You and me both, dude.
I think that what happened over the weekend was that I fell into a fugue state, or perhaps a wormhole wherein the space/time continuum as we know it ceased to exist, thereby allowing the hours in each day to expand in infinite directions. Because that is the only reasonable explanation I have for what just transpired over the course of my move from the Valley to Malibu, which was that I DESTROYED IT.
And by "it" I mean "life."
Last night was not the first night that I have appeared in my own personal horror movie. No no - that night happened several months back, on one of my very first nights alone in this house without the kids.
I had installed a very fancy security system that had alerts on virtually every door and window and crack in the wall, and so when I awoke in the middle of the night to what sounded like a moan in my backyard, screamed at the top of my lungs, and then heard my very fancy security system announce "GLASS SHATTER...MASTER BEDROOM WINDOW" you better believe I was up and out and hiding behind the china cabinet in my dining room in .02 seconds. Did I grab a butcher knife on my streak through the kitchen? Yes, yes I did.
The next thing that happened was that a very nice lady's voice came over the very fancy alarm system's very fancy control panel, and told me that she'd alerted the police. She asked me how I was; whether I had a weapon; whether I still heard any noises. Half an hour later, police still decidedly MIA, she and I had become old friends. I knew where she'd grown up, and how many kids she had. I was by then sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the china cabinet with the knife in my lap, explaining to her that I was a newly single mother and that I was alone in my house, not to mention the fact that I was blonde and wearing nothing but underwear, which means that if this had been a horror movie and someone had actually broken into my house, I would be oh my god, so extremely dead. Like, many times over.
This is the first picture of Lucy I ever posted here.
Lucy’s first name was Rosie; I don’t know if I ever told you that. She came to me as a surprise: A girl who my back-then boyfriend and I were friends with had bought a teacup shih tzu with one blue eye and one brown eye for some unconscionable amount of money at a Malibu pet shop. And then that girl decided to go to London and maybe not ever come back, and so she gave the dog - Rosie - to us. I didn’t know this; what happened was that my boyfriend decided to surprise me, so one day in the fall of 2005 I was sitting at my kitchen table doing whatever, and the door opened, and I saw my boyfriend's nine-year-old daughter standing there. She kneeled down on the floor and parted her curled hands, and this fist-sized ball of white fluff came speeding towards me. And that was it, I was in love. I liked the name Rosie but I wanted her to be my own, and so I named her Lucy. I don't remember why I picked that name, but from then on that's who she was.
My dad happened to be staying at my house that day, and when I ran to tell him about Lucy he'd barely even look at her, so annoyed was he that I’d gotten a dog (too much responsibility, why would you do that, et cetera). But later that afternoon I had to go out for some appointment or another, and so against his protests I left her with him - literally just dumped her on his lap, said “I’ll be back in a bit,” and left. When I returned a few hours later, I walked in to find my father and my new puppy snuggled up on the couch, gazing into each others' eyes.
If we're being honest, I don't think it was my marriage that broke me. It was all the marriages.
I just finished reading this book, Fleishman Is In Trouble. It's about divorce - and specifically about a woman who, one day, simply disappears - abandons her marriage and her job and her children while her husband holds up the fort, so to speak. It involves major twists that I won't spoil for you because you really should read it - but I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you what I took away from it. Which is that this book explained my own story to me in a way I hadn't fully comprehended before.
At the crux of the issue is the plight of the working mother. I shy away from this topic because in our present culture there is such (completely valid) sensitivity to the different ways women approach parenting. There is a danger, when you identify yourself as a "working mother," of creating distance between yourself and the other kind of mother - the one who "doesn't work." But who does! Of course she does! She does the hardest job!
I'm moving. Again.
Not quite so far this time - and with considerably less drama, thank god.
But no matter how you slice it, moving an entire household filled with assorted children, pets, and board games requiring the wrangling of 10,000 extremely small pieces (I hate you, Risk) all by yourself...it's exhausting. I am exhausted. And excited, because this move is a good one for virtually everyone involved (except maybe Lucy, who DNGAF where she is, because she is very busy napping).
