Temporary
Posted on January 8, 2009
Filed Under Anxiety, bitching and moaning, challenges, kids, marriage, parenting | 16 Comments
You all are too kind, with your words of sympathy, support, understanding and even commiseration. To speak about the implosion of one’s marriage is almost cathartic. As soon as it’s out there, finally out there, otherwise private individuals are quick to share their own personal tales of connubial woe, of separations, divorce, of nervous breakdowns. I am swimming in confessions. I am the now privy to other people’s secret failures. There is solidarity in this type of vulnerability and rightly so…it is so necessary to surviving this sort of crisis, to know that others have walked this very same line.
And of course they have. Intellectually I know I am not alone in this. Statistics show that some 50% of all marriages end in divorce. And still, no one ever imagines themselves on the precipice of such a colossal failure. If we could even conjure a picture of our future selves living in separate homes, contacting attorneys and real estate brokers, divvying up the furniture and the pets… well of course no one would agree to marriage in the first place. There’s no temporary happiness that can justify this type of pain. We all really, really mean it when we say “I Do.” Until we don’t.
Admittedly it’s been hard to focus on the dreadfulness of this situation as I am currently exhausted due to the frenetic pace that this life change has ushered in. I have temporarily taken work as a painter/renovator for a friend who buys multi-family homes out of foreclosure, slaps on a fresh coat of paint and changes some switch plates and proceeds to rent the places out for outrageous prices. It is depressing and mindless work but she pays a generous hourly rate and I can come and go as I please. I keep reminding myself that it is only temporary. I am rushing home from my painting job to meet the kids when they get off the bus. I am managing homework and bathing and dinner and house keeping. I am meeting real estate brokers and tracking down the right therapist for the kids. I am keeping the walkways to the back door ice free which means I am shoveling and scraping and salting as necessary. I am typing up resumes into the wee hours of the night. I am looking for a full-time gig, one that tickles the mind, pays adequately, offers benefits and a growth opportunity. I am trying to schedule a service appointment for the car. I am trying to squeeze in quick trips to the gym even if then kids need to come and do homework while I plod along on the treadmill. I am ordering a new Canine Fence Company collar for the dog since she’s broken the old one and keeps skipping the yard for greener pastures (who can blame her?). I am not sleeping well because there is laundry to do and I should really get one more resume off and there’s school snacks and lunches to pack and dishwashers to unload before it all starts again tomorrow.
The kids have been sort of swept along in this eddy of activity and coping and seem to be doing much, much better. This improvement in their mental state comes just in time for their father’s return home for the weekend which should set them back to square one by Sunday evening. But this is the best we can do right now. And that has to be enough.
Now What?
Posted on January 5, 2009
Filed Under Anxiety, bat-ass crazy, bitching and moaning, challenges, homeownership, kids, marriage, parenting | 11 Comments
That felt bad -the heart rending, gut wrenching, kind of bad that is, at least in film, usually accompanied by sorrowful swells of music. There were tears, especially from G who was, until today, blissfully ignorant of her parents’ faltering relationship. She was blindsided by the quiet admission that we had decided to part ways for awhile, that this parting meant her father would be temporarily occupying a friend’s house some two hours away. She was not comforted by promises of weekend visits, by our comparing his absence to the bi-monthly business trips that take him away for days at a time.
O took the news stoically at first and tried to inspire his sister’s smile by making goofy faces and performing antics with the pizza crust in his hand. His efforts were in vain. She retired to her room to weep and process. The sounds of her sobbing called into question the whole damn thing for me, the selfishness of two parents parting. But O remained tear-free for hours. He has seen and heard this coming for miles. He has witnessed our fighting. We have addressed the fact of our conflict and the possibility of our separation as a solution with him. He has had time to cry about this already.
In hindsight, I wish we had handled the parting differently. While there was no way to make it easy, we could have been more thoughtful. In the effort to explain his leaving, their father mentioned the word “months” which instantly sounded like an eternity hanging there in the space between us. “Months” in the life of a child is something akin to forever. I so wish we had said, Dad is leaving for the week and will be back Saturday, no more – no less. This is the truth. They probably don’t need to know much more beyond the week to week since we don’t know much more ourselves.
In hindsight, we should have made certain his departure was during school hours. We should not have made them witness to our grief. But My Better Half was anxious to get the show on the road. Living here with the knowledge he’d be leaving eventually was wrecking its own havoc. And it must have been torture – this imminent departure from the people he loves all in the effort to find a way back to them – permanently. I think he wanted to begin the process of settling into a new purgatory while waiting for things to magically heal, while hoping for some sort of divine intervention on our family’s behalf. No one ever imagines slipping so far down their own life that happiness is suddenly out of reach. How could it have gotten so beyond us? So beyond me?
And what’s the old saying? When it rains it pours -pours down waste pipe overflow from the second floor bathroom through the light sockets in the first floor office, soaking the rug, flooding the basement on the night two parents decide to part ways. It was almost biblical, the timing of this plumbing failure. O and G and I, stood watching the deluge. And O, as if inspired by the waterworks, finally gave in to tears. He let the crying take him where no nine year old should think to go, My life is terrible, I want to die, everything is awful…my house, my parents, my lack of friends. G piggybacked on this profound depression and began to agree that her social life at school was sub-par, that her life at home was unacceptably sad without her parents being together and happy and living in the same house with working plumbing and shared bedrooms. She rejected the possibility of two homes in close proximity, equal visitation, Daddy-days and Mommy-days, she rejected this quaintly presented notion outright. She could see immediately that nothing this complicated could turn out so easy and sunny and sweet.
And so the three of us fell asleep in my giant bed, trying to find some comfort in the proximity, alien and empty, listening to freezing rain lash at the windows, a sound quite like loneliness.
Better than the Last
Posted on January 1, 2009
Filed Under Anxiety, Blogroll, career, debt, kids, marriage, milestones, parenting, resolutions, suburban joys | 10 Comments
The first day of the year and it’s the coldest day we’ve had to endure since we moved up North three years ago. I suppose it’s best to get the worst out of the way ahead of time. Now the remaining 364 days will feel superior to this one. There’s a foot of new snow but it’s too damn cold to enjoy it and the vacuum cleaner broke so I’m bound to go completely insane with two children, one inherently messy adult male and two pets roaming around the confines of the home making crumbs, shedding hairs and rubbing cat litter on the back of the sofa.
We have one car that’s a champion in the snow but mice have crawled up inside the dashboard and nested in the airbag system. My warning light has been illuminated as reminder that when I fishtail and throw a 360 on slick, icy roads, I’m SOL save for a rodent family that might shoot out the steering wheel to cushion the impact. Considering the size, weight and non-absorbent make-up of the average mouse, I’ve decided to mostly stay home even though the lack of cleaning apparatus and chill of strained relations makes me want to crawl out of my itchy, winter-dry skin and flee to Florida where I hear it’s 80 and humid and there’s no such thing as chapped lips.
I suppose in this confinement, I should continue the job search I began a few days before the X-mas break wherein I write and re-write cover letters and resumes in order to send on-line responses to job listings in which I am only vaguely interested, those that appear on Monster and Craig’s List, knowing all the while that my ten years as a Landscape Designer don’t translate into value as a paralegal or administrative assistant or pharmaceutical representative but there’s always hope that some firm will see that the individual who ran her own company, wrote for a newspaper and also did time in the accounts department in an advertising firm, can and will learn this office stuff quickly and, in the interim, can probably manage the phones and tend to the ailing tropical plants suffering for light beneath the fluorescents.
I make it sound sort of optional, this employment thing but really it’s dire. In the last days of ‘08 we learned that MBH’s company would no longer be covering health insurance for dependents. So we have the expense of three on our plate in the New Year which makes for leaner times in our already skinny lives. And then there’s the latest confession – that neither of us can take one more day in the house together as a couple; working, sleeping, eating, pretending. And so we’re trying to find a way to swing rent. Some way to give ourselves some breathing room. It may, in the end, save us. Or it just may allow us to sever things in a civil manner. Either way, we see the expense as non-optional.
In order to clear the way for this added financial hit, I cancel newspaper subscriptions, I dial back the minutes on the cell phone, I cancel cable and stare meaningfully at the high-speed internet access bill wondering if we can survive on a dial-up. Wondering if the dial-up option still exists? We are wearing long underwear and turning down the thermostats. The dog shivers in her dog bed. The kids play hours of Wii and we let them, because school’s out and the wind blows negative temperatures and it’s free and we ignore their computer game dependence because their bug eyed attention to Madden ‘09 somehow assuages our guilt.
We have yet to break the news to the kids, this separation, which will confuse and disturb them even more than it does us (if that’s possible). And then there is the news to share that we are taking a leave of absence from the Country Club which really doesn’t affect their Winter lives but will completely rock their summer-time existence. I keep reminding myself that there are worse things to suffer than no swim team or tennis or golf but I feel really, really badly about this one. Possibly because we gaveth and now we taketh away. It’s one thing not to know what your missing, it’s another to miss something you once really, really enjoyed. They have friends there. They have known the sweet laze of sultry afternoons spent licking watermelon drips from their sticky arms and jumping in the chill pool to rinse their skin clean. They have known the smell of fresh mown grass on the fairway. They have known the distinct sound of tennis balls bouncing on a clay court. They have learned how to drag the brush and groom the court after play without filling their tennis shoes with clay granules. They have dressed in a sun dress and sandals and little boy khakis with a starched button-down to attend the awards ceremony at summer’s end where they receive recognition for sportsmanship and effort and achievement. They have known what it feels like to belong to this safe place, a place of well-to-do families and blue skies and a snack bar. I feel sad about a lot of things, but mostly I feel sad that I can’t continue to give them the things they have come to know as normal.
So here’s hoping that somehow, some of the next 364 days will find a way to be truly better than this one. Less uncertain and bleak and fearful and nostalgic. And here’s hoping your ‘09 is a good one, better than the last, even if your last wasn’t all that bad, because who doesn’t deserve even better?
Stop Snowing Damn-it
Posted on December 21, 2008
Filed Under marriage | 10 Comments
If it doesn’t stop snowing soon, in time for the plows to do their toil and prepare the roads for school tomorrow, I will begin to weep. And I will continue to weep through the long day tomorrow while my children sit home for the third day in a row, temperamental and bored, hopped up on sugar cookies and candy canes, teeth rotting, blisters forming from Wii over-use.
I will weep because I can’t get to the grocery store to prepare for an in-law influx that is scheduled to be five days in duration. And because I can’t get to the gym and I can’t finish my Christmas shopping and mostly because I can’t get the hell out of the house after what feels like weeks and weeks of canceled plans and forced togetherness.
I will weep because this year in NOT the year in which we all gather round the fire, content to warm our hands and cozy up in domestic bliss. I will sob softly from the chill of my upstairs office while coming to terms with the fact that this is only the first day of Winter and there’s so many more days of foul weather and foiled plans ahead of me.
I will weep.
The LED Spirit of X-mas
Posted on December 13, 2008
Filed Under christmas, holiday fun, homeownership | 9 Comments
I have reconsidered. After writing Tuesday’s harangue, I tried to settle into my own bah humbug and felt all kinds of itchy and sad. It occurred to me that without my driving the Christmas Bus, the holiday would, in fact, actually not occur for my children. No filled stockings, no gifts beneath the tree. Hell, no tree at all. No Christmas cookies, no gingerbread house, no cards sent to friends and family. No English trifle and tenderloin and no reading of the Night Before Christmas and The Grinch and The Steadfast Tin Soldier.
I was cynically sipping a little alcoholic grog and watching Comedy Central in my bathrobe, when it hit me…I AM the spirit of Christmas, at least in this household. So I put down the beverage (which really wasn’t a good idea at 11 a.m. anyway) and changed out of my pajamas, but did not remove my Ugg slippers (they do have rubber soles for outdoor use, ya know) and climbed into the SUV that was fairly humming with anticipation in the driveway, keen to its task of wheeling down the interstate to Target, AGAIN, in less than 24 hours since its last visit to the Big Box. (It’s possible that the hum I speak of is an indicator of something altogether more SINISTER ticking like a time bomb in the engine and has associations with the four or five dashboard lights that are now constantly illuminated warning me of airbag failures and low tire pressure and potential explosions, but I’ve decided to just ignore all that until I get this Christmas thing worked out.)
So me in my Ugg slippers and my ailing Honda Pilot made it back to Target to wander the aisles looking for the perfect display of Christmas cheer and, ultimately, I got me some of those white, dangling, light-up stars to hang from the porch that faces the street.
They were easy to assemble. They are big enough to be seen from the street through the tangle of woods in front of our house. And they really are lovely. All white and festive and pure. But now I can see how the Christmas light thing really snow balls. Every time I drive up to the house I think, “Oh, Cute Lights, but wouldn’t it be cuter if there was another four or five or fifteen strands of white Christmas stars hanging from the second story roof line and wound round the front columns and maybe at the back door too.” One measly strand of stars just doesn’t seem enough, feels kind of miserly and half-baked and now I’m afraid I’m going to have to spend the weekend wrapping the house in twinkly lights just to give those stars some company because my star strand, as seen from the street, while quietly beautiful, is kind of making me feel lonely and sad all over again.
No Ugg slippers this time…it’s work boots, and gloves and staple guns and extension cords. I’m in need of a light extravaganza, some riotous blaze of holiday magic. Here’s hoping they’re having a sale. Here’s hoping I don’t fall off a ladder and break a vertebrae in pursuit of more LED administered holiday cheer.
Scrooge
Posted on December 9, 2008
Filed Under bat-ass crazy, bitching and moaning, christmas, debt, kids, parenting | 6 Comments
I wish I were the type of person that could earnestly don a holiday themed sweater and some poinsettia earrings and settle into this seasonal stuff, generating deep internal satisfaction in hours spent marching the mall corridors hunting the perfect gift. Instead I screech into the Target parking lot at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning. I am shopped, bagged and out again by 8:50 vowing to avoid big box shopping for another 12 months, all the while observing that it’s been almost a year since I was last there and not a whole lot has changed, same aisles jammed with holiday junk on which people will spend money that they don’t have in the sad attempt to doll up their homes and their office spaces, in the name of Christmas damn-it, in keeping with the season, just one more glitter glued snowman and the spirit of Christmas will have arrived at last.
I wish I didn’t feel the need to tell the kids that each and every Santa we come across can’t possible be the real deal. I wish I could just let them harbor this seasonal deception. Why do have to get all cynical, smacking my lips with disapproval. “Get a load of that one kids? Look at the black, greasy hair beneath the wig. Smell his Bourbon breath. Mark my words, the real Santa is far too busy this time of year to be drunk at noon on a weekday.” My O and G have learned to out the fakes. They play coy games with the Santa stand-ins, “If you’re the real Santa then YOU can tell ME what I want for Christmas.” There is a moment of uncomfortable chuckling followed by a hostile silence. O and G slowly slip down off of Santa’s lap. Photos seem entirely beside the point. You can practically hear the shop girls sheepishly dressed as elves thinking – HATERS.
This year I have even given up on outdoor lights. It just seems so beside the point. The front of our house cannot be seen from the street yet each year I feel compelled to string the white bulbs on the dwarf spruces by the front door and march out of the house each evening at dusk to plug the damn things in for the pleasure of the one neighbor with whom we share the drive and who hasn’t hung even a wreath four years running. Not this year. No way. You can’t make me like Christmas. I just won’t. Wake me when it’s over and we’ve safely avoided spending thousands of dollars we don’t have. Wake me when I no longer have a wheat allergy and I can actually partake of the Christmas cookie buffet. And not a moment before.
Do Dogs Get Dysentery?
Posted on December 3, 2008
Filed Under another dread disease, bitching and moaning, challenges, dogs, pets, suburban joys | 9 Comments
I awoke to find canine generated diarrhea all over the mud room and downstairs bath for the second time in so many days -like cow flops in size and smell, a field of the richest stink littering the white tile floor, dotting the gray L.L. Bean carpet.
Last night, before bed, I had put newspapers down in anticipation of the mess, having spent the day before dodging doggy-do and mopping the floor with Tilex. Still, the dog managed to hit the few spots that were un-papered – remarkable aim considering the dire circumstances that must have compelled the beast to soil the house in the first place.
What’s wrong with the dog, what’s making her ill, you ask. My answer - I don’t give a shit (I realize this is a pun, one I intended). I’ve given her half a bottle of Pepto Bismal and stern talking to about the consequences should she defecate even one more time inside the house.
I know the old adage, feed a cold, starve a fever. And feel, somehow, betrayed that the old, wise folk who develop and deliver such truths forgot to generate any catchy saying pertaining to a house-pet’s GI distress. So I’m going with the starving bit and have decided not to feed the damn dog until I observe a noticeable weakening in the shit storm.
For those of you who’ve been wondering why it’s been taking me so long to publish my next post, just imagine me down on my knees, holding my breath while dabbing ineffectually at the god-awful mess my dog has left me. Imagine how it is to be so lightheaded and exhausted from all that scrubbing and lack of oxygen and the effort expended swallowing back your own vomit, that you have no choice but to return to bed immediately after cleansing the mudroom. It’s like a swoon, an enduring faintness that really fucks with a person’s motivation and eagerness to meet the day. Imagine me hanging the Gone-Back-to-Bed-Because-This-Morning-Is-Unbearable sign on the door knob and forgive me the spotty blogging.
(Just a little part of me is currently dreaming that this bout of tummy trouble just might usher in a doggy-ending. I can hear myself saying, Natural causes. Couldn’t be helped. Doesn’t the house stay clean a lot longer without our canine friend who we remember fondly but, on days like today, could probably live without?)
Past
Posted on November 24, 2008
Filed Under marriage | 6 Comments
They arrived all California tan and under dressed for our bleak, bare Sunday. Having left here more than a year ago, they had forgotten how bitter the prologue to winter can be. We laughed at their thin coats and sun streaked hair. It was natural, unguarded, this teasing. There was great relief in finding their familiar faces on the doorstep, huddled against the cold. The way they spilled into the house was routine and I realized how much I’d missed them.
We shared lunch and coffee and tidbits of the year passed and then they presented us with just a tiny piece of personal fiction. There was context for the tale but I can’t remember what that segue might have been. It doesn’t matter. It was captivating in its ability to convey some distant past. It had the familiar tone of an old, time worn story, one he trots out when trying to underscore his wife’s tendency to worry, one she uses to defend her love for him. They told the tale like the couple that they are, that they have been. There was gentle prodding, an undercurrent of mockery, while arriving at the familiar but not entirely un-tender place this story takes them in its telling…
“It was Florida, before kids, we stopped at a rest stop on a remote strip of highway, a truck stop really,” he began.
“Entirely abandoned,” she said. “And really he was gone too long. Anyone would have worried.”
“Worried? maybe? But you convinced yourself I’d been jumped by red necks and sodomized in the Men’s Room? A step too far, no?”
“That was ages ago,” she added. “Ages.”
They both turned to me, shoulders up near their ears, palms spread out, offering up the universal sign for Please settle this matter that continues to grieve us all these years later.
I shook my head and got ready to say, Those were certainly the good old days, the salad days, a time when you were together in the world, just the two of you, without children, without a mortgage, possibly without even a car payment, unimpeded save for the fear of something happening to the other. It’s entirely sweet and sad, really, as it’s probably a relic, the last time the two of you stepped out in the world entirely consumed by one another.
But before I could get it out, this tribute to the people that they once were, this encouragement to savor that memory, our children, my two and their two, cartwheeled around the corner crashing into counter stools, demanding bagels, asking for something to do on a chill November afternoon.
She quickly jumped from her seat to pour juice. He followed his son to the upstairs bedroom to admire the Lego ship the boy had just made. I smiled and set to the task of slicing bagels and finding the cream cheese, all of us too distracted by the present to properly dissect the past.
Cruel
Posted on November 16, 2008
Filed Under Anxiety, kids, parenting | 7 Comments
As parents of elementary aged children, as former second grader ourselves, we all know that second grade homework can be a bitch.
We’ve been there, hunched over our spelling lists, sputtering and wiping away tears as we try, try, try to remember that “grage” is actually spelled g-a-r-a-g-e. Or that “cercos” is, for some inexplicable reason, spelled c-i-r-c-u-s. The English language is cruel. Mrs. McLaughlin of the second grade is cruel. Spelling tests on Friday are cruel and but not unusual punishment and still, even though I graduated from second grade, and I am the mother of an older child that has already been through the rigors of the curriculum, I managed to forget that G needed to prepare for a Friday morning spelling test until well after 8 p.m. Thursday night.
I did a mock test in preparation and discovered that G was not able to spell more than half the list correctly. And so, being type-A and academically driven, I settled in to the task of helping her master the information. I put pencil and paper in front of her seven year old nose and I said, “”Write it again, three times, say it aloud while you spell it, hear the letters as you put them on the page.” She diligently penciled in the words, writing them the correct way over and over. And then I’d remove the spelling list and test her again and she’d make the same errors. I pushed and I pushed and I pushed her to the point of breaking. I was relentless and it was nine o’clock and I clutched her little body in a grip of frustration and I squeezed, just a little too hard and whispered through clenched teeth, “Why can’t you just get this?” I was tired. I’d been managing homework, G’s or her brother’s, since 3:30 p.m. with only an hour’s break for dinner. I was exhausted and depleted and sick of spelling ‘kingdom’ and ‘elevator’ and ‘bridge’.
I wanted to go bed. I wanted children who were self motivated and remembered their own spelling tests long before their mother insisted they study. I wanted something, anything to be easy. And because of my fatigue and frustration, I crumbled. My lack of control made my G feel terrible about her spelling difficulties and she cried and cried her way through another twenty minutes of drilling for Friday’s test before excusing herself and retreating to her bed where, I’m sure, she suffered anxiety dreams about mis-spelled words and her nasty mother and a stern teacher and a conflagration of shame and frustration. And I went to bed shamefaced and chagrined where I deservedly tossed and turned, wrestling with insomnia and the truth about my parenting limitations and I fervently hoped that in the morning she would wake and forgive me my insensitivity.
She was quiet the next morning – reserved and sulking. I sent her off to school that way, not knowing how to make it up to her. She’s can be tough and brooding. She knows how to hold a grudge. She’s now dedicated to making me work for her forgiveness, not knowing just how intensely I feel my own failures, just how badly I wish I could take it back. I can only hope we can mend before Monday when she will return to school and receive a new list of spelling words – a chance to handle things differently or another debacle. Here’s hoping for the former.
The Same
Posted on November 13, 2008
Filed Under Anxiety, My Better Half, bat-ass crazy, career, challenges, marriage | 9 Comments
I’ve returned to blogging skeptically, reluctantly because I know some of things I share here have damaged my already delicate home life and I’m doing a pretty good job fucking that up without rubbing salt in the wounds. But I need this space somehow, this collective nod, the communal understanding, to help me make sense of my world. I need to feel like the future, whatever it may be, is one of hope. Since I stopped blogging last Summer, I’ve been having trouble believing in optimistic outcomes. So I have returned to sort and order and lay it out here on the page. Writing helps me process. Reading your responses makes me feel less alone in all this.
If I’m being honest, periodically, in the past five months, I have wanted nothing more than a long and peaceful slumber, some break from the tortured meanderings of my mind. Some way out of all this effort we must expend trying to repair and remain. The idea of real ‘forward’ exhausts me, requires sooo much hard work, soooo much conviction and I can’t seem to find the certainty that real ‘forward’ requires. And so, sometimes, I confuse permanent avoidance with the concept of progress. At least it’s a solution of sorts rather than the absence of one.
Of course, each time it flits through my mind, I am profoundly startled and ashamed by this desperate though fleeting thought. I’m a mother of two, an intelligent attractive woman who should just exude self-esteem and yet I must admit to having considered, momentarily, checking out. How profoundly selfish and sad and altogether beside the point. There are women the world over suffering the loss of their children, their spouse, struggling with illness, poverty, addiction, natural disasters, and here I am feeling like everything I have is too much and not enough. It doesn’t make any sense at all.
And while our couples’ therapy continues, My Better Half and I persist in occupying the therapeutic frame in just the same way we started – each of us sunk into our own end of the long leather couch, facing a man who is supposed to save us, a stranger to whom we direct our most naked and dangerous thoughts about the other. My Better Half and I occupy that space without making eye contact; side by side, separated by throw pillows and years of resentment.
We are two people repeating ourselves week after week, framing the same problems, circling the same cracks in the foundation, defending the space that is not ‘forward’ or ‘better’ but stubbornly remains the same. We have contentious car rides full of shouting and accusation on the way to this bi-monthly meeting. This is a time when we feel safe unsheathing our claws. We know we will soon be sitting on the long leather couch of our collective unhappiness, spending 50 minutes licking the wounds we just inflicted.
We have mopey, quiet car rides home, forty minute journeys back to the reality of our lives – lived together under the same roof and, somehow, worlds apart, where we skirt conversations of import, dodging emotional landmines, saying little, sharing nothing, waiting until we are back in the therapeutic frame some ten, sometimes twenty days later, where we can, again, be candid and direct.
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