My dad and stepmom met Mike last spring, and they said they liked him, but, really, what else would they say? Since they visited my sister last week, I figured I could check in with her and make sure.

So I checked. And, yes, they do. But...

"They think you're getting married," my sister said.

"What?" I squawked.

This is me we're talking about. Put aside that whole not wanting to get married again — this relationship's barely a year old! We haven't even lived in the same city yet! We're not even ready to live together! Plus that whole my-divorce-isn't-even-freaking-final-yet thing.

I casually mentioned this.

"I know, I know," she said. "But Dad thinks so, because you're coming to visit me."

Since Mike and I will be spending Christmas on the East Coast, part of our travel plan involves stopping in Boston to see my sister.

"SO?" I asked.

"Well, when I said you were both coming, he got all thoughtful. You're at his place, then Mike's parents', then here. He said maybe you were making ‘the family rounds.' ‘She must have something to announce!' he said."

"Don't worry," she said hastily, as I started sputtering. "I set him straight."

"But, but...how could he possibly think that?  Doesn't he know me at all?"

"Please," my sister said, "this is our dad. He asked me my senior year of college if my boyfriend and I were pinned. His world is a different place than ours."

Thank God their conversation happened. Otherwise, Thanksgiving might have been awkward, without me even realizing. 

Okay. I haven't written about the boyfriend in a while. Truth be told, I haven't wanted to jinx it. Things have been going so smoothly I sometimes wonder if there's something wrong?

In the past, I've kept my finger on the pulse of my relationships. If the heart wasn't racing so hard one of us was in danger of a heart attack, then the relationship didn't seem real. It was all emergency-room experiences.

Reality was at such a high pitch, such a fevered pace, there wasn't any down time or room for ambiguity.

Maybe it's maturity. Maybe I'm just exhausted post-divorce, but my new boyfriend and I have a rhythm that's positively lethargic. I'm loving it.

Here's the 411: I'm so busy rushing around with kids, job, music and meetings, that when I make a date with Mr. Right these days, I'm finding peaceful relaxation, safety, security, and the warm-fuzzies are what I'm looking for. Not a racing pulse.

First, I never worry where I stand. He thinks I'm wonderful all the time. Second, whenever I ask, "Would you like to go to such and such?" his response is always, "Are you going to be there?"

He continually assures me that the largest measure of his happiness has to do with being near me.

I remember when I was in my 20s, writing about how I needed a wife. That just goes to show how lowly the position was back then, because I was writing about needing someone to do my laundry, scrub my floors, and cook my dinners.

While Mr. Right isn't angling for the wifey position, he isn't above helping me with household chores. And, he does yard work.

Now you're saying that this sounds too good to be true.

Although divorce has damaged me to the extent that I find it hard to think of a romantic future of more than a single day, I can honestly say that, from a new-age perspective, you really can dream your way to reality.

"If you do not wish to be prone to anger, do not feed the habit; give it nothing which may tend to its increase."  —Epictetus (55 A.D.–135 A.D.)

This is the way that I have been trying to live. It seems that out of all of this — the sadness, the despair, the desperation, the lonlieness, the worrying, the anxiety — that the anger has been the one emotion that no matter how hard I try to shake it off, it continues to hang on.

I've written so much about how angry I am at Levi. How I'm angry about what he's done to me, to us, to our son. How I'm angry that this divorce left me bare, stripped of all of my innocent beliefs of true love and Prince Charmings.

But what I haven't written too much about, haven't even really realized on a conscience level myself, is how I am angry with myself.

How could I have been so stupid? is something that often comes to my mind. How could I have not seen the forest through the trees?

I told my therapist that if I met Levi for the first time today, I know that I wouldn't even like him. In fact, when I first met him, I didn't really like him...at all.

It was the idea that — this man loves himself so much there must be something great about him — that kept me coming back for more.

Last night I got home after working for 12 hours, my kid had pink eye, the house was a mess, and my cat had puked all over the floor. It's nights like these that I become angry with myself for ever even believing in Prince Charming and happily-ever-after in the first place.

Except now, as I feel the anger washing over me, I give it nothing, I do not feed it and I feel it fade away faster and faster.

I hope maybe if I keep this up, I will find a way to let go of the anger.

Welcome to my recipe for disaster. On Thanksgiving Day this year my daughter will be 21. I am trying to combine a milestone birthday, a holiday, the umpteenth anniversary of my father's death and a tentacled divorce. I can't even tell you the half of it because doing so here would compromise the privacy of people close to me. I'm leaning toward Jet Blue. I will focus instead on stuffing.

My favorite stuffing story was the year I decided to make the bird at my house and transport it to my late brother Stephen's home. People were not relaxed. I was never known as the turkey girl and I that year I was going to show them! 

Everyone at the table watched in awe as my mother pulled a plastic bag of innards out of the stuffing cavity. I can still hear my brother's hysteria. This year I'm at it again...shoot me.

For decades it was my mother's Italian egg stuffing recipe. A combination of, roughly, a dozen large eggs, a handful of grated Locatelli cheese, a handful of chopped fresh Italian parsley, enough plain bread crumbs to thicken the mix till it drips off a spoon and a little salt and pepper. This then blows up inside the turkey and is absolutely delicious.

My sister-in-law Susie started going with her sausage & chestnut stuffing and my stuffing allegiance is now challenged. Actually, I am open to stuffing suggestions. Got any?

It is happening. The great Family Holiday Trade.

Mike and I started dating a little over a year ago, a month or so before Thanksgiving. I ended up spending my Thanksgiving break in New York that year, but we went our separate ways on the actual day. There was no way I was taking the train to DC with him to his parents'; we had just started dating. We hadn't put a name on this. We were still holding things at arm's length. Just meeting parents at this point would have been too much.

This year he's coming to my dad's for Thanksgiving and I'm going to his parents' for Christmas. It feels at once completely logical and the Scariest Thing in The World.

Before you scoff at this 33 (Gah! 34!) year old woman's panic at bringing a boy home, at spending a week at a boy's parents' house, let me remind you that Jake and I started dating when I was 15. This is all new to me.

I don't have a childhood home at this point, but my dad's house has always been the place to go when things are hard. He and my stepmom are a happy little island of normalcy in my otherwise questionably functional family. It's quiet there. People are nice to each other. Jake hated it, so I tended to visit alone. I don't think of it as a place where I have a partner.

I'm stupidly nervous about Mike coming with me. What if he hates it, too? There's nothing to do — my family and I play cards, watch movies, putter around the living room. That's what I like about it. What if he doesn't? What if he's bored and cranky?

Plus — there's something so definite about this. If he comes to my parents' house, he's for real. He'll get to know my family. They'll know him. Every step in this direction makes an ending that much messier.

I suppose, at some point, all of these "first things" will be over and then I can stop worrying about them. Right? 

The family joke is that if I had stopped at two children, I'd be the most insufferable mother who ever lived. My two oldest daughters have never given me moment's pause — well maybe a few moments — but I saw none of the screaming, slammed doors, sullen withdrawals or general obnoxious teenaged behavior I've heard about (or exhibited myself as a self-absorbed young lass). Never had to set curfews, never had to mete out punishments for missing said curfews. How clueless I was.

But daughter number three — bless her little heart — has given me a run for the money from the very start. Didn't want to be born; we had to induce. Once born, she didn't want to leave my arms — or the house. Where most babies are lulled to sleep in their car seats, K would scream bloody murder the entire time. I remember one wretched ride where I compulsively kept reaching for the radio knob, as if that could turn her volume down.

Now it's just the opposite. At 15 with her first beau, it's all about The Boy, and she can't wait to get into his car. She doesn't want to spend any time with me — and certainly not with my beau and His Boy, four years younger. And I understand her need to be with her guy, her first love, so it's a delicate dance between her legitimate needs and ours.

So I thought she was being particularly magnanimous, when S and his son came over one Saturday afternoon and she agreed to go iceskating with us at a nearby rink. Afterwards, we came home, baked cookies together. When she said she'd like to skip going out to dinner with all of us to meet her guy, I thought it was a reasonable request. But S got a little pissy, which annoyed me, so I sweet talked her into it. We had a lovely dinner, then she went off with The Boy, S and I retreated up to my room for a movie, his son settled with video games downstairs.

I awoke at 3 am with a start. I was sure K was home by now, but something made me check.

Not in her room.

I have decided to take Adrian to meet Levi's mother. I actually had decided this a few weeks ago, but hadn't said anything to my friends about it just yet.

She has asked to see him a few times now, and it occurred to me that I would like to treat her in the way that I would like her to treat me. I can't really explain it, but it just feels like the right thing to do.

I was going to take Adrian to the Museum of Natural History (the butterfly exhibit open again!), so I asked her if she'd like to come along. We'll be meeting next weekend.

Last night I attended a group meditation/message circle in upstate New York. It was a lot of fun; they did tarot cards, meditation, and then the medium gave people messages.

Immediately the medium looked at me and told me that he had a message from one of my relatives in spirit. He asked, "Are you planning a trip to the city soon?" "Yes, I am," I replied.

"Yeah, this is going to be a huge step for you," he said, adding that the message from my relative was, "Don't worry, she knows her son is an ass and she will like your boy."

Wow. Had I known before that psychics could be this dead on I might not have spent so much money in therapy.

Today I got an email from the medium. He said he saw the Statue of Liberty — and that's what tipped him off that I was going to the city — but he thought that was an odd reference for New York. He said that he thought about it more and decided that the message meant that this meeting with Levi's mother will be very liberating for me.

Liberating? We'll see.
 

Tomorrow is my second unmarried birthday.

I hate my birthday. It's been a bad day for years — a day to be disappointed. A day of promises that your partner will come home, only he won't. Or he'll forget. Or he'll blow the whole thing off as not a big deal, anyway.

Plus that whole Husband Moving Out the Day After thing — that will kind of taint your birthday — well, forever.

What was I thinking? How was this in any way a good idea? For the rest of my life, no matter how happy I am, no matter how good a place I'm in, November 14th will always be the anniversary of this, so far, hardest day. My birthday will always be the anniversary of the day before: the Day Before the Hardest Day. The Last Day.

That first birthday alone — it wasn't bad. It really wasn't.  But boy, did I work for that. The effort that went into not making it a big deal, making sure there were no expectations, making sure it was just any other day — it was a lot.

This year, I just can't muster the energy. I'm tired. The last couple of weeks have been hard. The effort involved in being that nonchalant, of steeling and girding and getting myself together so Thursday won't be crushing — the very thought exhausts me. To the point where I'm thinking one day of suck might be better than the week of prep.

The thing is, I used to really like my birthday. Not that anything big or important would ever happen, and not that I wanted that. But it was a nice day, and usually nice things would happen. Now, though, it just leaves me lonely and sad and wondering why no one will ever love me as much as my cat does.

I wonder what it's going to take to make that go away. I guess if something really amazing and magical happened on my birthday, that might knock the other associations into second place. Like, I don't know, Josh Groban showing up in my kitchen to make me pancakes. But I'm not holding my breath.