7 years ago today.
Facebook memories needs to come with a trigger warning.
Here is the realization I had this morning, while coordinating a virtual army of people to help me care for my children while I'm on my business trip this week: Life will never be the same.
At my son's open house last night, we were given a checklist with the different projects on display, so we could make sure to see them all. There was a wall where the kids had written about their favorite part of first grade (my son wrote "getting to eat breakfast in school," because he has his priorities straight), and a wall displaying illustrated book reports of their favorite Dr. Seuss story. The last project on the checklist was "My Home." There were little spaces where the kids filled in various facts about their home - how many pets they have, that kind of thing.
In my home, there are 3 pets, my son wrote. There is 1 adult and 2 kids.
I scanned the other kids' projects, doing the now-familiar hunt for Another Divorced Person (I look for them everywhere - at drop-offs and playgrounds and amusement parks; they're not usually hard to spot). Two of his classmates had 6 people living in their home (4 adults and 2 kids). The majority of them had 4 (2 adults and 2 kids). But - national statistics be damned - nobody else had "1 adult."
Mood
Because y'all, this level of dramatics cannot be normal. It was only two weeks ago that I was bent over in a parking lot with my ex-husband scraping poop off my butt.
Could I GET A MINUTE?
Wheeeee
I was almost shockingly well-prepared for today's mission: Getting passports for my two children in advance of our Spring Break trip to Mexico. I mean, I've been around the international-travel-with-kids rodeo a couple of times before, and I know that it is terrible. But here's a fun twist: it turns out that when you decide to both get divorced and take your child on vacation? The government goes fucking after you. (Because they don't want you to kidnap your child. I get it. But STILL.)
See, when only one parent is doing the passport-acquiring on behalf of the child, the already-considerable amount of paperwork involved multiples like rabbits and requires the involvement of people like notaries. And if you hear the words "Could you get this notarized?" and think "Oh, sure! No problem whatsoever!" I do not think you and I can be friends.
The other day, my daughter pointed to one of the jagged lines criss-crossing her palm. What are those cracks?, she wanted to know. So I pulled up a sort of Palmistry 101 website, and we sat there, labeling each one. Alright, so that one's your life line, I told her. That spot where it divides in two - that's when something big changes, like maybe you get a really cool new job.
After we'd covered the major lines - Life, Head, Heart, Fate - we twisted our hands from side to side, looking for the smaller cracks, then scrolling through the website to find out what they meant. Those little lines in between the index finger and the middle finger represent your kids, and I showed her how I have two. That's you and your brother, I said.
