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.
