Maybell 40

[Maybell]

Hello peeps!

Here are some things that happened that are worth sharing.

1. D13 had therapy yesterday. Towards the end the therapist brought me in and I had a breakdown. Eventually she sent my girl out to the waiting room and talked through some of it with me, and eventually I decided to just come out and say two things: a) it's often hard for me to manage my girl when she's being difficult because she just reminds me so much of her dad and b) even though it's not ok to, I really hate him.

But things are shifting with my girl. Now she's being normal teen snotty, not snotty plus abusive and bullying. And it turns out that I can pretty well handle normal teeen snotty without taking it personally. So that's a good thing.

2. Mr. Fantastic's girlfriend has the same first name as me. (This is not the woman who broke up our marriage). Today for the first time he sent me a text meant for her, by accident. He was so embarrassed. And I truly did not care. And that felt GREAT.

However, an hour later he discovered his car had been stolen from his own garage (an offsite space he rents half a block away from his house) and I admit I didn't feel badly for him at all. And I'm totally OK with that. No guilt about that whatsoever. Besides, I suspect that one of the Fantastic Girlfriend's sons may have borrowed the car. It has a combination lock on the drivers door and Mr. F keeps a spare key in the console. It's not one of the usual targeted models...

3. My Guy has very opposite political views to mine and occasionally we'll get into discussions about various topics that can get slightly heated. Mr. Fantastic is a sharp guy intellectually but we didn't usually get into a lot of those kinds of discussions because we agreed a lot. My Guy is fun to talk to partly because he does NOT back down. I can keep a conversation going with him and it will follow a long path from where it started and we learn a lot about each other. It does sometimes make me pause -- can I *really* like and trust someone who I disagree with on such fundamental things? He points out that our values are actually fairly similar, it's just the conclusions we draw that are often divergent. My next door neighbors are similarly opposite in their political views (from one another) and they've been happily married for 30 years. So I try to keep my eye on the things that are really important -- like the fact that My Guy is willing to communicate these things with me, and that I have the good sense to listen to people I disagree with.

4. Our Thanksgiving trip was so lovely. I loved the rhythm of basically living with him for a week. He treated me with so much care. Twice I fell asleep waiting for him to come to bed, and woke to find that he had dug up a blanket to put over me because I was cold. Once he had to go down to the front desk of the hotel to get it and I never even asked for a blanket either time, although I wasn't warm enough. When someone protects you that way, who cares about political perspectives?

By the way, we've been dating for a year now.

5. I was in a meeting at work this afternoon and came out of it to see 7 text messages on my phone. Turns out my mother's cataract surgery was successful. I had no idea she even had cataracts. All the rest of the texts were my brothers and sister-in-law saying they'd been praying for her all day.

My grandfather (her father) died on the operating table during cataract surgery when I was 14.

I haven't spoken to my parents in about a month. It's hard to. They are so busy playing all the time, and when I try to talk about what's going on in my life they throw really trite advice at me that isn't relevant to how I'm living at all. And time passes without my really realizing it. Then the more time that passes the guiltier I feel and I avoid dealing with it by avoiding calling them. And they never call me in the meantime, and then I get a text saying Mom's cataract surgery was successful and now I really feel like a jerk so I want to call them even less. I don't know how to break this cycle other than to put calling them on the calendar.

And my mother is so clear with her boundaries of what she will and will not do. She WON'T come up to visit because it's too far (although they're they ones who moved away from me). But she wants me to send the kids down "when they have a break sometime" so she can "help me" by looking after them when I'm too busy. I say "They don't have any more breaks until Christmas" and she says, "you know, if one comes up." Because we all know that's how schools schedule time off. But anyway...

6. Work has gone simultaneously a lot better and a little bit worse. But I feel like I've turned another corner. I can see how things are supposed to work and all the plates are spinning at the moment. Getting that to come together has woken up a piece of myself that has been dormant a really long time, maybe even since BD. The kids are with their dad tonight and so My Guy came over and I cooked a really nice steak dinner, etc., and after he left I moved the laundry over and bled my radiators. I've been worried about the dang radiators for months and now after a two minute Google search and 15 minutes with an adjustable wrench, the problem seems to be solved. That has given me a little more confidence that I can get the rest of my act together too. I SO WELCOME the idea of feeling competent again. I hope this feeling lasts.

Sorry for the novella. Believe it or not there are a few important things I left out, but I want to cogitate on them for a while before I admit to them out loud. I think saying the ugly thing about D13 to her therapist released some of the anger I'd been holding on to and I'm so relieved to let it go that I feel a lot more like myself than I have in a long time. It's a good feeling.