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Miss O is a bit of an imp …
Wednesday night at bedtime, I was reading to Bean, and Miss O was in the room with us. I hadn’t yet closed the bedroom door because, honestly, I encourage O to skip storytime before bed. If she’s in there, she screams bloody murder until Bean hustles off my lap with a gentle “It’s okay, O, you can sit with mommy”. It’s very sweet of Bean, but O can’t keep ‘winning’ like that or the screaming will never end. And it has to end. Soon.
Anyways, Miss O toddled on over to the door, grinned at us and started easing the door closed with one hand while waving ‘bye-bye’ with the other hand. It doesn’t sound nearly as silly or cute when I type it out, but trust me – between that impish little grin on her face and the wave, it was wicked cute.
Last night while I was fixing dinner for her and I, I let her play with some dry lentils and bowls and scoops. Yeah, the stuff got everywhere, but she was perfectly content with what she was doing, and there was no whining, screaming or demanding to be picked up.
As the fun was winding down, I got out the small hand broom and dust pan to clean up. O wanted to use them, so I let her for awhile. When dinner was pretty much done, I started to sweep again, and she wandered over to the pantry, got a cloth napkin and came over to start wiping up the floor as I swept. How sweet is that?
For the past two nights I’ve let her more or less self-soothe to sleep. Not really crying, tho there was a bit of fussing. But when she gets wound up, I’ve discovered that gently scratching her head is like an ‘off’ switch, if the planets are in their proper alignment. So with some fussing, some skritching and some soothing, Miss O has wound down on her own, instead of the usual nursing to sleep.
I tried getting her to take a bottle of formula on Wed night, but she was angered mightly at the suggestion. So it was back to nursing last night, but I did make her fall back to sleep a few times without the boob.
She was up a lot doing this really congested sounding cough last night, and was pawing at her ear a bit before bed. I have no idea where the cough came from – she’s not been sick or sniffly or congested at all. I’m hoping her ped is open today …
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Since my desktop computer kept giving me the “holy shiznit, you’re almost out of space!” message every single time I booted up, I sprang for a 1.5TB (that’s like a gigolo-zillion bytes or something like that) external hard drive at Costco.
While I know I have a bunch of stuff hogging space, I think my biggest problem is fragmentation and a messy C: drive – but how the heck do I run a defrag when there is next to zero free space?!? I’ve deleted everything I don’t use, but can’t move the dial from 3% free space. And the darn defrag wants 15% free space to run. Grrr …
I’m going to end up downloading (to my D: drive, thankyouverymuch) a bunch of system mechanic type programs, because I figure $70 worth of software, plus my googling skills and (limited) computer savvy is a better option than paying someone by the hour. Right? (Someone say right. Because I have never been my own tech support!)
The clean up and file moving exercise uncovered a strange sidebar: what the heck do you do with a marriage’s worth of digital images?
Do I delete old vacation pictures? Is that what one does when one gets divorced? I’m sure that Dave did, as he had a whole Sherman-esque approach to “us” when I moved out … but it’s not like I look at the pictures (ever) or, now that I’ve had my memory refreshed that there are pics of the places ‘we’ went, I’m waxing nostalgic and feeling reunion feelings. I guess it’s not something like the wedding photo album, that the girls may some day want to see. Any mention of “I went on a cruise with your dad” is unlikely to be any more than a passing thing, and that’s only until I go on a different cruise and the one with Dave isn’t the only point of reference.
It’s different for pics of family trips, once Bean was in the picture (ha, I made a funny). But pre-Bean, I guess there’s really no point, is there? Is there any need to be a memory keeper when no-one really needs or wants the memories?
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Thanks for the thoughts and comments on the brain dump post.
I mentioned yesterday that I had changed my mind about a few things; the biggest is I really don’t think I’d want to try again. Doing the kid-swap thing Sunday evening really made me realize that I don’t want Dave back. I don’t even think I really want my old life back anymore. I like weekends off and being in charge, completely, when the girls are here.
Wanting to know I did everything in my power is one thing; wanting that marriage, or even some purified version of it, again is something entirely different. The unresolved business that feels like a millstone around my neck makes me wish for a do-over. But really, it’s just a weight I have to cast off.
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Well.
The crickets from my last post are overwhelming, Jen and Melissa aside. Too much detail? Too honest? Is everybody thinking (but not saying) that I’m still hung up on Dave?
Ah well. I knew putting that post out there exposed me to a lot. And exposed a lot about me. But since I’m not big on pulling punches, and since I’d been doing so much boring, day-in-the-life type posting, I wanted to give y’all a peek inside my mind a year and change after my life imploded.
And putting it all out there helped solidify my own thinking on things.
After a kid-free weekend, and interacting with Dave (however minimally), I’ve altered my opinion on some things and reaffirmed it on other things.
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Ack. How’d I miss Friday? Oh … that’s right. I was putting it off until the evening as I’d be kid free, but then the cold I’m fighting kicked my tush and I watched a movie, took a bath and went to bed. I’m still pretty achy and crappy-feeling, but it’s amazing what 8 uninterrupted hours of sleep will do for the body.
My mom and Miss O and I spent Friday bargain-hunting for kids clothes. Bean is very partial to wearing dresses with pants instead of shirts with pants, and Miss O is still a bit too small for most of the ‘grow into it’ stuff leftover from Bean’s toddlerhood. It’s so cute to watch her tiny and cute self walk around with a head that looks, especially when her hair is down, almost as large as her legs and torso. Like an orange on a toothpick.
I’ve discovered that I really get a kick out of resale/second-hand shopping. There’s just something in my DNA that is energized and invigorated by scoring stuff for cheap. I did one of the big resale ‘events‘ and then hit the Salvation Army and Goodwill. Truth be told, the prices are just way, way better at the latter two than at the ‘events’, whose prices are usually on-par with resale shops.
As we drove around yesterday, Miss O nodded off. So I continued to drive so she could have a quick nap. And my mom and I talked about all kinds of stuff.
She asked me if Dave came to me and said “I made a mistake”, would I take him back.
Now this is a question I’ve asked myself before. I assume he’s asked himself his own variation of it at some point or another. I think, as humans, we always ask ourselves these questions. In a way we almost *have* to, as we look back and look forward and navigate through life. But they are questions that are hard to answer honestly; out loud, especially, but even internally. Each of us has a question of this magnitude. Some of us have more than one.
But these types of questions require us to swallow pride, to admit mistakes, to feel hate and anger, to face up to truths and lies. Things we’ve felt or told ourselves and things we’ve expressed to others.
I answered her without hesitation: I’d want to try.
It’s not that I’m in love with him. It’s not that I really want him back. Or that I’m motivated by wanting my life back. Honestly, I don’t think it could ever work again. But in that same vein of honesty, I don’t feel that our marriage ever needed to end. There wasn’t anything so egregious that – handled properly – couldn’t be rectified. I made small mistakes, he made big ones, and when everything reached it’s crisis, he’d moved too far away to ever give the marriage a chance.
That’s a hard truth to walk away from without regret, you know? That an inherently good, but flawed, marriage died without the due diligence it deserved. So when I think “what if he wanted to try again?”, and I factor in Bean’s still-broken heart and my own annoyance that we never actually tried to fix things, my logical, rational side says “how could you not want to give it a chance?”
There are hard truths in life. Some of us understand and accept them, some of us don’t. In my opinion, one of the hardest truths is that you won’t always love and like the people you love and like. You’ll hate them sometimes. You’ll wish they were not a part of your life, that you had nothing to do with them, that they would just go the hell away. In marriage, you’ll wonder if you married the right person, if there are greener pastures, if you made a mistake … you’ll also be amazed that someone can love you, faults and all, and put up with you day after day. And, if you’re really lucky, they’ll put up with you forever.
But there will still be days you hate them and they hate you.
And that’s okay.
If you want to read something worth reading, take a look at Necessary Losses by Judith Viorst. There were few things in there I hadn’t, on some level, accepted or known. But it was amazing to me to see these things in print. She has another book, Grown Up Marriage, that I want to read. Necessary Losses challenges so many illusions about love and life – the illusions of perfect love, perfect friendship, perfect marriage, a perfect life … Life is messy and sucky and fun and hard and great all at the same time. But it will never, nor will anything in it, be perfect.
So when I think about that mythical ‘trying again’, it’s from that place I was at while I was married. The place that knows there is no perfect, that love isn’t *always*, that hate is *sometimes* and that in choosing to love someone, we do so knowing that we could make that choice with someone else with equal odds of success.
But I also think about it from the place of betrayal, of shattered trust, of hateful words and thoughts and feelings. And, knowing that, I know that even with my best efforts, and even with true remorse and commitment from him, the likelihood of me ever achieving a loving, trusting relationship with him again are slim to none. Knowing that he is capable of such a betrayal – how could my trust ever be total and complete? And without total trust, how can a relationship survive? I, personally, don’t believe it can. Not really. Not in a way that’s good, and honest and true. If there’s betrayal and both parties can get back to absolute faith in one another, I think there’s a good chance. But getting back to that faith …
So yes, I’d want to give Dave another chance. And I’d want to really, really try – both for myself and for my kids. And, truth be told, for him. (Talk about truths that are not easy to admit out loud, as I’m sure some members of the peanut gallery will construe from that statement that I’m still in love with him and *want* him back. Sarah.) Because I do believe that people can make mistakes and be forgiven and given a fresh slate. I just don’t know if I’m capable of that level of forgiveness, were it ever sought.
This is all just an exercise in thinking out loud, and sharing thoughts and feelings on divorce and life, as I’ve drifted away from this kind of stuff for awhile. I don’t expect that this will ever be a real thing for me to consider, and I’m honestly glad about that. I’m really liking being a single parent, really liking being on my own and really liking being able to take my time looking for and choosing a mate that will respect, appreciate and – most importantly – share my take on life, love and hate. I don’t want to share my life with someone for whom those illusions have yet to shatter and for whom the potential and freedom of those shattered illusions is lost. I like the freedom of being single and the freedom of accepting and embracing my necessary losses.
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My dad turns 69 today – Happy Birthday to the old geezer 
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An hour plus of getting the girls to sleep; add two Miss O wake-ups in the hour afterward; a third just after 9 and a 5:30 a.m. start. Good times.
It’s sleep cycles like these that have me contemplating some sort of sleep training for the little one. I threaten it when sleep sucks, but truly, I’m not going to do any of it. I love the snuggling, the little warm body snuggled next to mine, the sweet little sounds and touches. I love still having Bean in the same room, knowing we’re all in one place, we’re all safe and if anyone needs me, I’m right there.
Will it make O’s transition to sleeping at daddy’s and, eventually, napping at school, more difficult? I don’t know. Possibly. And for that reason I entertain ‘sleep training’ with a little more seriousness than I would were it just me being cranky about losing “me time”.
Gotta love winter in Texas. Yesterday it was 80*, with a low of 56. Now it’s 37* at noon with a high of 47 forecast, but I’m guessing we top out around 40. No wonder we’re all sick all winter long.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenge that President Obama (I just love typing that) gave us all in his inaugural speech:
“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility. A recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”
It’s a call to duty, to all of us, and I’m trying to decide what my duty will be. Besides, you know, snark and being so. damn. good-looking.
I’ll leave ya with a couple Beanisms:
- I’m going to marry Connor and our wedding is going to be great.
- I know his name but I don’t know his nickname.
- I didn’t bug you. I didn’t wake Miss O. I watched you sleep and it looked like you were dead. When I sleep I look like I’m dead too.
- If it’s going to be cold, I can’t go to the park. I’m sorry, but I don’t like to wear a jacket so I can’t go.
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I want to go on a date with Henry Rollins.
(Don’t watch any of this if you’re not old enough to hear bad words)
He’s killing me with his “Letters” on YouTube. And having watched his spiel on evolution and “intelligent design”, as well as his joie de germs speech, I’d like to up my dating proposal to a marriage proposal.
He’s coming to town on his spoken word tour on October 5th … hmmm … anyone want to go to La Zona Rosa with me that night? Bean will be at Dave’s, and I know my folks would watch Miss O if I wanted to go …
I’ve been wondering lately how I’m going to meet men when I am ready to start dating. The places I go aren’t really prime trolling grounds, and everyone I know (and everyone they know) is married. So when I look at stuff like the 2008 Bachelor Issue from Austin Monthly, and I read about the type of guys that are out there, I think “great – but how the hell do I meet them?” Not the bachelors or Henry Rollins specifically, but the guys like that. The ones who are established and sure of themselves, and looking for a woman like me – and aren’t scared off by my already having two kids.
The bar scene is right out – I can’t really do it because of the girls, and I don’t even want to because I just don’t have it in me. The idea of just going out drinking and trolling is horrifying to me. And my outings to Target, HEB, Kiddie Acres, PetSmart, the park, etc aren’t really going to put me in the ‘meet and greet’ setting – even if there are available men there, no-one is just going to walk up to me, with or without the girls, in a setting like that to see if I want to go out on a date.
Am I going to have to do one of the match.com type things? Or wait until I start working outside the home? Take some classes?
I’m having such an emotional few days … I feel bipolar, in a way … not clinically, just that whole mood-swingy, sometimes on the verge of tears, sometimes feeling strong and confident kind of bipolarity, ya know?
I have a little more insight as to why Dave’s been stand-offish, but I told him I wasn’t going to put it in my blog, so you’ll just have to take me at my word when I say he isn’t doing it to be a douche. He also apologized for putting ‘Mariah’ in my face and said he wouldn’t talk to me about her any more.
But after a lot of talk yesterday, a thought entered my mind. I can’t help but wonder if he’s kind of re-writing history to justify the affair. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe there was nothing in our marriage that could have been changed, I’m just wondering how much of that was really divorce-worthy, and how much of it just looked flat and dull in comparison to the shiny newness of ‘Mariah’.
This whole debacle began with Dave telling me there was a ‘list of grievances’ (my words for it), things that he was unhappy about in our marriage. The list came up, funnily enough, after his trip to Cali where he met ‘Mariah’. It took about a month before he was ready to talk to me about it – a month in which there was a second trip to Cali and when I’m pretty sure he kissed ‘Mariah’ – and by then the list had morphed into a general “I’m not happy, there’s no spark, and I’ve even considered divorce as a possibility if I can’t get to happy” discussion we had Thanksgiving weekend.
Shell-shocked, and completely unaware of the affair, I took his revelations in stride and agreed that our marriage wasn’t perfect, divorce wasn’t the worst possible thing in the world, yadda, yadda, yadda … the next day, the ramifications of some of it hit me, and I dug in, insisting that our marriage was good at it’s core and that it was worth fighting for.
He was surprised by this, saying he expected me to agree and not to fight.
At some point I asked if there was someone else, but he told me no – that he had just hung out with a woman who made him feel more like himself. And that he felt more like himself when he was traveling on business than he did at home. Duh. I feel a lot more like carefree Vick when I’m away from the kids and the day-to-day drudge of home life, too!
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Ya know, there’s more details but, honestly? I’m vacillating back and forth between “what difference does it make?!?” and “I need to understand” .. and right now, apathy is winning out over any desire to rehash things. I keep wondering about details that, in all likelihood don’t make a damn bit of difference to the rest of my life.
I really don’t think there was anything that wrong with our marriage. I think he met someone new, there was a spark and he chose to turn his back on a marriage that needed work and to fall in love. Then, to justify that to me, himself and the world, the flaws in our marriage became huge gaping issues that could never be fixed.
I keep waiting to hear something from him that will make me understand, but I don’t think there’s any big bombshell he’s going to drop that will do that. Marriages have issues, people have issues – that’s why there’s such a thing as marriage counseling and that’s why these trite phrases like ‘seven year itch’ and ‘midlife crisis’ exist – all relationships reach a point of “huh. what the hell am I doing here?” That doesn’t mean they are doomed to fail, it means they’re real.
There was likely nothing on his ‘list of grievances’ that’s egregious or divorce-worthy. Added together, the ‘list’ would most likely have been counseling-worthy and certainly compromise- and reassessment- worthy. But I don’t think there’s that much I can actually learn from the issues themselves … I think the real problem wasn’t the issues but Dave’s inability to articulate his wants and needs, and his choice to pursue a relationship with someone else.
Lyrics from The Ataris’ The Hero Dies in This One
Recent Beanisms
- Regarding who to invite to her birthday party: “I want to invite Olivia. And my bicycle friend. Bicycle, would you like to come to Chuck-E-Cheese’s? He says ‘yes please’”
- “Mommy, I’m sad about about the noise I hear on the starfish. I don’t like it, so I walked away to you because the noise was back.”
- “The Mary Had a Little Lamb button ruins the John Mayer song” (I assume this happened at daddy’s house)
- She also made up her own song today, to the tune of “Frere Jacques”, but the only lines I got were in the “Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les matines!” part, and she was singing “I like Miss O” and drawing out the I for two syllables.
One of life’s great mysteries – to me, at least – is why the hell they put the chime-box-thingie for the doorbell right over what is obviously destined to be a child’s room. Not in the living room or dining room, but right over the kid’s door. Seriously. What the hell?
In a sweet-but-sad moment, I was talking with Bean last night, and I asked her how she felt about going back and forth from mommy’s house and daddy’s house. It’s so hard to not lead the witness when you’re talking to kids about feelings, but when I asked her how she felt about going to daddy’s house, she said “sad”. I tried to get her to qualify that with something, *anything*, so we could address her concern, but the best I could get was that she missed me. Within 10 minutes, tho, I had her talking about how much she liked daddy’s house and the fun things she could do there.
So this morning, out of the blue, she said “I miss Miss O when I go to daddy’s house. I’m sad because she’s not there”. It was so sweet, but so sad. I’m thrilled she misses her sister, but I wish it wasn’t necessary, ya know? I’ll have to ask Dave to have a similar conversation with her and see if the converse is true – that when she’s at mommy’s she sad because she misses daddy. It’s not like we can change that, but it’s good to be aware of it, and hopefully find a way to address it with her.
I was watching Joss Whedon’s Equality Now speech on YouTube the other day, and I really loved what he had to say. He relayed that he’s asked – almost incessantly, it seems – why he writes such strong, female characters. Among the replies he tried out for a fictitious reporter was this: “Why are you even asking this? Why aren’t you asking a hundred other guys why they don’t write strong women characters?”
re: his dad and stepfather: “They prized wit and resolve in the women they were with above all things and they were among the rare men who understood that recognizing somebody else’s power does not diminish your own.”
(While I initially quoted that for my judgment of Dave not being okay with a strong woman -I realized that it’s apropos for me, as well. It’s hard to walk the line between strength and compromise … )
On equality: “Equality is not a concept. It is not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity – we need it to stand on this earth as men and women. We need equality. Kinda now.”
Lyrics from the Chili Peppers’ ‘Power of Equality’
Today’s Beanisms:
“[Miss O] is my favorite baby. One day she will be big and she will walk (illustrated with an exaggerated walk) and crawl (illustrated with a .. swimming motion?) and she will play with me.”
Bean: (comes running with an scribbled-on envelope she got from my office) Mommy! I drew a picture
Mommy: Were you drawing in my office?
Bean: Nooo
Mommy: Where did you get the envelope?
Bean: Your office
Mommy: Where did you get the pen?
Bean: Your office. I’m not supposed to go in your office.
Technically, no
So, I’m slipping in my ability to really like Dave. I’ve sent him a couple emails that he said he owed me a response to, emails that – I thought – were starting to get into the heart of things, and brought up some stuff that seems important. So I asked him the other day if I should stop waiting for a response, and he said, basically, that because I blog about it, he doesn’t want to talk to me about it. Also that he needed space on this kind of stuff …
Which would be okay if he didn’t feel the need to put ‘Mariah’ in my face so damn often. Apparently he can’t talk to me about anything that actually matters, but he can talk to me about his girlfriend. Nice.
I’m working so. damn. hard. to find ways to like him. I really am. For the girls and for me, too. I don’t get what he’s so afraid of. *He* cheated on me. *He* stopped loving me. *He* wanted the divorce – why hold back now? If it’s everything he wanted, why the cloak and dagger and the need to shove his girlfriend in my face?
What’s hardest for me is that – even though this is what he wanted – he still seems to want/need to ‘stick it to me’. This is the same guy who wanted to remain friends, who talked a good talk about still coming over to help out with the girls and help me out. Now I’ve got to beg to get him to change an a/c filter for me (not because I’m a girl, but because I legitimately couldn’t reach the damn thing) and when I asked him to help me with the girls last night after he had Miss O until her bedtime and Miss I still needed a wipe down, jammies and toothbrushing, you’d think I’d asked him for a huge favor.
He blames my blog for his crappy ‘tude. I keep coming back to: you wanted this, and all I’m doing is venting emotion and still not tearing you apart like I *could* be – why the need to make me pay for needing an outlet?
Lyrics from All’s Bubblegum
“All committed relationships … have to be tested by crisis. It’s a psychological baptism by fire that severely strains the relationship but may be necessary to solidify the marriage.” from Crazy Time: Surviving Divorce and Building a New Life – Abigail Trafford
This is at the heart of what nauseates me about the divorce to this day. What could have been a watershed moment that made our marriage better and stronger was simply a watershed moment of failure. This *could* have been one of those things that sucked for a little while but created an unbreakable bond between us. But instead, we’re on the weak path of giving up. He forced the moment to its crisis, and then scuttled off on silent claws …
Totally related tangent; I wrote a literary analysis of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock – I bastardized a little of it in that last sentence – when I was in college. It was actually published, too. Anyways, I wrote it from the perspective of “what would Nietzsche think?” (long before that whole WWJD stuff, and it’s possible I’m owed some sort of royalties …) and I realized that, in a way, it was kind of a scarily prescient piece of writing. Not that Dave was totally Prufrock or that I’m Nietzsche – hell, my “coulda, shoulda, woulda” reflections would likely earn me a slap in the face from Nietzsche – but the overtones were there.
Actually, Dave’s newfound desire to live life for himself would make the old German proud. And now *I’m* kinda the Prufrock with the wishes that things could have been different … I don’t want to be Prufrock. Tho the petulant whine I used when I said that in my head just kinda underscored my wussiness …
Oh how I wish he could have shown me this kind of strength and determination when it would have made a difference. If he would have really pushed back, not let me get away with so much, called me on my shit … I don’t find strong men unappealing at. all. And I’m the kind of chick that needs to be put back on my heels once in a while. Yup. Coulda, shoulda, woulda.
I hate the feeling of regret. There are few things I regret, simply because it’s such a pointless emotion. You can’t change the past, you can’t undo what’s been done … but I’ve got so much regret over all this. Some for my own actions or inactions, some for his actions/inactions. It sucks when something so fixable/preventable happens because you make the wrong choices on the way to collapse.
This emotional limbo – the looking back with regret and some degree of longing, but also trying to focus on making solid strides toward the future and laying the groundwork for a happy, stable home for the girls – is tough. Now, I don’t want him to say “oh, what a mistake, please take me back”, but I also don’t want him to seem so cavalier about everything. While he’s told me that it isn’t easy for him, it really doesn’t seem like it’s all that hard, either.
Intellectually, I get that it’s been over for him for awhile, and for me the wound is only a few months old, and the bandage was ripped off about a month ago when I moved out. But emotionally, I want to see him hurting over this too. Not in a mean way – like “I want to hurt him”, but in a raw way where I’d like to see that I’m worth hurting over.
And while that sounds like a cue for the world’s tiniest violins and lots of “poor Vick”s, I’m actually typing all of this without tears or recriminations. I don’t want to be pitied or fussed over; now, since this is supposedly a long recovery – “Crazy Time” says around two years, to which I say ‘bugger off’ – I’m sure I’ll be seeking some coddling and validation again, but not today. This isn’t a bitter or sappy post, just something that’s on my mind and in need of an outlet.
The Bruces do their Philosopher’s Song live at the Hollywood Bowl (not work safe), complete with lyrics
