SLAPPY THOUGHTS, PLEASANT EXTERIOR EDITION

My ex-to-be is being nice to me.  

This should make me happy.  I want peace and harmony.  I want quiet.  Instead, I’m perturbed.  

He claims that he’s a better person than he was when I was the life partner, that he had morphed into a pompous blowhard know-it-all while we were together.  Yes, he had morphed.  No, I did not love the man he had become, but I had loved the pre-blowhard.  

I didn’t leave, I fled, chased by fear for my sanity, and my baby’s.  I could have stayed, but then, gosh, he wouldn’t have had a chance to become this “better person”!  He understands why I left, but he’s still not happy about it.  He doesn’t have to be happy about anything I do.  He never was, unless it made his life easier to place in neutral gear, to idle for hours…

He doesn’t have to be happy about anything. 

Three women in his life after me shoved in his face the unpleasant caricature that I had been painting  for years, version after version to plaster  our walls.  “This is what you are.  This is who you are.  I do not like this man.  Help me find that other guy who looks exactly like you, but without a beer belly and a bad attitude.”  Those other women knew how to limn a version that he could understand.  My watercolors were too pale. My frames were too flimsy.  

So, now he’s nice.  He talked mildly and pleasantly about the kids and work and politics while I waited for the daughter to do something important with the other daughter, and he complimented me, and apologized for something I had forgotten or had never known.  He gave me a cup of coffee.  

I think his “better” self needs a sound, righteous mental slapping.  Why did three women after me have to point out his rudeness for him to listen, when his first wife left for the same reasons I did?  Why wasn’t my voice heard?  I said everything I felt.  They just said it differently, he explained, and made him understand.  Did I have to scream it like the first two, or let him watch my heart break while I offer a running play-by-play  like the third?  

I did have to do that, I guess, but I wouldn’t.  He should have been watching and listening more carefully, dammit.  

So, I am glad that his better self has released some anger, and has learned “some things about life”.  Yeah, I gagged a little hearing that, too. 

Know what I have learned?  I’m not here to fix anyone.  Just not my strong suit.  I am bad at the fixing.  

I’m good at being nice if it means that my daughter smiles more.  

 

 

 

DON’T TRIP OVER THE THRONE

My kid had a sleepover last week.  We do sleepovers well, I think.

First, let me deal with the issue of actual sleep.  It happens.  She’s seven going on eight, so when mama gets sleepy, everyone is usually sleepy, too.  Easy. I say, “Start thinking about getting yourselves to bed,” and they begin elaborate tent-building and bed-making in another room, robbing the other tents like raiding Huns.

The living room has already been completely tented out by this point.  Fortresses of sheets and couch pillows and pilfered kitchen chairs make the room impassable to anyone but a four-and-a-half-foot-tall child or a very flexible grownup.  Thank goodness I’m flexible, so I can still respond to the call, “Come in here with us!”

Those requests are numbered.

Snacks happen on no particular schedule, and food is allowed anywhere but the actual bed.  Ever try to get the smell of smooshed watermelon out of a mattress?  We don’t drink real milk here at the cottage, but when milk was a part of our lives, it was also banned from the bed.  Worse than watermelon, man.

I taper off the chocolate opportunities as the evening wears on, and begin to turn off a lamp, here and there, and yawns happen.

“You busy ladies sure have done a lot today.  Look at this amazing fortress!  You carried these chairs from the kitchen all by yourselves!  Such strong muscles!”  They show off those muscles, and brag about how heavy the coffee table was, when they had to scoot it across the room.  The chairs, they were nothin’.

“I’m going to probably land on my face if I try to walk through here in the dark tonight, so you might want to put some things back where they were.”  Cue groans.

“Okay, I’ll straighten up in here, but it’s time to get your beds ready.  Where are you sleeping?  Big bed or floor bed?” We have a futon minus frame that gets stashed under the bed for sleepovers.  I got tired of hearing small bodies hit the ground like sacks of taters.  They all kick at this age.  Fortunately, they also sleep through falling out of bed, but I still don’t like it.

They rush to the bedroom to choose the placement of the floor bed, and more tentmaking begins.  Now, this house is not big, and we don’t have a linen closet, so the whole of our tent-building supplies fit into one big drawer or are in use around the house.  The living room tents are plundered mercilessly for sheets and pillows, and I quietly shuffle chairs back to the rooms where they began.

And damn, that coffee table is really heavy, but they help with the scooting, muscles bulging in those twiggy little arms.  The cat helps by bolting from one end of the room to the next, thrilled by the flipping and dragging of blankets.

So, I am left with a room without pillows, blankets, couch cushions, or sheets.  The heavy underpinnings of the hastily broken camp stay.

I could call this a mess.  Most of you would call this a mess.  I still see the little girls stretching their whole selves, physical and mental, to make a refuge-within-a-home, trying one way and then another when it falls on their heads.  They work it through.  Sheets become vaulted ceilings and pillows become plush thrones and lounges.

This morning, I sit in the darlingly ugly recliner and look at the aftermath, and listen to the cat trill over a dropped shiny girl-thing: a plastic ruby ring as big as a silver dollar.  I soak up the energy those happy small people left behind.  The floor of her bedroom has disappeared under tent makings crashed down by that busy cat, but she’ll get a little laugh about that when she comes home from her grandma’s house.

Blessed, blessed, blessed, and blessed.

I TAKE MY MEDICINE, TOO

My girl has strep throat.  Not a big surprise.  Her best friend had it last week, and they are huggers.

Infections happen.  She’s had her share, and I know the routine; however, there’s a twist now: it is not “my night” to have her at home.  It’s her daddy’s.

We have to share her.

This makes me sick.  I am the mommy.  I am the Tylenol-giver.  I am the puke-bowl-holder.  I am the yucky-medicine cajoler.  I am also the hypocrite, because I know men who can do these things perfectly well.  This makes me selfish.  I want my baby, right now.

She is fine without me.  The Tylenol did its magic in two hours, just after we brought her here to pick up her things for the night at her daddy’s.  She showed off her new bike skills and bobbed on the trampoline for him.  She is asleep by now, fresh from a bath, full from a sandwich, with antibiotics doing their magic.  I hope she is curled up in his bed while he’s watching TV, that her germs don’t make a pariah of her.

If she were here, she would be on this couch, or in my big bed, and my hand would be on her belly to feel her breath.  I can’t do that from across town.

So, it’s ten o’clock and I have to leave at eight.  She will go to my ex’s ex’s tomorrow morning, and one of us will snatch her up before the other after work, and that will be that.  He’ll make it home first, so a day will go by without my girl.  Again, then, back to him tomorrow night.  She may be right as rain for summer camp the next day. She wants to go to the blackout skate at the Y on Friday night.

If I could  change one thing about this life, this is it.  Now you know all about it.  This is the yucky medicine I gag down.

Ouch.

FUTURE-BUILDING, UPPER BODY STRENGTH EDITION

I flirted with an old shame last weekend.  I bought a piece of furniture that I don’t really need, but that I wanted for its potential role in my future.

That chair is ugly by any measure. No one loves a brown and black itchily-upholstered recliner with wood arms and a footrest crank mechanism that shows when it’s open.  No one loves that, but me.  With the favored quilt thrown over it, the itch problem goes away. I’ll have to re-cover that woven nylon with something a little more plush, but not yet.

My shame in furniture purchases runs deep.  In my fourth segment of life, bringing home a thrift shop treasure meant enduring a kind of Chinese water torture.  The beginning felt kind of pleasant and fun: mild teasing over my odd taste, maybe later a compliment after a makeover if I was lucky.  If my luck failed and the project didn’t look showroom-ready, the drips on my forehead grew more acidic and more frequent with time, until I was being yelled at about my disrespect for my family for bringing trash into the house.  I couldn’t resist making a nice place cluttered and ugly, could I?

This little recliner reminded me of a very sweet one in my love’s upstairs spare room.  When I sat in this less charming one at the yard sale, I imagined sitting with him on a porch in our future, rocking a little, feet up, a pitcher of tea on a tray on a side table with two glasses filled and more waiting to be filled, in case a daughter or two arrived.  We held hands.  We smiled.  We had reupholstered, not matching, but complementing.  That image, so hopeful, sank into my soul.

The yard sale recliner went into my trunk, and the contents of the trunk went into my back seat.  My love and carried it into my house, but I felt embarrassed about it, every bit of it.  I should have taken it in alone. He asked where it would go, and I didn’t have a good answer.  It went anywhere for the time being, but mostly, it went into a place in my heart where the maybes still linger.

The shame came on, harsh and heartless.  I had just purchased a nice room divider, and my ex-husband helped me move it into the house.  I refused his help in placing it, refused to listen to his drip of opinion beyond my odd taste in home decorating, and shooed him away with many thanks for the use of his truck.  That funny stack of shelves and drawers suits the room beautifully now, but the thing weighs more than I do, and certain parts of my body are still protesting my stubbornness.  To avoid more protesting muscles, I let my love carry the little ugly recliner into the house for me and with me, despite my uninvited shame.

When my darling weigh-and-balance Libra love commented on my home-is-haven Cancer-ness, I felt a drip.  I felt awful.  I felt dumb for having that mess in my car and not enough room for him to sit.  Shame cuts deep, invisibly, paper cutting again and again unless real work is done.

So, I said out loud what had struck my heart when I sat in that chair.  I described my hope of sitting with him, and unexpectedly, he saw the porch, and the tea, and the holding of hands.  He understood.  He smiled with me at the thought.

He understood.

Shame runs from my truth, as silly as that truth might seem to anyone but me.  I am the same me that “brought trash into the house”, same me that saw future in that trash and had hope for a life lived with trash made into treasure, same me that finally put the treasure that looked like trash to everyone else on the curb for the next hopeful gleaner.

Now, right now, it’s time to rearrange some furniture to suit my present and my future.  Attach any symbolism you like, but I’m really going to clean my bedroom to make room for a little recliner, to keep it safe for rocking with my love, and sipping tea, and smiling.

AS IF THIS IS A NEON-UNICORN-ADORNED DIARY WITH A GOLD-TONE LOCK AND USELESS KEY

I want my cat to continue to eat and drink.

I want my daughter to feel loved.

I want the car to not rattle when I drive over bumps.

I want to have lunch dates.

I want to go on bike rides.

I want to make more money.

I want to use that money to travel.

I want to travel with my girl and my sweetheart, together and separately.

I want to sleep on a train.

I want to go camping.

I want to have a picnic.

I want the good playground to get finished.

I want to be invited.

I want to cook for you.

I want my mother to be happy.

I want the finches to live somewhere else for the summer.

I want to plant a garden.

I want a little camper trailer and something that will pull it.

I want to paint with my watercolors.

I want to wear cute shoes without the pain of wearing cute shoes.

I want to play guitar.

I want to play piano.

I want a piano for my girl, because she wants to play piano, too.

I want to get rid of my TV.

I want cable.

I want that good man to love me forever.

I want to clean my car.

I want to find good cigar boxes at the smoke shop today.

I want to remember what it was that I forgot to do today.

I want to juice green things.

I want to sleep when I am tired.

I want to be free of desire, but then, I think I would get bored.