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.

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?

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.

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.

I find myself uttering the hackneyed phrase you don’t know how lucky you are, daily, sounding like my parents and their parents before them and wondering when I turned into my Nana, convinced that I’m but moments away from donning a bathing cap and doing the breast stroke in the lap lane. And, like all children the world over, since time began, my children successfully ignore my reprimands and scolding, my attempts to remind them that in other parts of the world, hell, in other parts of town, whole families live in tents and share bedding with their sisters.

It strikes me that lucky is a relative concept. There is always bigger, better, more and until a person experience smaller, worse and less, true understanding is just not possible. And so it is that I am contemplating developing a Fresh Air exchange program in which we invite lower-income children from Detroit, Trenton and the Bronx to come to our town for the week and work on their butterfly kick, their golf swing and the proper construction of a sand mansion while my kids take their places in their inner-city neighborhoods, delivered there by Greyhound with only a knapsack and twenty dollars stuffed in their pockets. There they will learn about dodging street fire and they will come to know the stench of urine in the stairwell on a humid summer afternoon. They will play among the shards of glass and look forward to neighborhood children yelling ‘Narcos’ whenever the police ride ’round the block to hassle the petty dealers. There they will learn to associate the summer evenings with the sounds of sirens and car alarms and the occasional domestic dispute that has spilled out into the hallway. Maybe then, when I get them back, a little strung out, sleep deprived, a whole lot wiser, will they get what I mean by lucky.

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.

It’s not that I can’t remember the sort of lazy, free-form tangle of Summer, it’s just that I’m sure I’ve glorified those two halcyon months of childhood each year, because they couldn’t have been anywhere near as good as I remember them. My brothers and I, as children, never went to sleep-away camp or to the country club pool or took sailing lessons at the yacht club. There were no organized golf or tennis lessons and the there may have been only five days of the entire break when we even attended any structured day camp, it was an Audubon sanctioned program and we ran around in the forest, loosely supervised while capturing snakes and racing bull frogs and rolling in poison ivy. We learned the names of wild flowers, Queen Anne’s Lace and Purple Loose Strife. We earned our Audubon stripes by enduring the week-end MudWalk which was a swamp slog, waist deep in decomposing muck. It was all about emotional endurance, withstanding the indignity of leaches and mosquitoes and pockets of quicksand that captured your shoes and sucked at your shins.

The most one could hope for during this two hour trek was to avoid the urge to cry. (Jessie Allen broke down half way through the walk each year, providing the rest of us with the ammunition to make her next 11 months a living hell. In her defense, I still cannot watch a movie with American soldiers traipsing through the swamps of Vietnam holding their guns over their heads without thinking about that Mudwalk and Jessie Allen and the effort it took for ALL of us not to succumb to tears.)

Though we had a pool in the backyard, we were forced to take swimming lessons at the Town Pond which was really just a man made hole filled with startlingly green water, heavy with algae, stinking in the heat of August. The pond never warmed and there were pockets of still cold, deep in the middle, where the bottom was obscured by algae growth so thick you could feel it between your toes. We shared rumors about the various atrocities purported to lie on the bottom – dead horses, abandoned cars, the ghost of Minerva Graf who supposedly drowned a decade earlier while her mother bonked the life guard. As part of the Junior Water Rescue course we were made to swim the length of the pond and back, the whole time stroking for our lives, maintaining a speed we hoped would out-pace that of Minerva, up from the deep, surely intent on claiming a pre-teen companion.

In the evenings we played a loosely organized game we called Chase which involved a lot of hiding and running and suppressing the urge to wet your pants. Chase was best played after dusk when the fear of dark shadows and neighborhood dogs made regular old hide and seek a singular thrill. We were barefoot, we were dirty, we were probably put to bed that way each night leaving the happy smear of summer on our pillowcases.

I wish, for my children, these idealized memories of summer, memories full of taste and sound and smell sensation, singularly unique, familiar yet fabled, the sting of mosquitoes around the ankles while picking strawberries from the field, the smell of damp bathing suits and towels in a heap on the bathroom floor, the taste of salt surf on the tongue and the disappointment that is the last half of sandwich stolen by a shrieking sea gull, dinners eaten on the screened porch listening to the peculiar call of the Whipperwill just beyond the whir and pass of the lawn sprinklers at dusk, the drip of ice cream down the wrists on humid nights in August, the rush of wind while biking fast, down hill, with no hands, “the conscious yet not resentful sensation of being caught up in a web of something as tangible and fragile as thread.”

Eight weeks, 56 days, 1324 hours, 79,440 minutes of summer still to go, but who’s counting?

Quote from John Cheever’s The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well

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.”

He went on sketching the apple tree in the yard, just beyond his bedroom window until he couldn’t bear the aching nothingness of the afternoon and went down the stairs to stand in front of the open refrigerator.

“If you’re hungry, Timmy, decide what you’d like to eat before opening the fridge door. You’re letting all the cold out,” his mother said.

Timmy swiped a yogurt from the second shelf though it wasn’t what he wanted. He let the door slam and watched his mother jump. He left the utensil drawer open after removing a spoon and sat down at the weathered farm table to eat his banana strawberry yogurt from the carton. He didn’t realize that his mother was comparing him to his father. He didn’t know that his mother was busy considering whether or not standing in an open fridge or leaving utensil drawers open were learned or inherited habits. He hadn’t sensed that, just last month, she had considered leaving.

“You’d better get your cleats, Timmy,” his father called from the home office. “Ten minutes to game time.”

Timmy looked to his mother who shrugged. He had hoped that they could all forget about baseball. His mother seemed willing, eager even, to overlook the entire sport but his father came into the kitchen punching the inside of his well worn glove, the one he’d had since high school. It smelled of twenty year old sneakers and slightly of piss.

“Today’s the day, Timmy. Maybe they’ll let you pitch an inning or two. I’m guessing you’re going to hit today. I’m thinking a double or a home run,” his father said confidently. Unable to strike the right tone, his father’s over-the-top optimism only underscored the true insecurity he felt as a man who had fathered a son who had, so far, managed to strike out and miss pop flies to right field each and every weekend afternoon for the past three months.

“Don’t forget to wear your cup. I’m thinking you might get to play catcher for a bit,” his father said.

“I don’t want to play catcher, Dad,” Timmy said. Just thinking about the other team stealing bases while he bobbled the ball behind home plate made him feel nauseas.

“Don’t be silly, Timmy. You’ll be a great catcher,” his mother said sweetly though she wouldn’t come to watch the game. She had learned to leave her husband to the task of coach and spectator as he was possessive of the role, embarrassing in his urgency.

Timmy filled his mouth with another spoonful of yogurt and left the half empty carton on the table for his mother to dispose of while he climbed the stairs to find his cap and glove.

“Nonsense. Your mother’s right. You were born to catch,” his father said as he walked out the back door to start the car and wait for Timmy in the driveway, the engine running.

“Hurry,” his mother urged from the foot of the stairs. “You know how your father likes to warm you up a little before a game.”

Timmy sat on the floor of is bedroom and wriggled into the tight polyester stretch of his baseball pants. He paused to remember the last game he’d pitched. It was unfortunate that his debut on the mound had coincided with his father’s first time volunteering as umpire. Being earnest and eager to show he would play no favorites, his father had been ruthless with the calls. Timmy walked six batters and was taken out in the bottom of the third. His next at bat was a three swing strike out. Standing behind him wearing the official face mask and chest plate, his father had kicked the dirt in frustration and later cried in the shower wishing his son, Timmy, had turned out at least the athlete he had been.