C'mon over Angus!

My son Wyatt can be awkward. Maybe not awkward. Exceedingly shy, intense and nervous.  He didn't speak until he was over three years old.  He had panic attacks all last year, fearful, he said, of dying.  His first grade teacher told me he was the quietest kid he'd had in well over a decade of teaching. My dad - a pediatrician - said it might be "selective mutism" which I guess just means you don't talk when you don't feel like it.  Needless to say this makes it hard for the boy to make friends.

He frets about this. His older brother Virgil is what one might call a "social butterfly". He talks. A lot. Like really a lot. He won't stop talking to me right now while he's playing a video game and I am trying to write this.  It's a constant mind-numbing stream of inanities.  He's a good student but every teacher he's ever had has felt the need to speak with either me or his father about his spontaneous verbal eruptions. They seem to have calmed this year but his impetus to talk appears rooted in wanting to be included in every conversation. In every friendship. Which he manages to do. He finds himself at the center of the social circle of Ms. A's 5th grade class.

Thus Wyatt has said to me: I'll never have friends like Virgil, mom.  He squeezed my hand, a little desperate, pleading for help. Which cracked my heart a little bit though I managed to hide my weepy eyes.

So it was with tremendous relish that I rang young Angus' mother when Wyatt told me he wanted said Angus to come over to play. Yay! Wyatt made a friend. Yippee!! Happy happy day. I called. Angus' mother seemed confused. "Why?" she asked.  "Well...because. Wyatt likes Angus."

"Is this a sleepover or something?" she quipped. She didn't sound pleased in the slightest. Meanwhile, I was still grinning the grin of a canary eating cat.  I did not relent. We made a tentative plan. She didn't call me back though to confirm this tentative plan.  Why wasn't she as excited as I was? Was Angus too cool for my Wyatt? Was Wyatt an undesirable in the 2nd grade New Traditions class? Who knew, who cared.

I persevered. I texted, probably irritating the poor woman to death. She didn't seem to care if Angus came over or not. But I did. So here he is in my living room on a rainy Saturday. I didn't even know what he looked like, acted like, nothing, before I hassled his mom into bringing him over. He could've been the thug of our local elementary school, stealing lunch money and tripping kids with trays of chocolate milk and chicken nuggets. Thankfully he's not. He's a sweet kid with big glasses and teeth awry. Wyatt says he's smart and that's why he likes him. That's my boy.

They're playing Wii and then a round of monopoly. And I think Wyatt may just be unselecting 'mute' this year. Sigh.

No no, it's my fault

I've always worried a lot, panicked in some instances, about whether I'm doing things right. In a way that might bring approval. In a way that avoids descriptions like lazy, unfocused, undisciplined, stupid, mean.  This is cowardly, I am sure. I don't want to see those scathing words attached to my name, so I toil against them. Not for something, but against something. Avoidance.

I don't know if it started with gymnastics - my coaches were very critical and I would have done anything to avoid that raging criticism, avoidance of it amounted to praise - or if it was simply honed there. My therapist - who I haven't seen in some time, but probably should, many of my friends would assert - said that it was innate in me, but that it was sharpened through gymnastics. Because it worked. In my desire to extract approval, I worked very hard. Sometimes against my own best interests (broken ankle, dragged behind me, training still - I didn't realize this would have repercussions later in life). And when I worked very hard, I met some degree of success. So there you have it.  Fear of disapproval --> tenacity --> moderate success -->avoidance of disapproval --> more hard work --> more moderate success.

So it is who I am and that is fine. I've come to accept it, I think. I've turned it over and over, looked at it from many angles. In a desire to make others proud or at least not mad, I work. I take blame sometimes deserved, sometimes maybe not, though I never believe that when my boss tells me so (this wasn't you, you know?) He's missing my role in it, I think. He's being nice, because I beat him to the punch. But in all this self-flagellation, I achieve something. And make myself proud. I am reminded here of Amy Chua's philosophy on parenting, which she claims is "Chinese" in nature. Be hard on your kids, make them work beyond what they would ever feel was comfortable, because you believe in them, because it will make them successful. Not being exceedingly tough on them - in her case demanding hours of violin practice a day, no TV or sleepovers, calling one daughter 'garbage' in public - amounts to not believing in them, prompting failure.  My coaches must have been secretly Chinese.

Anyway, I now find myself wondering, extremely anxious, about whether I'm separating from my husband right. Whether I'm making him mad. I know I already made him very mad. And very sad. I left. I fucked up. My egregious mistakes feel unrecoverable and irrevocable. In my heart, I can't see what he's done in this, though when I read old journals, I know in my head, he did stuff. I just don't feel it. And it doesn't matter anyway, I know, because here we are. No point is divvying up blame now, is there?

But maybe I can make up a little ground by being good at getting a divorce. My past mistakes are something I will have to learn to live with. Something that will grow duller over time, I hope. You'd like to think that by willing something enough - I am desperate to take that back, that action, those words -  you could actually change what happened.  But you can't.  It doesn't stop you from trying, playing it over and over in your mind. If only...

But now, in the moment, am I doing this right?  This thing I can still change because I haven't fully done it yet. Am I being nice? Am I being fair? Is he getting what he needs? Does he have enough money? I just dropped my kids off at his house and find myself wondering, is he madder than normal? Have I done something wrong today? How do I fix it? How do I avoid making him hurt more? Do I ask him? No. Doesn't seem possible given how little we speak. So I am guessing. Inaccurately, I am almost certain.

Can I let go of trying to satisfy his expectations? Should I? If I do, will it change my entire orientation to the world, to life? And is that good or bad?

At worst, I'm a people pleaser. At best, I'm driven. How do I lose the first, and keep the second? How does a person accept appropriate blame, but not carry the whole of it around all the time? Accountability, but with limits, with - I hate this word, but can't think of another - boundaries. In marriage, in work, in child rearing. If I don't learn it, it's going to eat me up. So I better get on it, work on pleasing myself. That came out wrong.  You know what I mean.

Tacos and tearfulness

Just the other night as I was setting the table for dinner, I spontaneously combusted into tears in front of my two boys.  This spontaneous combustion happens fairy regularly these days but I try to keep it in check when they are around.  Little boys don't need to feel like they need to take care of their mother. Unfortunately, it seems to be not all that controllable right now. It is truly an unexpected explosion. Nonetheless, this was the first time I'd done it in front of them. If they've been there when it's happened in the past, I've managed to seek cover in the bathroom for long enough to hide any trace of weepiness. Not so this time.

It had been a very difficult day. The first day that my husband and I spent locked in a mediator's office trying to negotiate the terms of our marital dissolution, as the mediator politely and euphemistically likes to call it. We were arguing - maybe debating is a better word - about the terms of our impending divorce. How much alimony and child support should I be paying and for how long.  Needless to say I was saddened to be having these conversations, utterly confounded by the fact that I was sitting in a room with the man I married and had two children with and neither of us could look each other in the eye. And crushed under the weight of the probability that I will be financially on the hook for a very long time to come. At times I felt barely able to breathe from the pressure of knowing that there would never be a break for me, from the pressures of work, given the likely terms of our future arrangement.  Part of me wanted to jump into his lap and throw my arms around him and feel his scratchy face against my cheek again.  Smell his warm neck.  And part of me wanted to bang the table in frustration and fear and rage.

So I started crying while I put the tacos on the table. At first, my face contorted. Virgil said: mommy you're making a really weird face. Oh! You're crying.

"Yes, I am. I had a hard day.  I'm sorry. I shouldn't."

"It's ok, mom. You should cry if you're sad. You should let it out," Virgil empathized. Quite a kid.

"Are you sad that Aunt Rachel's dad died?" asked Wyatt.

"Well, sure, I'm sad for her. But I didn't know him very well. But I am very sad for Aunt Rachel. And I'm sad that Brain (our cat) died. And I miss daddy. And our family. And work is really hard right now. But I'll be ok. Let's have some tacos."

"It'll be ok, mom. And you can always tell us what's wrong. Really, it's ok."

And I felt better. And we ate tacos.

Sunday Black

A long Sunday awaits. The Sunday blues have taken on an entirely new shade of blue (deeper, darker) since Sunday has become the day I return my kids to their father.  No longer a hazy, ill-defined sense of sadness. Sundays are sadness incarnate.   I'm fraught contemplating the 12 hour stretch ahead with no human interaction. And knowing that I won't see my kids until 3:30 on Wednesday afternoon when they are finished school for the day. I will try to put some of my new year's resolutions to work today. Make use of my time alone to enjoy the things I like to do (what are those again?) Write down the things that bother me, make me panic so I can put them out there, with the vague and hopeful notion that if they are "out there, on paper" they won't rot in my gut. Like: the agitated frenzy that sets in about 10 hours in, that my kids won't want to come back to me on Wednesday. There I wrote it down.  Is it mitigated? We'll see.

I will exercise. Cry less. Not not at all. Just less.

Ok. Here we go.