Monthly Archives: May 2010

committee of adjustments

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Every now and then a correction is required. Life is busy, we are what we frequently do, and we have behaviors that are so ingrained they are knee jerk and embedded. When I was foolish and twenty I somehow had the wisdom to latch on to the finest girls at my school.  Funny, smart, kind  and extremely good people-we have unfailingly been there for each other these last decades. Weddings, child birth, a few funerals, my separation and subsequent divorce, trips away, flowers and casseroles at the door, gifts of congratulations, loud  dinners out, male strippers in homes with center halls and children sleeping upstairs, bike trips, 40th birthdays in Vegas where ‘everything stays’, calls of panic, calls of joy,  pranks, good listening, hard laughing, stepping in, stepping out.

My younger daughter asked me the other day “How do adults learn to do everything?I said – ‘committee of adjustments’ . Stuff I don’t understand, things I need to get better at, how to balance, manage, help, be. When I spend weekends or evenings with these fine people, I watch, I listen, I ask.  I grab the best of who they are and copy it.  I come back with  a chiropractic adjustment to my life. They have taught me how to make risotto, how to be kind, how to do upside down tequila shots, how to be a better daughter, friend and mother. They have even taught me about marriage, although that lesson didn’t quite do the trick.

The best part of true friendship is that it renders you  better than who you  are, sees you better than who you are and it is happy -truly happy-for you  when you  fly. Because at twenty I became acquainted with the prototype for goodness – I don’t  need to mess around- I can spot it quickly and keep finding more wonderful people to join my committee.

So on Mother’s Day when I sit accepting kindness from my children for a job well done- I thank my committee of adjustments. I  would be half of who I am without you.

Spare Change is my new post on Urbanmoms

the zoo

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One day on a family outing to a zoo, she glances over his shoulder and sees he is  texting “Hi Beautiful”. How odd, she thinks, we are here together and that is his name for me. The bottom falls out of her stomach as the surreal nonsensical morphs into the  real.  Questions flood her bloodstream, racing through her system, searching for how this could be, poisoning her life immediately and irrevocably.

She tells me later that she waited to confront him  at home,when the children were in their rooms, reading after a long day at the zoo. It is in those waiting moments that I admire her maturity or patience or I am not sure what it was. When she confronts, he denies, looking deep into her eyes with reassurance. This is our human trusting thread- we all share it on some level before we separate. It is our longing to believe and trust, regardless of the evidence shoved in front of our faces, over and over. Often it is  presented only  once , backlit, neon, dramatic and  forensically verifiable and  obvious. We can stare it down, push it back and kill it. We are dying to not lose the  ground that we know. It is shaky, the richter can’t count that high, but we have normalised it. We tell ourselves it is solid.

His words finally gave way to the truth. “I’m done” , he says.  This is what we said impolitely as kids, when we were full. He pushes his marriage away with the same insouciance as a plate after dinner. She begged for a month, they sought counselling, she confronted his lover, had public tea with her no less, and they even made love again. But he was done.

24 short months later after his life with this woman was made public,  they split up. They had moved half way across the country together, bought and renovated a house, started new traditions, took trips together and created a new life. Soon he was done again.

This was a secondary loss for the ex wife- the marriage broke from this relationship and then this relationship broke. Although possibly  just the catalyst for them to split, it feels wasteful in a way that is unbearable. It is barren and empty  and she has to revisit all that is still sore and open.

click here to read my latest post on Urban moms called DEEP POCKETS