I’ve had my current dishes since 2000, as they were a wedding present from Mike’s mom and dad. When we split up, he left me with most of them. I have a weird mishmash of dishes now - 2 single small plates, a couple of mugs, too many dinner plates, not enough salad plates. Every time I use them I’m reminded of when I got them, and how long I’ve had them. The irony of the missing pieces is not lost on me.
I already hate cooking in my kitchen because, well, it’s even uglier than the kitchen I had in my ramshackle Catherine street apartment in Ann Arbor. Half the appliances barely work and the counters, though scrubbed with bleach, magic erasers and any other implement I can get my hands on, never look clean. I call the oven a mini-bake oven because none of nice bakeware fits in it. Apparently everything was smaller in 1963.
Putting food prepared in an unhappy place onto unhappy dinnerware has made it even worse. I don’t know why I have such strong attachments to things - how a song I listened to a lot in 1989 can actually bring back the smell of the bay in April, or how the feel of a certain pair of bedsheets can make me recall the exact temperature of my old bedroom in my last house with Mike. The dishes have become one of those nagging reminders of what my life used to be like.
One of my deal sites had Ink Dish dinnerware on sale - and I’ve had my eye on these for quite some time (the pattern is called May). I just couldn’t justify the expense. Remind me of that when my kids talk me into yet another stuffed animal I’ll be making them donate in a year or two; I just don’t have the money anymore and when I do have it, I spend it on them. Or running shoes.
Soon, I’ll be eating off these. They are totally my taste - I bought them only for me, and I didn’t give any consideration to what anyone else thinks of them. They certainly wouldn’t go in my old Wyndham kitchen, and maybe someday soon I’ll have a new kitchen to match the feel of them.
Bon Appetit.
(yes, those are pigs roaming across the dinner plates)
Between end of school festivities and travel, I’ve been keeping busy with the girls and life in general. We spent Memorial Day weekend with friends at Kiptopeke State Park. Counting everyone there, we had 11 kids between everyone. This meant that each night, the kids fell into their beds exhausted by sun, water and running around like maniacs. This also meant the adults fell into their beds in a nearly comatose state.
(Arden rockin’ shell collecting)
Life is a little off right now; a variety of small things are adding up to throw me off balance. I hate being in limbo and right now there is a lot of limbo around me. I’m interviewing for jobs while worrying about how I’m going to take care of my businesses if I’m working full-time, not to mention being a mom and a runner and a girlfriend all at the same time. I’m good at time management and balancing acts, but even that seems daunting. My personal life is also in a kind of limbo for reasons I can’t write about yet. Many of these limbo-moments aren’t under my control and have nothing to do with me, but affect me in significant ways. It is difficult having a relationship following a divorce in and of itself; add schedules, kids, legal stuff and lack of free time and it becomes even more difficult. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with trying to work it out. I deal with it by not dealing with it and trying to enjoy my life day to day. It’s actually quite a relief to no longer worry about the future when I can manage to do so.
Summer is right around the corner. Unfortunately Richmond thinks it is summer already and today we are going to be in the high 90’s with heavy humidity. Running at the beach this weekend, laboring for breath, I remembered all too well how running in heat like this feels almost like hell. The silver lining? When cooler temperatures return, I am reminded that I’m not as bad a runner as I’d been convinced I was over the summer.
In the long gaps between blog posts, I’m doing things like laundry, running, chasing kids, and making mistakes. As someone said on Facebook today, “if you weren’t making mistakes, what would you blog about?” Good point.
First, and it’s okay, you don’t have to pay me for this advice, but . . . if you have recently struggled with marital issues, separated, or divorced: DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT watch Blue Valentine. Though I could appreciate the exceptional writing, great acting and interesting cinematography from afar, I wanted nothing to do with the actual plot. I felt almost like I had a hidden camera in someone’s house. Less glamorous than reality tv (I kept wanting to brush Michelle William’s hair) and incredibly less voyeuristic and inspirational than a biography, the movie was two hours of fingernail-pulling agony.
Running Boy’s 10 second review: “Why would I want to watch something I’m already living through?”
Another good point. While most divorcing couples I know lack the overly dramatic alcohol-fueled workplace rages and random flashbacks to abortion clinics, this one hit far too close to home. The closest thing I can liken it to is forcing a newly-minted divorcee to watch their wedding video, go through old photos, and read love letters from the early stages of their relationship while simultaneously filing their divorce papers, taking the kids to therapy and considering bankruptcy vs. suicide.
I spent some time after the movie was over feeling incredibly sorry for myself, my extended family, and mostly my kids. All the guilt and sorrow I thought had finally disappeared FOREVAH was suddenly back again; this guilt had obviously been eating a lot of carbs and processed foods because the sucker was heavier than the last time it was with me. Trying to buck off this monster, I wondered whether I would ever feel settled or safe again. I also wondered whether I would ever be able to trust my feelings for someone, or trust anyone to love me. In the dark, it seemed highly unlikely.
Thanks a lot, Blue Valentine.
Philip relayed the fabulous statistic to me from his therapist that it takes an average of 5 years to truly move on from a divorce. Great. Thanks, Phil. This might explain why, when I thought I was through the worst of it, I realized I’ve barely scratched the surface of the dark pool of damage that still roils beneath my skin. If I didn’t choose right before, and I hurt someone badly, what’s to keep me from making that same “mistake” again? It seems to me that divorce drives a few unpleasant points home. a.) nothing is forever, b.) maybe I’m not biologically engineered to be married, and c.) it’s possible I can never trust my judgment again. Just sayin’.
On top of my reservation at the Haven o’ Guilt and Doubt restaurant, I really messed up with Arden this week. My experience reminded me of a room decoration my ex sister-in-law had: a weird mirror her mother had given her. It said, “Mirror Mirror, on the Wall, I am my Mother, after all.”
It’s true. We are our mothers.
There are many things about my own mother that I wish I could emulate. She actually enjoyed cooking for my crabby, picky ass. She was a perky morning person. She liked hanging out with me, and thought I was funny. There was always some random goody in my lunch bag, sometimes with a note.
Then, there were things I didn’t want to emulate. Little things, like not wanting my friends over a the house or me spending the night with them, either. Her insistence on making my bed every morning. Forcing me to eat peas. And sometimes, the way she chose to discipline me.
Without getting into details, because that’s not fun for anyone, I decided long ago that I wasn’t going to discipline my children with spanking or hitting or slapping. I didn’t like what it did for me, though yes, one could argue, the fear of my dad beating my ass was quite the motivator in making it home by curfew. What I didn’t like in my own past and in my close friend’s lives, was watching their parents lash out physically in anger. There IS a difference between swatting a child on the rear when you need to get their attention, and letting your anger boil out of your pores while you lose control of your limbs and your mouth.
I’ve found that discipline works best with Arden when I am calm, cool, and detached. But the other day, something happened. She did what most teenaged girls do, even though she’s only 6. She screamed into my face. It was some ugly comment or another. It was like another person took over me, and what followed shocked me. My instantaneous response to her behavior was something my mother had used as an outlet for her anger many times in the past. It surprised both of us: Arden stared at me, eyes wide, and I stared back at her, my eyes even wider. I immediately pulled her into my lap, apologized, and took responsibility for my actions and my anger. I told her she owed me the same courtesy, and she turned into me, hugged me and told me she was sorry, too.
This isn’t a gripe about my mother or how my parent’s generation dealt with smart mouths and disobedient children. She did what she thought worked best, just as I am doing the same with my own children. My dad, though he rarely had to physically punish me, loved running surveillance on me as a teen and busting me for being places I shouldn’t have been. I didn’t have much privacy, and in retrospect, that was probably ok. I don’t agree these were the best methods for dealing with me, but they worked for them and that is all there is to that.
For me, though, letting my anger out in physical ways seems backwards to me. Just today, I told Arden and Lily that the next person to lay hands on someone else out of anger was getting in REALLY. BIG. TROUBLE. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wondered if they were going to be thrown back at me because I have, myself, acted out of anger. I just want to screw up my kids in new, different ways: I know I’m far from perfect but I also know what felt really bad to me growing up, and I don’t want to serve that kind of crappy feeling up on a plate in my own house.
Now that I’ve flayed myself and walked barefoot across broken glass, I can move on with my week. I’ve got a fun 3 day weekend at the beach to look forward to. Let’s hope I can make it without any more gut-wrenching movies or anger-infused mommy moments.
I love to read, and best of all, I love new literature especially when it just shows up on my doorstep. This is why I’m now writing book reviews for BlogHer.com. You can see my first one, about Jean Kwok’s “Girl in Translation”, by clicking here.
