clink clink clink

Yes, I'm doing this again, shush everyone. Do I look ok? I'm wearing red, I'm fancy. Did anyone else snitch the turkey? It's ridiculously good. I'm a little worried about it. They must be injecting them with something new this year, because turkey isn't supposed to taste like that. WELL. It's a smaller table this year. Unless you count the cats. We seem to be overrun. If things keep going like they have been, we might be having smaller roasts next year - yeah, watch it, Po. So this wasn't the best year we've had. It was pretty spectacularly crap. Nice touch there, mom, breaking your toe for the holidays, I saw that. Still, it's like I've been saying, the bigger the disaster, the better the story. So there was the layoff, and moving, and Josh died, and the dog got run over, then there was the pay cut, the ride in the ambulance, I developed that allergy to all my wool, my favorite patron died, mom's bird was murdered, and now we have the breakup ordeal and childcare issues. But we're all still alive. That sounds flippant, but it's really not. The spectre of Death has been in the wings - but we can come to this table, and sit here together, and eat until we're sick, and drink until Charlie Brown is funny, and everything is ok. We are all here, right now. And that counts for so much - we would claw through the years just to get back to this time, some day. I hope your shirt is absorbent, mom, because I have some crying-on-my-mom to catch up on this weekend. And I made the casserole without onions, just because they make you violently ill and you're tired of throwing up every holiday. No respect for tradition, I tell you.  So let's eat, and sit around trash-talking the tv and listening to the kids sing muppet Christmas carols. And everyone get along, because the pie is watching us.

Cheers.

Week 1

It isn't really week 1.

Week 1 happened 5 years ago. I watched the car drive away, turned away from my father-in-law's front door, and realized that everything had changed. I was standing in the first minutes of a long walk through a lot of years. I think Oliver Stone did a rack focus on me. 

But in this most recent reset, things are easier. Still complete shit, with the lonely nights and detached limbs and financial landmines, but not bleak or hopeless or lost. I'm just hanging around, with the dinner dishes and bedtime stories and laundry folding and bitten fingers from pilling my asshole cat (who is still peeing on everything, just more comfortably). 

There is some laying around on the floor listening to Led Zeppelin, the Black Keys, trashy angst rock, and the Muppets with John Denver.

and noticing that the rug smells funny

And I drew a bit.

Gave up on knitting when I got to the armpits, because armpits take counting and I am too damned lazy. And because the cat barfed on it. Twice. In the same spot. I hate her so much. She's just lucky she's so skilled at tap-dancing, or there would be no reason to keep her.

There is the shmoopy shcarf, which I have been adding a row to every day based on my feeeelings. The yellow was clearly a waste of $2.99.

read from the bottom up

Grownup bed! Slept in! All night! Memory foam causes instant comas. It's magical stuff.

I'm a jerk and I hate my cat

Still haven't had those gimlets. And I'm not going to. Drinking isn't therapeutic when you're the only person around to drive to the emergency room if the kids roll out of bed and crack their heads open on a cat or something. The plan now is to just ignore everything and see how long it takes before I have a horrible meltdown at an inopportune moment. The last time I did this, I made it two months without crying about losing the house before bursting into sobs at the word "avocado". Three days in, and so far so good. I am a bit grumpy, and sometimes I start to well up when people say things like "What did you do this weekend?" or "How are the kids?" or "Do I have any late fines?" but I'm cool. When people talk about their babies and husbands I totally don't say, "I SMASH YOU IN THE FACE WITH YOUR STUPID ADORABLE BABY/HUSBAND," because, as I have just said, I am cool. Cooly crumpling my emotions into a cool little wad and cooly stuffing them into a bottle of coolness. Case in point: earlier today I made fun of my co-worker for trying to walk next to an old lady without her feeling embarrassed about how slow she was, so he was sort of zombie-lurching and pretending to be very interested in the thermostat. Cool people mock their friends and the elderly. So there you go. I'm fine.

Now, at the library we keep the new issues of Cosmo under the front desk, because our copies get stolen by masturbators. I take the magazine out and flip through it from time to time, and it has assured me that by talking about my living arrangements, I can expect psychopaths to immediately come crashing through my windows, ready to throttle me with shoestrings. But I am going to do it anyway, because I am daring and stupid and I have pepper spray somewhere. Psychopaths are here encouraged to stop reading.

So I'm living alone now, with the two boys, and it is slightly unnerving being the only adult in the house again. After going on a manic cleaning and furniture-rearranging spree, I took the kids to the beach, thinking that seemed like a safe enough way to spend an afternoon, and there I discovered a dead kitten in the sandy walkway. It was still fluffy and adorable, curled under a stick which must have broken beneath it from the tree overhead. I paced around for a bit, thought about pretending I hadn't seen it, looked for someone to come dispose of it for me, got mad at myself for being an asshole, and finally decided to make a run for the car before the kids could see it and get upset. There was a box of to-be-donated-clothes in the trunk, so I grabbed a shirt, ran down to the kitten, and gingerly swaddled it up. Ideally, I would have liked to lay it in the forest under a dignified scattering of leaves and flowers, but my kids were trying to get eaten by sharks (which I could tell because they were whacking the waves with sticks and yelling, "RAWR, COME ON SHARKS!"), so I ran to a trash can and laid the little bundle inside with an apology. A picnic bench full of people was watching me throughout all this, so I gave them a Disapproving Librarian Stare and ran back to the water to scrub my arms down with sand.

This was not the best way to start my new chapter of single-parentness. I decided that the next thing to do would be to sleep in my very own bed like a proper adult, instead of cramming up against the wall on the bottom bunk in the kids' room. This has not happened yet.

Night 1: Changed all the bedding, for a fresh start. Po jumped up, purred at me, squatted in the middle of the bedspread, and peed all over it. I chased her around the house with a spray bottle, changed the bedding again, started the washer, and slept in the kids' room, because that was all too much work.

Night 2: Sniffed the bed, got under the covers, turned off the light, and made myself lay there. Managed it for about 20 minutes - eyes bulging, searching the shadows for shoestring psychopaths and listening for telltale scrabbles at the windows. Po jumped up, purring in a comforting manner, and - of course - started to pee on me. So I went running all over the house chasing her with a squirt bottle, changed the bedding again, thumped back onto the bed in a stubborn manner, and then heard a WHAM from the front of the house and sprinted to the kids' room - only to find it was my neighbor closing her car door outside. Slept in the kids' room, because that was all too much work.

Night 3: Put the spray bottle on the nightstand, got under the covers, and read a book until I was sleepy. Flicked off the light. Kicked Po when she jumped on the bed. Heard a scratching by the hamper. Turned on the light, caught Po peeing on a sock. Chased cat around the house with the spray bottle, put sock in washer, got back in bed, turned off light. Heard a thump. Turned on light, caught Po peeing in the closet. Chased her with spray bottle, threw her into litter box, cleaned closet, closed bedroom door, and went to sleep in the kids' room, because all that was TOO MUCH WORK.

Fuck it.

In other news, I changed my hair, because something had to happen to it and I can't bring myself to cut it.

My one and only wrecking ball

The plane departed. The kids cried, then fell asleep in the car. As I drove along the edge of the island in the dark, my brain reached out to feel the cracks of my heart to see how deep the injury was. It isn't safe to have an emotional breakdown while handling a car for two hours, so I shoved my brain and heart into opposite corners and drove home with red, tired eyes. After the kids are safely tucked in bed I can reunite the brain and the heart and lose my shit as much as I want.

Later.