My daughter is sick.

Sleep is fleeting. I'm listening, now, to her sister talk to her in their room down the hall. I am listening, but also in the interim moments between their bedtime and my own I am listening to myself. 

I am a cliche. 

This past weekend my ex-husband questioned if I wanted to see my children at all. It is a long story to tell, this one, and it ends with my searching through months of text messages to find evidence of a pattern of behavior - not his, my own - and finding no such pattern should have ended in relief or triumph, but there are no simple feelings. Instead, I wandered my house thinking, doubting; maybe I hadn't done enough to prove that I wanted them or loved them, or enjoyed them.

I don't know how to dig that out.

Someone mentioned off-handedly that my daughter was sick because of a late bedtime one night, and I laughed, took that as well as I could, but it settles and it gnaws until my chest feels tight -  I don't know how to take care of these children, I hear myself say, I don't know how to love them or protect them. 

When my first daughter was born, I was overwhelmed with the idea that if I walked away she would have a chance for something great. My then husband could find someone more deserving, more prepared to care for her, he could find her real mother. It echoed; this was a mistake, I was a mistake, and to make things right for her I needed to go.

All these things settle down into my bones until everything is darkness.

----

Even if she falls asleep in her own bed, she will wander into mine tonight. She will wake me up, and I will not be able to return to sleep.

It won't matter.

I will lay nose to nose with her until the sun rises.

It's been a long week.

So, I'm 34 and divorced with two children. I keep repeating that to myself, but it doesn't seem any more real or understandable. 

Understandable.

Let me explain.

I've been ignoring things. All the things. Sleeping. Alarms. Paperwork. Making lunch. Meals in general. And I know this isn't healthy, but I don't want to hear it, even from myself. This is not how a functioning adult acts, but I gave myself a month to ignore everything.

The month is up in 3 days and I'll have to figure out systems to cope with the chaos. 

Am I the only one that needs a system? I can't remember to do little things like wipe my counters off, so I invent these elaborate systems to help control the chaos. Pay my electric bill = change the air filter for instance. 

It kind of works. 

I'm about to replace the systems with something else entirely, though, because they aren't working and it's a lot of anxiety. If I get rid of everything maybe there won't be so much mess to maintain. Maybe I'll start to look like myself instead.

31 days. Starting Wednesday. 

31 days to change a mindset. 31 days to burn things to the ground. 

Let's do it.

What we mean when we talk about divorce.

I want to talk about what is lost when a marriage ends.

I want to say how hearing the first soft notes of my favorite song sends me back to before we were married, sitting on his bed listening to him sing to himself. I asked him what song - repeat those words, they are so wrapped into his fingers and his hair; they will tell me his secrets. Years later singing that same song to calm a child and losing myself in it.

I want to describe the way he walked our first child in his arms for hours the first night we were home. I want to talk about how small she looked in the crook of his elbow, how I watched a child not three days outside of my own body settle finally as if she'd always known him.

I want to talk about how my whole heart lay there with him, swaying back and forth in the darkness.

What ends the moment I realize that he will never come back? I sit in the hallway of my empty house in the silence; I want to hear the sound of my children laughing with him, or breathing deeply in sleep, but all I hear is my own heart beating and I can't escape it.

I rearrange. I paint over the colors we chose, and track earth inside the kitchen without caring. I tear down what we have built. I sit in the evening and light a candle. I let us burn down until that last light goes out.

Tomorrow I will step out of my house and it will be like the first time.

The Old Man and The Sea

I tried to call your son to sing happy birthday to his daughter, but you passed right at that moment and I had to go through with it alone. 

This is not a complaint. Just that when you passed, you left a void where you once were. Who will sing happy birthday and let my daughters play with his beard now? 

The world lost an adventurer, but most won’t know that. They won’t know that you reinvented yourself multiple times over your lifetime. 

And I think you were ok with that. 

I am thinking about you now as I light a candle and wait for peace to descend on the house at bedtime. I will read The Old Man and The Sea. You have captured your fish and are standing on the shore now with nothing, but we are the boy and we know that you conquered and loved and we’re are here waiting to see you in another life. 

Rest.

Creating Rhythm and Mindfulness in Everyday Things

I've been thinking a lot about the idea of ritual. Children thrive on routine, but that word never conveys what a routine actually accomplishes. Routine suggests control, no real reason or known purpose.

Instead I've focused on the idea of rhythm. Rhythm means that my children and I can mark the passage of time in ways that help us to appreciate how the little pieces of our lives add up to the big mystery. 

Rhythm is a better word for us. We have natural rhythms that help my girls find their way in a confusing life. Since they are new to this, I want to give them something that helps them find meaning in the whys of every day.

In the stillness of winter, we are dreaming of spring.

Honestly, I'm not great at this.  I've been trained to watch the clock and to measure my own accomplishments by what it says. I have a hard time being patient enough to let rhythm in.

Last night my 4 year old snuck into the living room where I was working. The concept of work is strange to her. She can't read yet, so she stares at my documents until her eyes lose focus. For her, my real work is the business of explanation and the business of comfort.

We'd been playing the Big Bad Wolf game earlier and for anyone with experience with children, games are never just games. In the stillness of bedtime, she'd spooked herself thinking about wolves.

So I did what eases my own fear. I talked about big things. I talked about the new moon,  and what gives the moon its light. We walked outside and watched our frosty breath as we tried to find the moon. It wasn't in a good place to see from our back yard, so we watched the stars instead. She loves the three stars in Ursa Major's tail, and so we talked about them. She calls them the three bears. 

Stars are above our heads and below our feet and we can sleep dreaming of them.