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.

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.

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?)

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.

I find it hard to gather a spark from anything these days. Even the positive election returns, the optimism I feel now that we’ll have new leadership in Washington, seems clouded and thin, not quite the exuberant dance of future forward that I was expecting.

I suppose I’ve been to busy saying goodbye to the good things that are October: afternoon soccer practices and Sunday football games, the dazzle of colored leaves, the singular blue of autumn skies, striking the tennis ball while dodging acorns and drifts of pine needles at the base line, jogging without gloves and a hat, standing at the bus stop in nothing but shorts and a sweat shirt and sunset after 6 p.m.

Darkness arrives at 4:30. Mornings are chill and bleak and require two cups of coffee. It is time to make Winter preparations, a fact underscored by the arrival of the plow-guy today. He spent a few minutes staking the borders of our driveway and talked with anticipation of the first snow fall. His mentioning early November storms of years’ past sounded slightly ludicrous on a day of fog and drizzle and 57 degree temperatures. But I don’t doubt his facts and feel, now, just a hair more anxious and intolerant of all the leaf drop in the yard.

And while its seasonally time to eat heavily, sleep deeply and breath slowly, I find myself unable to find a state of relaxation. I spend whole nights sweating the small stuff and the big stuff and all the stuff in between and when I finish making mental grocery lists and planning my future as a trial attorney, I turn to contemplating the purpose of human emotions.

Last night, while fluffing my pillow and popping muscle relaxers in hopes of finding temporary hibernation, I pondered the concept of jealousy and decided that while most of us learned from an early age that the inherent human emotional response of possessiveness and wanting, the peculiar rile and prickle of insecurity we know as jealousy should be stifled, I think, in fact that jealousy can serve as a necessary and effective means by which to communicate our core feelings of vulnerability and deep love.

I’m not suggesting that the type of jealousy aroused by the neighbor pulling into his three car garage in a brand new Lexus is healthy or productive, but rather, I’m talking about the kind of jealousy that makes a person feel demonstratively protective and vulnerable when it comes to their mate, a spouse or significant other.

While jealousy may be a feeling most associated with machismo – men throwing perceived competitors down the pub stairs for looking at their date wrong while shouting, Wadda you looking at, I believe there’s a certain quiet admission of jealousy that can actually bolster a relationship, leading to open discussions of commitment and need.

It takes a lot to admit one’s insecurity to an intimate partner. It’s an admission of fear, fear that “I’m not good enough, smart enough, attractive enough, funny enough to hold your attention and I fear abandonment.” Such an admission may make a person feel like a weenie. But an admission like this is also a signal that one of a pair fears the loss of the other, holds the spouse in such high esteem, and at such great value, that this loss is unfathomable and to be avoided at all costs, it can be interpreted as sweet and, at it’s simplest, can serve as much needed validation. I think that when a spouse fails to admit to jealousy they miss an opportunity to say, in no uncertain terms, I really, really don’t want to lose you to anyone at anytime. It’s so simple a possessiveness, so certain an admission of love.

I can’t help but wonder how many relationships have been ruined by outspoken and admitted jealousy versus those that could have been saved if a person had just copped to a little unseemly possessiveness and said, out loud, I value you enough to fear your going, I realize others must see the same qualities in you that I hold dear and might want them for themselves?

It is officially the first day of Summer in that there is no need to be out of bed, no bus to catch, no snack to pack or lunch money to remember and yet my kids are up with the sun and the birds and the damn waste management team, which hasn’t tailored the trash pick-up schedule to accommodate children and mothers who might like to sleep past day break if just to shorten the otherwise interminable day.

I hoped this day would have a lazy start. We were at the Red Sox game last night. The kids were over indulged. They had Cracker Jack and Italian Ice and Soft Serve ice cream and watched a little baseball in between stuffing their faces. G fell asleep in the eighth inning, just when the entire park began chanting Manny, Manny, Manny, banging arms against Fenway’s green wooden siding, clapping hopeful hands, rhythmically urging on the designated hitter, trying to will a win for the home team. She was right to give up right then and there. Manny was caught out, hopes faded and the line to get out of the parking garage rivaled the queue hopeful pilgrims encounter when trying to catch Mass with the Pope in Vatican City in July.

We were home some four hours past their usual bed time and still, still, the kids were awake this morning before sunrise.

How do you do it? You with the kids up your arse and the lawn needing mowing and the bathtub black with dirty footprints and new landscape design project added to the mix? How do you keep on blogging when taking on the neighbors backyard pool project, trying to design a garden using Zebra Grass and Japanese Lilac Trees and Weeping Maples when really you have no idea what to do with these plants since they distinctly deciduous and decidely un-sub-tropical and the entire project will require your faking Zone 6 expertise? How do you keep writing when there are latin names like Pennisetum and Miscanthus and Syringa reticulata to master?

What I’m essentially getting at is that I’m back at work as a landscape designer (it’s casual, it’s the neighbor’s project, yet it’s scary and overwhelming and complete change of pace). What I’m getting at is that my kids need me to drive them to swim team and tennis and the occasional golf lesson as that’s all I’ve got planned for them for the next ten weeks of their freedom. What I’m getting at is that I’m going to try and continue posting, I swear I’ll try, but I’m making no promises as I see my life sort of lurching away from me for the next little bit. And we all know how that worked out for me last summer, even without the pressure of design work. I think I posted once in early June, slipped off the grid and returned in September. I promise to try and do better. But I can only do what one woman can do and I bow down to those of you who somehow manage to keep up the writing energy when there are kids up your arse and the lawn needs mowing and the bathtub is black with dirty footprints and the children and the backdoor neighbors’ with their landscaping needs have high-jacked your Mom-life.

O and G bounced off the bus, discarding back packs and sweatshirts and shoes on their way in for the daily snack and elbowed up to the counter saying the same thing they say every day, as if their continued nourishment hinges on their asking, “May we have a snack?”

Instead of replying, as I do everyday with my usual, “No. Only bread and water, twice a day, that’s all the food for you,” after which I would laugh or mockingly growl, I, instead, dissolved into sobs. It was so unstoic and ultimately unmaternal to let them see me weep and yet I couldn’t seem to stem the flow and they hovered, concerned and baffled about why a mother would cry at 3:30 in the afternoon with a box of Wheat Thins in one hand and a gallon of milk in the other.

But the saddest part of exposing this vulnerability to them was the reaction it inspired in my O who instantly teared up and demanded to know why I was crying, why WE were crying, a collective response to a persistent sadness. And I could only say that I was experiencing a profound and amorphous grief that would surely pass on in a few minutes – my paltry attempt to skirt the truth about the hours and hours of therapy I have endured lately, tearing open old wounds, leaving the soul to bleed and battle with bleak moments between sessions, and I’m still unsure of how to heal. I sat their on a kitchen stool, arms wrapped around his lean and, still little, body and couldn’t find the words to explain my wretched state of unhappiness. And so I stuffed a sob down deep inside the ache of my loneliness and simply said, “I can’t put my finger on it exactly. It’s just there sometimes – this sadness.” And I remembered a Free To Be Song called It’s Alright to Cry. I sang a little to him between hiccups, remembering days of riding around in the car with that very CD on loop. It only made me cry harder, these words -
Crying gets the sad out of me.

And O, braver, more concise and solution oriented than I, admitted that he, unlike his mother, knew exactly why he felt the urge to cry and explained that his presentation concerning the delivery of a four-seam fast ball hadn’t gone as well as he’d hoped that day. He confessed that his classmates had clapped for all the other presentations – how to incubate and hatch a chicken, how to make samosas, how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich – all the other kids had earned at least polite applause from their peers while he felt his delivery was met with stony silence. He said, “It hurt me that my friends didn’t clap for me today.” And the two of us began to cry all over again, he for the absence of friendship and approval and I because I did not possess the salve with which to heal his grade school wound.

And I wanted to whisper, “I’m so sorry I can’t fix you. But, you see, I can’t even fix myself.”

I’m also behind on almost everything else. There are outstanding bills left to pay, the bedrooms haven’t been dusted and vacuumed in over a week and the downstairs, while clean just last Sunday, is already sullied with the clutter of school papers and muddy rubber boots and pet hair and the grime of three meals a day at the bottom of the kitchen sink.

Our dear friends who moved to California last summer are back to town for a brief visit. They will come for dinner tomorrow. I have a meal to plan and prepare. This weekend we are off to Cape Cod and I’ve agreed to handle Saturday’s cook out, steak and Italian chopped salad and a birthday cake in celebration of our hostesses’ 35th birthday. And MBH and I will have been married eleven years on Friday and, of all our eleven years, this month just happens to have been our hardest yet, leaving us both unsure about whether to celebrate this one or just ignore it. And I’m in charge of planning third grade field day which falls on Friday of next week. And, did I mention that I drank way, way too much wine last night and have all this to tackle while trying to keep my head from wobbling off my fragile neck.

Forgive me the lame post. You know what I’ll be doing today. Wish me great efficiency. I know I’ll feel better when the fire-breathing to-do list has been slayed.

Friday night was baseball in the driving rain. While I huddled at the chain link fence wishing for a squall jacket and golf umbrella, G and her father were at the annual elementary school Father-Daughter dance which is an event designed for little girls to put on sweet, once-a-year dresses and eat copious amounts of frosted confections with food coloring and caloric impact from the dessert table.

Meanwhile, the Red Sox enjoyed a rain delay while the refs at little league forced our nine year olds to swing errantly at bad pitches and stagger backwards to weave and wobble under pop flies to center field, which were inevitably missed because the ball could not be distinguished from the drift of rain and the low hanging clouds. Six innings, and an hour and a half later, they finally found the decency to call the game. We came home to thaw, throw the baseball uniform in the wash, watch the Celtics and plan for Saturday morning’s soccer game and Saturday afternoon’s baseball game and Saturday afternoon’s post baseball game outing to the town festival featuring rides called the Octopus and The Himalayan (rusty, Carnie standards that inspire fear and wonder not for the insane thrill they offer but for the anxiety we all feel allowing our children to strap into these rusty ancient contraptions hastily erected by retarded people with no teeth).

There were deep lines for fried dough and candy apples and even deeper lines for games designed to fleece us of our dollars while pursuing the big win – cheaply made but impressively sized, overstuffed animals created solely to capture the eye of six year old girls who simply must try over and over to win the ring toss.

Sunday morning saw day break and mandatory 8:30 a.m. baseball practice because, I suppose, both a Friday evening and a Saturday afternoon game was simply not enough little league for one weekend. And tonight, well, there’s piano and yet another baseball game in the gusty chill of a spring evening but there’s great relief on this mother’s part that there is leftover Chinese in the fridge and no rain in the forecast.

Luckily we were playing a team comprised of two decent and understanding women who were already fully aware of my venomous and petulant tendencies (we all played for the same team last year). They just smiled and said, Such good tennis. So much fun. To which I responded Please excuse me while I swallow my own vomit. Oh and pretty please, for a just moment, try to imagine that you just lost an important match by one game, two points in an abbreviated third set that, by North Shore Women’s League rules, cannot be played in its entirety due to time constraints and come back and tell me how much fun it was again. Really, tell me again, because I need one more excuse to slam this ball at you from the service line after play has stopped and you approach to shake my hand.

Needless to say I’ve been licking the wound, suffering the sting of injured pride and damaged self esteem, all afternoon and only after a liberal dose of Clonazepam and a towering bowl of ice cream can I even write about the defeat.

Tomorrow is another day, a practice day, in which I should force myself to do wind sprints and full half hour of back hand volleys. Instead I may read a book and begin drinking before noon and stay in my pajamas until I need to take O to the dentist. Again, which, as you all know, always always puts me in such a foul mood that I will probably be freebasing Clonazepam and eating from the ice cream carton with my fingers by tomorrow evening. Oh, and yet another winter storm is rolling in which is just a cruel joke, a lesson in enduring patience.

Good things come to those who wait. Things like tulips and sunshine and tank top weather. It’s a shame that Mother Nature is just sort of an amorphous spiritual type idea because, if she were a little more real and had a tendency to wear tennis skirts, I’d be kicking her ass right now.