The only stranger I've ever had sex with is my husband. One day after I met him. And sometimes, 16 years down the road he's still the stranger in my bed.
If it was up to Sam we would make love – he'd say make love, I'd say fuck – every night and double on the weekend. A little something quick before the kids wake up.
Not me. Who has the time? Sex worth having – the kind where I come – is an investment, takes hours sometimes, and the sad truth is I just can't be up half the night then pack PB&Js for my kids' lunches before daybreak the next morning. A couple nights like that and I'm worthless for a week.
The other thing is, even with my husband, sex is just sex, just two bodies together and everything meaningful happens outside the bedroom. For me anyway. Hot is about the way we connect without ever touching. Hot is in the head before it reaches the body.
If you didn't read Wanda's post about truancy, (un)excused absences, and taking care of oneself, go back there right now read it. Then re-read it and then learn from her.
And let me be the first to say Amen, Sister Wanda.
Kudos to you for understanding the most valuable thing a mother, single or partnered, can do for herself and for her children is nurture herself. The single most important lesson she can offer as a parent is to teach her children, by example, to do the same.
Girlfriend, props to you for having the balls to stand up and say it true.
It's not just the singe-parenting road that is so hard to hoe in our society, it's parenting period. I've walked both paths these past few years and it ain't no easier on the two-parent trail.
I realized it on Tuesday, the way I knew it in November on election day, the way I found it after leaving my marriage two and a half years ago. Hope.
There's a way hope can feel so profound in the moment that everything shifts; it takes you by surprise, makes you think you never knew what hope felt like at all.
First time Sam and I were married I was hopeless. Technically we've only been married once, but our life together before the separation and what we have now — I can't call it the same marriage.
It has the same problems. They are not any easier or any less present, not any more pleasant, that's for sure. But they are not smothering me, and most of the time I do not want to suffocate Sam.
The difference is hope.
How it inflates you, makes you feel bigger than the challenges, or at least big enough. It's calm and confident like a drug, like ecstasy; that elation doesn't make any of the hard stuff disappear — doesn't even trick you into believing it has disappeared — but still it's enough.
I finally got around to moving the last three boxes from my bedroom to the basement this week. Woohoo. Done unpacking in just 4.5 months. Could be my new record.
They were all full of books from Sam's old living room, things he took for his apartment when we split.
I shuffled through them before hauling them downstairs to grab a few more for the hallway shelves.
I don't remember dividing up our stuff when I left. I didn't want stuff, not mine, not his, not any of it. Packing to leave is all one numb blur of a memory.
But those books, a dozen of those books were mine. MINE. And I was furious. Talk about delayed reaction.
Suddenly, pulling them one by one from the boxes here in this house where everything is blended back to "ours" and what once belonged to whom no longer matters, I was so pissed I could barely breath.
Why now? It's a moot point. Still I was pacing crazy, talking out loud to no one about "you can't have this" and "I can't believe you took that." Man, our little brains just don't know when to let go.
A dear friend who's feeling totally lost from herself right now emailed me recently. As I replied to her, it felt more like a letter to everyone who's ever lost themselves. Especially in a relationship.
So for all of you, for all of us, here's what I wrote:
My sweet, sweet friend, I promise you one thing, it's all still in there somewhere, it is. Trust me on this one. There are very few things I can say for certain, but this I know. Those vanished pieces of you are not lost. Think of them as hibernating or dormant or sleeping.
I have no idea what it will take to wake them, but I'm pretty sure it can only be some radical act of trust. Self trust.
If I learned anything with the whole separation, blah, blah, blah... (and somedays I'm pretty sure I did not) it is this: Take a giant leap of faith and you will land safely in your own skin.
Whatever that leap is for you, do it.
If nothing ever comes of my writing. If nothing ever comes of my relationship with Sam. If nothing ever comes of my widespread, dreaming mind. I don't care.
Oh the ups and downs of the holidays. In Portland we called the two week stretch from Dec. 14 to last Sunday Snopoccalypse, and those of us with small children at home and without big SUVs in the driveway? We became snow prisoners.
We pulled our children on sleds to the bus stop, and then through downtown streets and sidewalks to do the last-minute shopping. Those of us who shopped at all.
Okay, the sled detail was just Sam and me (but it sounds so Norman Rockwell and many people I know really did drag their kids to the nearest grocery store that way). Also, full disclosure, the 11th hour downtown shopping spree was more about getting out of the house than getting presents.
We're so broke we'd already agreed to exchange only a little book of the 12 things we would give the other if money and the time-space continuum were no objects.
My Facebook status that morning after we trekked downtown on sleds said "Red Rum, Red Rum" over and over to the edge of the update space. One of my friends gave me a lot of crap about that. He said it was overdone and I needed to dial down the The Shining references.
Turns out, in Portland, the joke is on us. That, and about a foot of snow.
Last week the local news weather types cried wolf for days and with every flurry we were sure Arctic Blast '08 was bearing its abominable teeth. And we, in our fair city of three snow plows, responded by closing everything. On one of my kids' snow days it didn't even snow.
By Friday, everyone knew the hype was nothing, but the week was already a wash, so no point in having school or doing anything else really. On Friday, the whole week seemed like a nice excuse to slow down and take a couple lazy at home days before revving up for the holidays.
Then came Saturday. And it snowed. It snowed and kept on snowing straight through the night and all day Sunday. Biggest snow Portland's seen in 40 years. Suddenly, it was not just an excuse. There was a foot on the ground and we really were housebound.
All the packages full of Christmas gifts from my in-laws are holding on some UPS snow route and they, the in-laws, are due in tonight on Christmas Eve.
