Mommy, I am going to live with you forever.

My sweet pea. All of eight years old. The girl who watches so many YouTube tutorials she is full of a fantastical amount of information, some useful, some not so much. She told me how she is going to live with me forever. I think she first started telling me this when she was five and I honestly paid no attention to it, just thinking it was the desperate pleas of childhood to prove some type of rank over the loyalty of her sister. Her sister (12) claims she is going to live in Japan. So then that leaves a lot of time and space for the little one to imagine how easy and cushy her life would be if her big sister were gone.

Firstly the little always wants sleep overs in my bed. Always not an easy thing to accomplish because I am a very light sleeper, I have sleep anxiety related to going to school, studying finance and quantitative management and the like, being able to still go to work and to not sleep through my alarm clock, and the like. Then my boyfriend sleeps over. No room in the bed for three. And thirdly, even though she is the cutest cuddle monster around, she sleeps dead in the foetal position, barely moving, she is a chatterbox and will keep me up all night until she sleeps.

So her plans involving staying with me forever include:
1) changing her sisters' bedroom into a bathroom
2) installing a slide to the basement
3) installing a swimming pool in the basement
4) installing a switch in the slide so we could go downstairs or to the pool, you can choose.
5) not letting her sister use the slide.

It literally only occurred to me how she has been saying she is going to live with me forever since we got divorced in 2015. We separated in 2014. I wonder if she thinks I am going to pack her things up and send her away.

Or I wonder if this is just normal kid behavior. I too wanted to live with my mom forever. I had zero plans to move out :)

Divorced Easter

My neighbours asked me what my plans were for Easter. I wasn't exactly able to respond to them. I just brushed it off, vaguely stating "meh, divorced holidays" and then we were distracted and the topic was quickly forgotten. Like most parents with young kids, things are forgotten, only to come steal your thoughts when you should be doing something else, like sleeping or doing work.

A divorced Easter. What is the big deal about Easter? I mean its just chocolate bunnies and plastic eggs that I must not forget to send in to school. correct? Or is it the whole redemption thing, Jesus giving the greatest gift he could give, laying down His perfectly clean life, to save us dirty sinners from an eternity of gnashing teeth.

Divorced Easter is a time when you're furiously driving down the highway to send one kid here, one kid there, to meet ex in laws for this, to spend five minutes here with another family member, to go and pick everyone up again. It is where you let bygones be bygones. Where new traditions are formed.

On the front steps of my horizon are new beginnings, new forays, a new family, a new life. I will be someone else's wife. On the back steps of my memories are my most precious moments, moving to America,  having my girls, buying this house that I inherited in the divorce (also symbolically this is our 10th year in the house this month, my twelve year old was just a tot when we moved in), all soured by the presence of a broken marriage, a family torn apart, visitors seeing family members instead of the organic innate family we once had, lives forever changed.

Some have said, my whole life, that I live too much in the past. My whole head is a jumble of things that are and things that were. I seek symbolism in things that have passed, things that can be, things that are. My life, a whirl of opportunities and memories.

Divorced Easter. I buy my ex husband a bag of goodies from his girls. They will pen their names in a card and deliver it to a man who once lived here.

Divorced parents, vying for influence, vying for their five minutes worth. Children growing up quicker than weeds. The time we have with them is the only thing that matters.

I drive to gym and my head is just a jumble. I cant think much anymore. I walk in and there is my friend, Mr. Zebra Print Leggings. He greets me, we meet before his workout. We speak briefly about the amputee guy at the gym and how incredible he is in his work outs. Then he says to me out of the blue (we hadn't even been talking about this) "I have been divorced you know. " (I didn't know that). He said "I wont tell you it gets any easier, but I wont tell you it gets any worse". He has kind eyes.

Later on we sit on our Keisers, he is three bikes down. I see him on the treadmill as I leave.

Chocolate milk and orange juice.

We're at a theme park in Atlanta on Saturday, riding the rollercoasters. My seven year old is thoroughly done with the big ones, and so am I. My eldest is off with her friends. My seven year old sees a face painter and before you know it, she is getting turned into a "pink kitty" for a mere $20. My boyfriends' face says he does and he doesn't understand why I would pay $20 for some park employee to smear communal makeup all over my daughters' face, when I could more than likely buy some decent quality face paint to take home for $5 at Walmart. But he doesn't say anything. He just watches. His hands go in his pocket. He adjust his sight to something further away in the distance. And I hand over the $20 to the makeup artist and then marvel at how much my youngest does indeed look like a pink kitten. I tell her she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Not a word is ever said about him thinking it is a waste of money, because he doesn't operate like that. Firstly it is my money, it is my daughter, and then when it comes to childhood, he is aware and supportive of the fact that memories are made up of silly actions like that day at the park. The $20 is inconsequential.

My seven year old was sick this week and the school nurse phoned, she said she hadn't seen her in a long time, possibly since the time she was in Kindergarten. She is now in second grade. I was thinking about why she would have to go and see the nurse so many times when she was in kindergarten. I wanted to know the significance of that time. My girls have both been really healthy. We don't get the flu and we've had strep a handful of times.  But they have both lived through some pretty hairy and scary times, times you would never intentionally push on your kids: In kindergarten her dad and I were divorced. I remember I would get blue slips of paper in her backpack during that time saying she had been to the nurse for a cough drop. I remember feeling appreciative of all of the ancillary people during that time who had helped her, been kind to her and her sister, during the time when her home had become a war zone.

Realizing this yesterday about the fact that the nurse hadn't seen her since kindergarten, I said to my seven year old, "do you know that you used to visit the nurse a lot when you were in Kindergarten because that is when mommy and daddy got divorced". And she said to me "no mommy, you got divorced in pre-K". So I didn't argue the time line then because I was driving and I wasn't sure. She then went on to tell me "but that is okay, because mommy, you and daddy were like chocolate milk and orange juice. You can love chocolate milk on itself and you can love orange juice on itself but its not so good if you mix it together.".

verbatim.

verbatim the words that the counseling session for divorced parents taught us to explain to our children that it is okay for the children to love each parent and to not be ashamed or to feel bad for choosing to love one parent or another.

verbatim the words that I came home and filled their heads with when I told them their daddy was going away.

verbatim the phrases that I told them, that they must have repeated to themselves, when they couldn't sleep or their worries kept them up at night.

So she said to me "I cant remember before I was three. That was too long ago. But I remember you and daddy used to fight all the time." (that I didn't remember, I thought our household was peaceful?)... And then she said "But that was a long time ago.". So I asked her, how about now, how is your house now? And she said "its fine now".

Sitting here this morning, I figure out the time line, back in 2014, when I filed for divorce, she was indeed in pre-k.

As a divorced parent you live with knowing you caused your children the greatest hurt. But you cannot parent from guilt. You have to somehow still be the authority that they need, the tough guy, the one who insists on certain standards, the one who sets the tone for the household to thrive.

But you still have to be the softy, the one who is the maker of dreams come true... The person who overpays for face painting. Some days I am more one thing than another. But they're watching everything that I do. Every action and every phrase becomes a part of who they are, how they interpret the world. Verbatim.

That girl. I loved her. I love her still.

That girl. That girl over there. Too big for her age. Body not conforming to your standards or your ideals. That girl. She is perfect. She is everything that she needs. She is everything that anyone could ever wish to be.

That girl is me. I am fiercely protective of that girl. I was there with her every time she felt less than or undeserving of being alive. I was there every time her flesh crawled with their judgment, where she felt like she could never meet their harsh standards of perfection, where she wished she could have been anyone, except the person that she was trapped in her flesh.

I love that girl. I always have. I always saw more for her. I knew she was so capable. I believed in her. I believed in me. I saw her breaking through the stereotype you formed for her. I see her being her own self.

I scroll through pages where people change their lives and they write and reflect on how they hated who they were, and they are so nasty to themselves. I never felt that way. I never felt like I was undeserving. I just struggled with finding a way to be in this world, in a world full of razor blades and harshness, its hard to be a person like me, who is hurt so easily.