on my lap. She’s practically the same size as me now, so that was no easy feat. I think in some ways, we all want to go back to an easier time, and for her, it’s the time when she was a little kid.
We were looking at stuff on Facebook, and she was sort of teasing me about the lameness of my Facebook friends. She told me that I can’t friend her, when she gets a Facebook account of her own, and I said, “oh, don’t worry–I’ll just friend all your friends!” She giggled and said, “mommmm, you can’t do that!!!”
I know that for me, I do have this feeling of “when will this be over”—which mostly right now is manifesting itself in hoping that our mediator will finally send us the written mediation docs. At least the process of mediation itself would end, then.
I don’t think, though, that the feeling of wanting it to be over will end—for her or me.
“I can’t keep living a lie”
That’s what the Bee said to me, sobbing, at her birthday dinner.
It seems that she had only told 2 friends about the fact that landisdad and I have separated. And there were 3 girls coming to her birthday party—a sleepover—the next night who didn’t know about it.
She was worried that people would make fun of her. She said, “I’m supposed to be this perfect girl, and now they’ll know that I’m not perfect!”
Oh. Bee.
I told her, no one’s life is perfect. I told her that when I told people that landisdad and I were getting divorced, some were shocked, because it looked like we had the perfect life. I told her that she would see that her friends didn’t really care.
Mostly I held her while she sobbed.
12 is a hard age. I remember that.
As it turned out, I don’t think any of the girls noticed or cared when I left the party, around 9 pm. They did notice when I came back the next morning, because I was carrying a huge box of doughnuts—but I think it was the doughnuts that caught their eye, rather than me in street clothes, obviously showered.
After we ate breakfast and the girls went home, one by one, the Bee asked if she could come back to my apartment with me. She did her homework while I did some stuff on the computer for work. She hung out with a stray kitten the kids insisted I take in, that I haven’t found a home for yet. She looked at some of her presents.
We drove back to landisdad’s for dinner, and after we ate, I came back here. Around 10, she texted me that she couldn’t sleep, and that she wanted to talk to me–I offered to call her, but she said she didn’t want to talk on the phone. I told her to think about things that made her happy at the party, and that we’d see each other today.
I don’t know what’s going on inside her head. But I’m hoping she lets me in.
the school year has begun
and with it, the schedule crazy. I always hate September–between the beginning of school & all the school-related events; a huge, week-long meeting I’ve gotta do for work; and the Bee’s birthday, it’s a crazy, crazy month. This year is no different, in that respect.
The Bee has decided to play field hockey again this fall. She was assigned to honors Language Arts & honors Math–when did they start having honors classes in middle school? The Language Arts teacher assigned a 5 paragraph essay. On the first day of school. Her field hockey schedule has her not getting home until 5, and then it’s time to watch a little tv before dinner, and then spend the whole evening doing homework.
The Potato and I have been working on cleaning up his room, a little bit. We went to back-to-school night at the elementary school last night, and looking at his desk was so refreshing. It seems he CAN keep some space neat, if he’s really motivated. His room at the old house looks like it should be eligible for FEMA relief. Perhaps one can have too many Legos….
We’re supposed to be signing him up for karate this fall, but neither landisdad nor I have gotten around to it. But he needs something to do if he’s not going to play soccer. That boy has energy to burn. His wiggling is legendary.
it wasn’t until I saw one of those
“one year ago today” posts on Facebook that I remembered that today is the one year anniversary of the fight that ended my marriage.
I guess it’s progress, of a sort, that I had almost forgotten that I spent all of Labor Day weekend 2010 curled in the fetal position on the living room couch.
A lot has changed in that year.
The kids are staying with me this week, and we’re off. We’ve been doing a lot of banal stuff—shopping for school supplies and sports equipment, new shoes and outfits.
A couple of nights ago, I was lying on my bed, reading, and the Potato wandered in for a cuddle. I said to him, “you like to start and end your day with a snuggle, don’t you?” and he laughed and said, “yes.” Now, every night he comes in and lies down next to me for a few minutes—he’s already had the long-established practice of jumping into bed with me in the morning (which he does with an unseemly glee on the coldest winter mornings, with his cold feet).
The kids will be staying with me much less when the school year starts. We’ll be back to our old routine, where I spend the evening with them at their house, and come back to my apartment alone.
I wonder, if I had known a year ago what I know now, what I might have done differently.
