Christmas Eve

I'm sitting in my apartment with my hat and coat and scarf still on from when I got home from work an hour and a half ago, just barely realized that I should turn the heat on, so I turned it on. It's slowly getting warm.

I had a good day at work. It was just me and production manager for most of it, and that went well. Production manager likes me a lot, he *trusts* me a lot, apparently. He knows I am about to take a lot of time off work and seems unphased by that. He asked me to tell him again what day I'd be back, I told him and was worried that he'd be upset when he realized how long it really was, but he just made kind of a thoughtful face and said, "you're coming back, right?" I laughed and said yes. He looked relieved and said, "good." He told me the other day that he's been very impressed by me and really hopes I intend to stay on. I do.

I'm by myself right now, listening to the dishwasher and feeling so good about everything I keep smiling and I want to remember this. This should be sad, spending Christmas eve alone but it's not sad at all, I'm just excited about things that are going to be happening in a few days, to see my family and friends and spend some time with my kids without feeling the pressure of having to take anyone anywhere or do anything specific.

A ton of people in Salt Lake want me to hang out with them. I have a feeling I'm not going to be able to see everyone, which is pretty typical I guess. I wish I could, though. I will try.

I have lots of presents to wrap and I should be doing it.

I'm gonna be helping Jeff move up here in about a week, and then a hustle, we're leaving to go on vacation right after that. It should be interesting to leave the country. I never thought I would leave this continent for any reason ever. I don't even speak German. I wonder how we'll do. My friend lives just outside of Austria, so that's why I opted to go there, and then on to Germany for a few days. I have no idea what that's going to be like, any of it, but I am very very excited about it. I look forward to just kind of muddling through the whole thing and feeling weird to be in a different country.

I think I have everything ready to go. I hope I don't find out otherwise in the coming days, or I'll probably freak out a little. Everything is booked and reserved. I have my passport and one of those travel wallets and all that sort of thing. A whole bunch of cash in Euros. Blah blah. I think I remembered everything. I hope so.

My ex is mad at me for taking this trip. Well, he keeps saying he hopes I have a good time, but he says it slightly begrudgingly. I hope he is able to take a good big trip sometime soon, but he doesn't think he will be able to. I am sure that will change. I don't know how to explain to him that things are never static. You can't just say, "This is my future." You just don't know. You'll never know. Things always change, they always do, usually when you don't expect it at all. People die, people get divorced, people get born, people move away and lose their jobs, things happen that you never could have seen coming. That's the only thing you can be sure of, change. Sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's good, usually it's a bit of both. You just have to capitalize on the good and ride out the bad, you just do it.

I have to go to work in about two minutes

Oh, what to write about today? I have to be the "receptionist" at work all next week, which is a little scary. I also have to do all the billing/invoicing stuff. That means I get to sit down, and not work my hands as hard as when I do the production type stuff.

But I don't mind the production type stuff. In a weird way, I enjoy it. Many years ago I used to feel like I was too "smart" to be doing that. But I don't feel that way at all anymore, because honestly it takes a certain kind of brains to do this crap. I mean just that you have to be able to stay organized without losing your mind, and I can do that. I am very good at it, in fact, which is weird, because I'm a disorganized mess in other arenas. Not at my job, though. At my job I know exactly when I have to push that button to optimize my time to the exact fullest, to keep my productivity at a premium, and I know exactly where to skew the stacks and exactly where to insert the color prints and exactly how to program the slipsheets and the double-sided so that everything runs as smoothly as possible and everything is jogged and collated perfectly and the client is never angry about anything ever.

The other thing I like about doing production is that my hands and brain come to a certain agreement with one another to where I can allow my creative mind to wander quite a bit while I am unwrapping reams of paper and my fingers are flying as I am shuffling binder clips and staples about on the copy machine or scanner or binder or folder, and I can think about stories that I want to write, or drawings that I want to do. This is what I used to do, back in the day, anyhow. These days unfortunately I mostly think about how mad I am at certain people, and why I am mad, and then berate myself for still being mad when really I need to just let it all go.

So maybe I should write a story about how mad I am. A story, or a blog? I don't know, maybe that's what I'll think about next time I am doing production stuff.

Not today, though. Today it's going to be all phones and invoicing, sitting in a proper chair in front of a proper computer like a proper office worker type. I suppose most people who work in cubicles would wonder why I am feeling so pleased that I "get" to do this, but believe me, when you've worked virtually nothing but production your entire adult life, you get to see data entry as a massive step above what you've been doing; you sit down in front of a monitor and feel a glass ceiling shattering beneath your feet.

I like the sound it makes, the breaking glass, though I believe I would be perfectly happy doing production until I am physically unable to do it anymore. Because I'm good at it, and I like it.

baby weight

Ruth is sleeping on me right now. The warm weight of a sleeping child is so distinctively identifiable. She has been a handful all day. I am reluctant to go put her in her bed. In some ways I can't wait for her to grow up, to at least get to the point where she can put on her own clothes and make her own sandwich, which makes me sad when I remember her as a baby, and how much I wished she could somehow stay that tiny forever.

Divorce article in redbook

Yeah, so this article seems to sum up what I keep trying to say over and over, that even though divorce is stressful, there are so many good things about it. I feel like I must be a weirdo for being so happy even right after the thing cracked up, but yeah, this article puts in in better terms than I have.

Yeah, because yesterday I was driving around running errands, thinking about how so many aspects of my life had become needlessly stressful just because I was afraid of how the old man was going to react to various things that had happened. If I ever did something stupid like take the wrong freeway exit and wind up halfway to Seattle, I could never tell him about it, because he would yell at me for being a moron, and I hated that so, so much. So I would write a blog about it instead, and then he would yell at me for writing blogs, because he thought it was dopey to post my innermost thoughts where everyone in the world could see them, even though he never read my blogs. Well, the only ones he ever read always seemed to be the very ones that would make him the most mad at me.

Like, remember the cargo carrier blog? This one?

Yeah, when that happened, it was stressful, but the absolute WORST thing about it was my intense fear that my husband was going to SCREAM at me about it when I explained to him what happened. And weirdly, he didn't. He didn't yell at me about it at all, (aside from being pissy that the hood was scratched,) which left me kind of confused, I remember, because it was exactly the kind of thing that he would normally yell at me for. Instead, he shared with me all these funny stories about when he was a delivery-truck driver and had caused various mishaps. I was so relieved! I wrote a blog about his hilarious delivery-truck driver misadventures. Damn, I was so, so happy that he didn't seem to be mad about it!

About a month later, we had an absolutely HORRIFIC blowout because he found out about the delivery-truck driver blog and was out of his mind with rage that I'd written about him. That fight led to about a hundred other fights that were semi-related. I deleted the blog and felt very, very bad. I remember I screamed at him that my blogs had become a very shoddy stand-in for having friends that I could actually trust to talk to, and I had no friends anymore because he HATED all my friends and had caused such intense complications in my friendships that I had just given them all up. So it was either write blogs, or hang out with people that he hated. He didn't seem to know what to do with that revelation.

We continued to fight horribly, right in front of our children, almost nonstop for what seemed like an eternity. It wasn't really an eternity though. But I basically sunk to about the lowest low I've ever experienced in my life. I felt completely and utterly like I had no control over my life whatsoever, I felt trapped in a horrible situation, I saw no way out and I genuinely wanted to kill myself. I thought about it all the time, thought about how I would do it, and then I would think about the effect on my children and knew I couldn't do that, knew I was just doomed to this terrible purgatory forever, and I wished I would get cancer. I wished it harder than I'd ever wished anything in my life. I would think all the time about how GREAT it would be to be diagnosed with terminal cancer, because then I could just die a "hero" instead of being some cowardly mother who abandoned her children by jumping off a building or blowing her brains out or whatever. These were not new thoughts, by the way, they just became much more abundant right after that fight.

We split up approximately three weeks after that fight. Those were, in some ways, the longest three weeks of my life, though now they seem like they went by in a matter of hours. I was in a daze throughout most of it.

But once it was declared over, the sense of liberation I felt was so, so so potent. Very much as described in the article above, stuff like, "Whoah, I can go for bike ride whenever I want now. And yeah, the kids aren't with me all the time, and I have to live in a crap apartment and have to work some crap job, but oh, that bike ride...that bike ride, I had no idea how much I would miss a thing like a simple bike ride." Hence, I have taken it upon myself now to live every bike ride to its absolute apex of bike-riding satisfaction, to LOVE that bike ride, to remember exactly how it felt when I badly wanted to take a bike ride and when I would say, "do you mind if I go for a bike ride later?" and would basically be told "no" after some big argument, because when Ruth was a baby T could not deal with having both kids by himself at the same time, and how much I deeply resented that I could not just go on a freeeking bike ride--and then later, when I COULD go on a bike ride, that I essentially had a deadline as to when I had to be home, and if I was gone too long the cell phone would inevitably ring with an angry man on the other end demanding to know what was taking me so long.

That if I wanted to go out and see some band play, which happened on average of once per year, I would be told first that I could not go alone, which was for my own safety, I could not go with one of my male friends because that was inappropriate, so I had to find some girl to go with, and then I was always told, "If you're not home at exactly one in the morning, I'm gonna assume you've been raped and murdered and I'm gonna call the police."

Or that something like going to dinner with a friend would take weeks of preparation to arrange, and half the time it wouldn't pan out because of some ridiculous complication.

And that I was told at one point that if I wanted the fighting to stop, that I had to call one of my best oldest friends and tell him "we're not friends anymore, I can never see or speak to you ever again." And I did it. I actually did this thing. Which was one of the most painful things I've ever done in my life, and I feel so much shame for having done it. My friend has since forgiven me, but he didn't have to. It would have been entirely within his appropriate rights to not forgive me ever, and I am so, so glad that he did.

In some ways I think I was kinda brainwashed into accepting this stuff as "normal." I mean, maybe it's normal for some married couples, I don't know. But it's really not normal for me.

By the way, I don't think T is in any way a "bad" person, I know he didn't mean to be controlling or "mean" to me. I think he is smart and way-above-average funny and interesting and all sorts of other things that compelled me to marry him in the first place, but I think things just got crappy with us to the point that we dug our heels into our particular philosophies and acted very, very stupid with each other. We did counseling for a long time, and we tried, we tried to stop being stupid, but something about the combination of our personalities just wouldn't permit it, I don't know why.

I hope he is experiencing the same kind of joy at his newfound freedom that I have been experiencing. I am pretty sure that he is, and I am very glad for it. I want him to be himself finally, just like I want to be myself. I have no doubt that I was suppressing him just as much as he was suppressing me.

falling into place

Have to leave for work in a minute.

I kind of love my new job. It's not exactly what one thinks of as a "career," but that doesn't bother me too much right now. I think I could actually do this for the rest of my life, or something similar, and be perfectly okay with that.

I realize now--all I ever wanted to be when I grew up was an artist or a writer. And I'm both of those things now. My "job" is not what I "became" when I grew up. That's just the way I pay the bills. If you can find a way to pay your bills that doesn't make you want to jump off a building, and then be the thing you wanted to be, then you're probably doing all right.

I don't know how long I will love my job, there are several problems associated with it, but for the most part I am very happy there in comparison with my last job, which was just really terrible in retrospect. I don't make a lot of money, though I do a little better than I did at the old place, but the benefits are good, the work environment is tolerable. I like my co-workers in a different way than I liked my old co-workers, which isn't better, but it's good. The last place seemed fine at the time, but it turns out, it really really wasn't.

Funny thing, hindsight.

I have gained quite a bit of perspective in regards to my marriage and just exactly how miserable I was, how many excuses I made, how much in denial I was about the whole thing and sometimes it makes me feel sad and bitter, but I am working through that. I think one of the greatest deterrents to my getting divorced had nothing to do with the marriage itself, or even the kids--it was the stigma of being twice-divorced that I didn't think I could live with. That seems silly now.

Well, that's not entirely true. I think it was more the kids than anything. But now that it's done, I do really and truly believe that the kids are going to be SO MUCH better off that they don't have to watch us fight anymore. I took some class that the courts make you take when you get divorced with kids, and it was full of all sorts of eye-opening proclamations in regards to that, as far as just how much it screws your kids up when you fight in front of them, and a few things were said that I have to agree with so wholeheartedly--the gist being that a good divorce is exponentially better for children than a bad marriage, and I have to say--I think this is shaping up to be a good divorce. I think my kids are going to be okay.

Also, my kids now get to know me for who I really am, instead of the person that my ex wanted me to be. I can't begin to express how important I feel that is, and how grateful I am that I'm now in a position where I can kind of "rediscover" myself. I always felt like I kinda "found myself" around 1998, I had a big awesome renaissance year in 98 and came to all these heavy realizations about myself and the world, I was happy for the first time I could ever remember--but then somehow I lost sight of all that stuff. I don't blame my ex, I blame myself for succumbing to his overbearing worldviews, stuff that in truth, I don't believe in at all. I don't condemn him for wanting to lead his life that way, but I don't think any of it is conducive to happiness. I'm glad, though, that our daughters will get the balance of both of our philosophies, and I hope it helps them to decide what kind of people they want to be.

Everything feels like it's working out right now, the way it's supposed to. I have a lot of ideas about the way I want to lead my life, some of them might be sort of unconventional, or make me seem irresponsible, but I don't care anymore if others don't agree with me. I don't care if my ex doesn't agree with me. I feel excited about the rest of my life.

I've never experienced happiness like this before, I didn't even know it was possible.

I feel very good today.

Busy month!

Right now, Ruth is crying because I won't let her cut my hair. She keeps saying, "Why?? Why?? I WANNA cut your hair!"

I feel that I'm a pretty lenient parent, but I mean, you gotta draw the line somewhere.

Meanwhile. I am going to be making chocolate centers today. My mother makes hand-dipped chocolates every year, and somewhere along the way I picked up this tradition, though I usually make different ones than she makes--also, she makes like, seriously two dozen varieties every year and I make like, five if I'm lucky. I was gonna shoot for six this year, but I'm thinking five is plenty.

Last year I didn't do them at all. Things were just way too...uh, on-the-brink-of-divorce-ish. Also, it always really super annoyed T when I did chocolates because it made such a tremendous mess. In general, my creative pursuits used to kind of mildly-to-severely infuriate him because of the constant mess and disorganization. This is why you should live with someone for like three years before you marry him, I guess. We didn't live together long enough for us to both discover that we HATE the way the other deals with his or her personal space. I mean, not that we would have gotten divorced over just THAT, I don't think, but it certainly didn't help.

So, you know, I guess it's nice to have all THAT over and done with so I can get on with important things like chocolate making, and chair-reupholstering and quilting and art-making without someone constantly hounding me about finishing it up and cleaning it up and etcetera.

Okay but so anyway. Chocolate making. I'm gonna start making the jelly centers for these jelly ones today, and possibly start doing the cherry cordial centers. I am trying a new recipe for cherry cordial fondant and I dunno how that's gonna go. I might do the mint truffle things today. I did the marzipan and the fudge yesterday. The fudge recipe I have is both the easiest and the most delicious fudge in the effin' world. The marzipan this year turned out more delicious than ever, but might be too soft. We'll see, after it's been refrigerated, how it goes.

Time-consuming, especially with a full time job and children and christmas shopping and aggressive cleaning that I need to be doing this month. But I like staying busy. Yes, I like it very much. I have a lot of idle time to make up for, after all the laying around and weeping and pining and feeling-sorry-for-myself I did this summer.

staying occupied

I am very much in the phase of writing blogs, second-guessing them and then deleting them. There is a lot I want to say, but I don't know why I sometimes feel compelled to announce it to the world this way. Just a weird quirk of people who like to blog; I guess I'm just glad I'm not the only one, though bloggers seem to be in much shorter supply nowadays, thanks I think in part to the dissolution of myspace's popularity, and the rise of those little sound-bite status updates on facebook, causing blogger types to rethink their former prolific tendencies and lean toward brevity.

Today I am reupholstering a chair. I expect it is going to look fantastic when I am done. I am also making turkey carcass soup; I had my thanksgiving a week early for various reasons. I am also making travel plans for a very expensive vacation I am going to take.

I feel guilty about that expensive vacation. I feel guilty about a lot of things, but that's working itself out slowly, the guilt.

I feel guilty to be in a position, now, where I have apparently fallen very hard in love with this one person, which is something I would like to just enjoy and revel in and shout from the rooftops, but I can't because the whole thing feels fraught with sadness and selfishness. If we were nineteen or seventeen or fifteen or eleven it would be different, and sometimes it makes me mad because we could have gotten together when we were nineteen or seventeen or fifteen or eleven, because that's how long we've known each other, except that we totally couldn't have because our life circumstances would not have permitted it, and they barely permit it now. It would have been terrible and ill-fated seeming anytime, so I guess better late than never, even though the complications we would have caused in the past seem laughable to what we've done now.

There are children now, and exes and custody arrangements and money problems and so it feels selfish, like we should never have done it, despite our "feelings," to preserve the illusion of pretend nuclear families that is really just a sack of shit anyway, I mean I've always thought so--there is such a weird, overbearing attitude among conservatives about how divorce or single parenthood screws kids up so much, and yet the most screwed-up people I know all seem to have come from two-parent families where the parents are still married. I mean, I don't believe, despite what some have suggested, that our relationship "broke up" either of our marriages, but it came so fast after the respective ends that I do know we could have gone back if we hadn't immediately decided to pursue this thing. We could have taken a step back and done some maintenance and crow-eating and decided to keep on with what we had been doing, but once he got in my line of sight there was virtually no going back for me, and it seems that I had the same effect on him.

So, excuses; I have them. But my biggest excuse just has to come from the way I feel now, which is a way that I haven't felt in years and years, and much of it is a way that I've never felt. Not so much the love thing, which is new, I confess, it is all new and very different than it's ever been before, and there is that, but there is so much more to it--it's a contentment that I've never had before, with my entire circumstance, with feeling like all these things that used to absolutely plague me in regards to my future and my status in life are all just entirely unimportant. I don't know what it is about him that's made me let go of so many of my old anxieties, but it has been so potent and so thorough that when I'm with him I feel--at peace with virtually everything. I have never had that before, except maybe when I was on drugs.

I feel like I don't care if I work at a dead-end job for the rest of my life--I mean, why should I? If I can pay the bills and still afford to pursue art and writing and take a vacation every once in a while, why did I ever think I had to be defined by what I did for a living? I feel like I am genuinely letting go of any and all concerns relating to "What Others Think of Me" in this big way that feels like a tangible disengagement. I feel like I am not worried about money the way I used to worry about money, because it seems like everything is sort of half-destined to work out, and because I know I am a clever and resourceful person who is entirely capable of looking after herself, and I did not in any way feel like that when I was a stay-at-home mom. I feel like I have been wasting a lot of my talents and potential and I want to live up to all of those. I feel like I could go to grad school just because I want to go, and not worry about whether it will even lead to a potential career. I feel like I can just do what I want to do because it will make me happier and healthier rather than any quantifiable reason that I have to explain to anyone. When I'm with him, I feel all this without putting any name to it. I just feel like I'm living my life and my life is good.

On the flipside, when I'm not with him, I feel distracted and crabby and guilty. I feel like I'm short with my kids, that I'm distant with anyone who tries to talk to me, and I have to work very hard to keep myself occupied or I would literally just lie in bed and pine and feel bad all day, and then drink excessively once it seemed late enough to be kosher. So I know this is bad, but the truth is, that's kind of what I did all the years I was married. I had days when I would just have to stop and cry every couple of hours and I barely knew why. I just knew I didn't like the way I felt. I felt inadequate and anxious and like there was something around the corner that I needed, something else that I was "supposed" to be doing, but I didn't know what it was. I immersed myself in things like sewing or cooking or budgeting or writing along with copious amounts of wine in the evenings, in the hopes that it would define me but it didn't, just distracted me from some bigger picture that I was dissatisfied with.

I don't know why, but I feel like that is going to be in the past now. I feel like I am ready to live in the moment, and to enjoy what I am doing for its own sake without causing ill effects to the people who rely on me.

He left yesterday. I won't see him for over a month, and that makes me feel sad. Not "depressed," but sad. So I am reupholstering a chair today. Making turkey carcass soup, and travel plans. Later I will look for a storage unit. Make the day go by faster. It's working, it's already 11:30, and I've been up since 7. That's good, that's good. This is going to be a busy month, I need to make the most of my time.