It’s a  bonus of writing about, well, BEING a divorced mom and mostly I’ve really enjoyed getting to know these amazing women and celebrating in their accomplishments post marriage.  But one of the drawbacks has been that thing that all women deal with… competition. Only with most of the women I know, it’s not so much of a competition as it is me feeling on occasion that there was a “how to handle divorce” memo that never made its way to me.  See, the majority of the women I know who got divorced around the same time as me, are in serious relationships.

Some have already remarried.

Some are getting engaged.

Some are just happily tied to another person without any need for rings of any kind.

Me? I am still just me.

Sure, I’ve been out on dates.  Sure, I’ve spent a few weeks or months here or there alongside a guy or two (not at the same time), but no one has really set up shop in my life or my heart.  No one has made it impossible for me to say “no thank you” and move along.  And I’ll admit, I went through a hell storm process of thinking I needed that to establish that I was desirable post-divorce, that I was still attractive and still someone that men would even want to date.  I went through the online dating thing (gag… sorry… just NOT for me) and the look at every man’s ring finger thing, and even the “why don’ t my friends set me up” thing … but those all passed.  And now I find myself in an unfamiliar yet oh so happy place of being, just… well… comfortable. I am comfortable with being single.

I am comfortably single.

I have a routine that works for J and I.  I have a job that works for J and I.  I have a life that just flat out works for J and I.

And it’s so comfortable that I balk at disrupting it.  It’s so comfortable that I wonder if there’s ever going to be anyone who makes me WANT to shake things up… someone who would make me agree to shell out the money for a babysitter and spend hours away from the life I’ve grown accustomed to.

Don’t get me wrong, it would be nice, I think, in some ways.  I would love for someone to fit seamlessly into this life we’ve created, causing no ripples or waves or currents of destruction. But I’m just not so sure it’s possible. I worry that a third person would stand out like a sore thumb, the awkward angled addition that isn’t really all that necessary to the little family I love… the little family of me and J.

I am just so comfortable with being alone with my family.

I am comfortable with my life as it stands, as it ticks by, as it whirls and swirls around me in fits of little boy shoes and day after day of Popsicles and Lunchables on the front porch. I’m comfortable with who I am, with where I am, and even, on most days with what I look like.  I am just… comfortable.

I think it’ll take someone pretty amazing to get me out of this comfort zone and honestly? I’m not sure he exists.

My kid has a tender heart.  I feel the need to say that now, because it’s apt to change as he gets older and I want it documented that yes, in fact, he has a tender heart.  When we’re playing a game or being silly it never really matters which role I’m playing but when it goes just the slightest bit too far… when he says a word he shouldn’t say, or throws something that shouldn’t be thrown, or his new favorite … spitting in someone’s face… well, then I have to be the parent.  And it destroys him every time.

I swear he thinks I’m just some giant best friend who also just so happens to feed and clothe him.  Yes he calls me “mom” but the title doesn’t ring true to him. “Mom” is just my name.  It’s just what he calls me; no different than Sally or Jane or Frances.  So when his giant best friend puts on her angry face and says “no,” it’s just as devastating as being bullied by a classmate.  His face crumples, his heart visibly breaks, and he takes off to the farthest corner of the farthest room where he falls to the ground and sobs.

To say that it is hard on both of us is, well, obviously an understatement.

But I don’t really know how else to handle this stage. I don’t want to cut off all play and I can’t cut off all punishment.  But watching him try to mend his heart after a serious “no” from me is heart breaking. I know that I have to be firm and set boundaries but I absolutely hate seeing him like that and knowing it was me who put him there.  Last night, I had to pick him up off the floor and cradle him in my arms until he stopped crying.  I told him that “no” doesn’t mean I don’t love him and that he can’t do anything that would make me stop loving him.  I talked and talked and tried to explain but it never seems like enough.  I want him to know, without a doubt, that I love him… no matter what and come what may.

I know he believes me when I’m fun.

I hope he believes me when I’m firm.

I just can’t watch.

At first, I thought it was disrespectful to the grieving parents and communities.  At first I thought I should force myself to spend at least an hour letting the ticker tape coverage seep into my brain like a cancer of fear, invading my body and mind and leaving me shattered and weak for someone’s loss.   And then I let it go.  I don’t pretend it didn’t happen or that it can’t happen to anyone at any time.  I don’t pretend it doesn’t hurt or ache or terrify me.  I just have to let it go.

See, when I was a kid, I was terrified of dying.  I couldn’t embrace the truth that everyone dies, that everything ends.  The thought of eternity made my stomach ill and I couldn’t process it.  So I pretended it wasn’t true and that it didn’t happen. And then, at eighteen, it happened.  And I learned the truth.

Everyone dies.

But the true fear in life, the true horror of the world we live in isn’t that we die.  It isn’t that we cease to exist and turn to dust.  The true and heart-wrenching sadness is that it happens to the people we love.

I’m no longer afraid of dying.  I haven’t been for quite some time.  I don’t worry about what comes next or who comes next or why it all has to happen.  I embrace my life for what it is: transient and temporary, passing quicker than I can even fathom.  But death is still something I fear, just not the dying.  I fear death not because it happens to me, but because it happens to everyone.  Even my parents.  Even my siblings.  Even my child.

So when tragedies happen, like in Oklahoma and Connecticut, they sound the death knell in my head that rings a pulsating reminder that it happens everyday to someone.  Everyday, a mother wakes up with empty arms.  Every day, a father accidentally drives to daycare to pick up a child who isn’t there,  not any longer.  Every minute a heart breaks and aches and longs for a person who is just no longer there.

I don’t have to see it to remember it.  I don’t have to sit and cry for these people to remember their truth.  Instead, I choose to honor their truth by embracing my own: by loving the child that is still mine to love, by calling the parents who are still mine to call, by joking with the brothers and sisters and friends who are still a voice on the other end of the phone.  Because death comes for us all, without warning, without sense, without any rhyme or reason. It’s inescapable.  It’s without control or consistency and it arrives without preparation and often without fanfare.  Death is just there.  The period at the end of life’s sentence.

And if tomorrow, death comes for me or more achingly for those I love, I don’t want today to pass without basking in the sunlit happiness that is my life now… my life before death. So I keep the television off.  I keep the news from my mind.  Not because it’s not important or devastating, but because it is: Death is too important to ignore.

But you know what? So is life.

And I choose life while it’s still my choice to make.

Inexplicably, one evening in late August, I found my non-mom material self in a light blue hospital gown staring into two dark blue eyes that looked at me as though every part of him needed me to hold him close and tell him it would be okay… so I did.  Even as I sobbed the tired cries of a new mother.  Even as I wondered how on Earth I could hear one more scream or feel one more agonizing pull of milk.  I held him close and told him it would be okay, even as I wondered if it ever would be, even as I wondered, still, if this was “my scene.”  I held him close when there was poop drying under my fingernails, when everything smelled like piss and powder, when nothing made sense except the rhythmic bounce of my legs against the floor, rocking him as I sobbed that I couldn’t rock him anymore. Rocking as I sobbed that maybe, just maybe, I was right.

Maybe I wasn’t mom material.

Every pain staking minute of the first few weeks and months of his life was like a constant pin-pricking reminder that I had no earthly idea what I was doing, even though this little person, this little being, seemed to think that I did… seemed to want me to do whatever wrong things I was doing. Slowly, I started to become more comfortable with my wrong decisions.  Slowly, I stopped reading what I was supposed to do and just did what I needed to do.  Slowly, I started to base my thoughts and decisions, my actions and reactions on the ever-growing love I felt for this tiny son of mine.  I was doing it all wrong.  We were doing it all wrong.  But we were in it together and dammit, there was so. much. love. Even with the hate and sadness and anger.  Even with the sleep deprivation and the confusion and the horror.  Even with all of my doubt, the part of me that tied me to my son grew stronger and stronger, binding me to him with a love I couldn’t hope to give voice to.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I became a mother.

Yesterday, my imperfectly mothered child “graduated” from preschool. He stood on the stage with his white cap and gown askew and stuck his tongue out at me. Though the “perfect mom material” in my head said to give him a stern look and make him stop, the mother I am stuck my tongue back out at him and we both laughed.  Afterwards, we took silly pictures and tried to share a graduation cap made out of fondant which was totally disastrous both in fact and in pictures.  And then his grandparents whisked him away for the weekend and I went home to my too-quiet house.

I opened a beer and sank onto the sofa to watch cheesy television shows, and took a good look around my consummately messy house.  I scanned the rows of shelves lined with toys and picture books and the hand prints on the glass doors.  I noticed the jumble and tumble of my every day world from the stillness of this unfamiliar vantage point and I realized, not for the first time, that of all the things I am and am not, and of all the things I am capable of being…  the one thing I will forever be, the one thing he alone has forever made me…

Is a mother.

Perfectly disastrous, perfectly confused and concerned and conflicted. Always perfectly unable to be, well,  perfect or proper or pristine, still so scared I’m doing it all wrong. But the love… oh, the love.  This mind-blowing, soul-twisting, heart-aching love is what makes us parents…. it’s what makes us perfectly parents… not in spite of, but because of all our imperfections.

I spent the weekend in the great outdoors, planting seeds and watering the garden I’m trying desperately not to kill.  We ate popsicles and rode bikes and walked around the neighborhood.  We picked strawberries and were chased by chickens at a local farm.  We were outside all. weekend. long.

And as my reward, I am now battling the nastiest bout of crap in my lungs that I’ve had in a long time.  You know the kind, right? When you breathe heavy and every cough needs to be near a trashcan or toilet because you might. just. gag. on the grossness inside you.  I hate chest colds with a fiery passion because they not only keep me from sleeping, and breathing and feeling like a normal person… they also keep me from running. Or at least from running without feeling like I’m just about to die.

So last night I popped yet another Mucinex and a sleeping pill and readied myself for hopefully the first good night of sleep all week.  J and I were in bed by 7:30 and both asleep well before 9.  Enter the dogs.

At 12:30, Riley started whimpering and woke me up.  For a good thirty minutes I laid in bed and called her foul and slightly unnecessary names.  At 1:00, I realized she wasn’t shutting up so I climbed out of bed to let her outside only to discover that AJ was pooping on the floor.  Since he’s old and can’t really tell when he’s pooping, this means a scavenger hunt for all the poop.  I let them both outside and turned on all the lights to find all the poop then scrubbed and cleaned and Lysoled until I was, you guessed it, wide awake.  And unable to breathe from all the poop searching.  I ended up making a cup of tea and catching up on this week’s Nashville episode in between trips to sit in an over-steamed bathroom to clear my chest. (Side bar: Huh? What? Why do I bother watching that show and yet hooked. I’m embarrassed by and for myself.)

I’m never really good at being sick, but this is my kid-free weekend and I have plans. Big plans.  Plans which include the Avett Brothers.  You know… outside.  In the pollen.  IT’S A VICIOUS CYCLE.

So the moral of this story is… um… happy freaking spring. Or stay inside. Or something along the lines of:

Need. More. Coffee.

That’s what the T-shirt said, when I pulled it out of the packing envelope; the one sent to me by my sweet friend in Tennessee.  The note enclosed said it was for completing my first half marathon and there were running shoes just below the quote.  I put it on immediately.

I did run a half a marathon in February.  I do lace up my shoes and pound out miles on the treadmill and around my neighborhood and I am a stronger runner than I ever thought I’d be.  My legs are stronger, my arms… stronger, my lungs and heart and mind are stronger because of the miles I have placed on my tennis shoes.

But when I snapped a picture of myself in my new t-shirt, it was not the strength of my body that put the smile on my face.  It was not the muscles in my legs or arms, or the physical strength of any part of me…

Instead, it is a smile of remembering how far I’ve come; not how literally strong my heart is… but how figuratively strong my HEART is.  It is a smile of accomplishment, realizing that I am whole again and ready to love and be loved again.  It is a smile of realization that I am strong enough to be vulnerable, strong enough to be alone, strong enough to be 100% me … always and only.

I am stronger than I ever thought I could be… on and off the treadmill, on and off the road, in and out of tennis shoes.

I am strong.  And more importantly… I am happy.

See, when you’re newly separated or newly divorced or hell, newly broken… everythinghurts.  For a long time.  Everything hurts because you can’t let yourself focus on the part, the piece, the broken… because to focus on it would hurt too much.  Like with any injury.  The day after my finger was stitched up, another doctor unwrapped it to do x-rays and I remember staring at it with a complete abstract interest.  It didn’t seem like it should be a part of me.  It didn’t seem like it was mine.  It was foreign and strange and looking at it closely seemed so bizarre that I only cried about it in a global sense of “ouch”… thinking about the actual disaster in front of me was too much to take in.  That’s how those first few holidays felt without my husband.  I cried about silly things, like not getting a present I didn’t already know about or not having someone to tell me dinner tasted good… I couldn’t cry about how broken I was… that was too much.

It’s been two years now since I last lived in the same house as my ex-husband and to say that everything is different, to say that everything is better seems to minimize just how different and better everything is.  People told me it takes time.  People told me to wait and see.  People said all the things that were true and right and obvious but what they said always just felt wrong.  I couldn’t imagine a time when I wouldn’t hurt because the hurt was so big. I couldn’t imagine a time that I’d draw in breaths without wondering if they’d bring tears on the exhale.  I couldn’t imagine healing.

But the healing comes.

After a brutal breaking of your soul, the healing comes.

First it’s awful and then it’s worse.  Then when it stops hurting to breathe, it’s numb again and then it’s oh so hypersensitive that the barest brush against your wound breaks you all over again… checking “divorced” on a health form, writing your mother as your emergency contact, struggling to zip a dress or fasten a bracelet by yourself.  Just when the numb becomes familiar, the feelings creep back in and they’re just all wrong. You laugh when you shouldn’t, cry over things that shouldn’t bring tears, get irrationally angry over something small and insignificant.  It’s like you’re waking up from a dream or a nightmare or at least a long and drawn out sleep,  and you can’t quite figure out where you are or who you’re supposed to be.

But those feelings? They sort themselves. Slowly.  You help them along through your passion for something new… painting, planting, running.  You become someone new. And then one day you wake up and the thought of your ex doesn’t make you want to drive nails into someone’s back.  One day you can have a conversation with him or her and you don’t wonder what they’re thinking about how you look or what you’re wearing.  One day you realize that not only are you not sad or angry… you’re not in love with that person any longer.  One day you throw your arms out wide and spin around in the sun with the son you always wanted and you don’t believe or think or feel that anything is missing.

One day, you are healed.  You are whole and strong and better than you were.  But there are oh so many days before that day, that it feels like it will never come.

Then it does.

And on that day, you sit and think back on how many steps you’ve taken, on how many miles you’ve run, how many races you’ve finished with your arms high and your soul higher…  since that day when you sat on the floor of an empty bedroom and wondered how you’d ever walk again.

And you realize that for some, for you,  it took the breaking to make you whole.

At the next light, the car beside me held a thirty-something African-American woman, sharply dressed in a perfectly clean BMW.  She was on her cell phone, seemingly ordering someone to do or not to do something, judging by the movement of her mouth and the unhappy shake of her head.  Behind me, the Caucasian couple kept arguing; beside me, the African American woman kept talking on her phone.  And then from ahead of me, a car turned left with the arrow.  In it was a young girl, wearing a tiara with a car full of her friends laughing and dancing.  The back window spelled out “SENIORS” and I had to smile, for maybe the first time all morning.

So many times I worry what people will think if they look into their rear view mirror and see this thirty-something Caucasian woman bobbing her head and singing her heart out.  So many times I worry that I’ll be judged by the people around me, judged with their stares and glares and frowns.  But this morning, I looked at the people around me and I decided that, if given the choice, I don’t want to be the perfect professional or the bickering couple.  If given the choice, I want to always be the girl in the tiara, dancing to unseen music, happily oblivious to the people around me.

Without thinking twice, I flipped on my iPhone and started to sing along, started to dance along with my uncoordinated and strange arm dances.  I’m sure the woman beside me was amused, in the way that you’re amused by a senile old man doing the twist to Reggae music.  I’m sure the couple behind me were appalled. And you know what? I didn’t care. Because when people see me in their rear view mirror, they may shake their heads and they may roll their eyes, and yeah… they may judge me.  But they’ll also maybe, just maybe, smile.  

And if I’m only sharing a small slice of my life with these random people on the road, I want it to be the part that makes them smile.

There are over a billion things that other people succeed at that I struggle with every day… cartwheels, patience, losing weight, having great hair, icing a cake perfectly, FONDANT, painting, basketball, photography, talking when I’m nervous…  Tons and tons of things that I’m just not all that great at.  And when I come across people who are good at those things, I cling to them like they are life rafts and I’m drowning in this vast sea of all that I can’t do.

At first, I thought I was clinging to them simply because they are better: better people, better moms, better attorneys, better Christians… better somethings or someones that I should be or could be if I just tried hard enough to be, well, them.

I worried that I was trying too hard to be what I’m not,  to bask in my own failures by way of surrounding myself with others’ success. I worried that I was looking down on myself for what I am not, looking down on the person I really am… un-athletic, un-coordinated, overly wordy,  with flippy strange hair and the penchant for melancholy.  I worried that these friends of mine would one day look around and realize that they had surrounded themselves with, well… me…. someone less than, someone lesser than… someone unworthy of their friendship.

And then I realized that my friend who does Ironman competitions inspired me to run.  My friend with the patience of Job inspires me to breathe a bit slower, to cherish things a bit more.  My friends with a sense of humor that makes me snort milk out of my nose inspire me to see the humor in even the little things… even when I don’t want to.  My friends with big hearts inspire me to give more, my friends with the gift of photography inspire me to take more snapshots, my friends who string words together like poetic pearls inspire me to write more and write better. My co-workers who show me up on the regular with their minds and their ability to process and analyze the law make me a stronger lawyer.  My sister, with her organic garden and love of the Earth makes me more conscience of my actions and how they affect the world.

I spent a lot of time worrying that I was the least of my friends and that that fact made me somehow wrong with my selection of friends.  But how boring to be the best in your circle, right? My friends make me a better person.  And I hope, in some small ways I don’t even realize, I inspire them, too.  Because I think that’s what makes friendship, especially among women, so very important.  I’m not less than my friends.  I am more than “just me” because of my friends.

I’m still not a natural athlete.  I’m still not the skinniest or the smartest or the funniest person in any room and definitely not even in my circle of friends.  But I’ve learned that what matters isn’t that I’m the best amongst my friends… it’s that I am the least.  What matters is that I surround myself with people who make me a better person, not people who just make me feel better about my inadequacies.

So to my friends far and wide, even those of you who “live in my computer” and who haven’t yet had the distinct displeasure of meeting me in person and finding out all my intricate inadequacies, I say thank you.  Sincerely.  For making me strive each and every day to be a better me than I was the day before.

I’d say we we’re both asleep by around 8:00 last night, or at least I think we were.  Around 9:45, I woke up with a start to J calling me from the bathroom:

“MOM?!”

“yeah…” I was groggy and irritable and totally confused by whatever was happening.

“I POOPED!”

Those are two words you just can’t ignore, so I stumbled out of bed and to the bathroom to clean someone else’s bottom… just one of the glamorous parts of motherhood.  Once he was all cleaned up, we went back to bed.  After maybe a minute, J tapped me on the shoulder.

“WHAT.” I was probably a little crankier than I would have been if I weren’t, you know, sick and tired.

“Um… mommy? There’s something gross on my pillow.”

I sat up and shone my phone “light” in that direction and yeah. There was something gross on his pillow.  There, right on his pillow, was poop.

Poop.

On his pillow.

I jumped up and turned on the light to figure out where it came from.  Inexplicably, there was no poop anywhere else. None on his pants, none on his hands, none in his night time diaper.  There was no poop on the floor, none on his feet, none on the door knob.  And yet, unmistakeably, there was poop. On his pillow. I can’t explain it.  He couldn’t explain it.  THERE WAS NO PLAUSIBLE EXPLANATION.

I thought I’d seen it all.  I’ve survived the magical mystery poops of infanthood, the accidental poops of potty training and the bottom wipes of potty trained.  I’ve cleaned poop from floors, from doors, from the sides of a potty.  I’ve had poop under my fingernails, for gods sake.  But I had never, ever, until last night, seen poop on a pillow with no plausible source.

I guess… happy mother’s day?