February is just about here. It’s the month of Valentines sent and not sent, the month when the New England mud begins in earnest, and the month the ghosts here get restless. Already I can feel the melancholy creeping this way, up the hill, to my door.

I really hate that damn word depression. A depression is a crater, a dip in the road, a surface bent out of shape. A depression is one spot, simple to point out. There, there it is.

I keep moving—years of moving on, how absurd can it get?—but my melancholy follows me. This is grief, yes? That’s my guess, anyway, and since I’m the last one standing here, I suppose I can call it what I like. Complicated grief is the official term for a loss so massive, the mind cannot work it out. Oddly enough, complicated grief has yet to make its way into the official manual of psych disorders. When it does, I expect the editors will take pains to make sure the definition refers only to the unshakable sadness that follows the death of a loved one—and only death. The big guns. They won’t let me get near that diagnosis, because there’s no death certificate.

Divorce, well, that’s something else. One is expected to recover, get over it. Was this always the case? At a certain point, one is expected to absorb the divorce into one’s being like anything else that identifies us: eye color, a scar, a middle name.

A comedian I like was talking about divorce. His point: no need to feel bad for a friend going through a divorce. After all, he argued, no one’s leaving a happy marriage.
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I’d have to rank report cards near the top of my Stuff That’s Fun About Parenting list. I love getting their report cards. I devour them in private with a heady and completely insufferable mix of:

a) Yeah, I could have told you that. The child is AWESOME.
b) She did what?!? I know, right?!? The child is AWESOME.
c) A 2? No way, she was robbed. The child is AWESOME.
d) This child must have a terrific mother. The child is AWESOME.

The girls and I make a date out of it. We snuggle up in one or the other’s bed, and we read our favorite parts aloud. This time around, for instance, H’s teacher declared that H’s “gentle and quiet leadership” was an asset to the class.

“GENTLE AND QUIET?” yelled S. We all fell over laughing, especially H, who toppled off the bed, cackling. “Gentle” and “quiet” are not words that accurately reflect her at-home personality, but it makes for good reading, for sure.
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I am not a natural runner. So this training for the Dirty Girl Mud Run in May — a teensy 5K — is a daunting new endeavor. Knowing that my oldestdearestbestest friend, Jackie, is training at the same time down in our native Philly for the same event makes each lurching-and-huffing-and-puffing run much more appealing, especially in this freezing cold weather. I picture her rolling her eyes at the Official Runner Creatures she’s crossing paths with, and I laugh out loud.

I can see this is going to become an annual tradition. She’s already got the hotel (with fitness center and hot tub) booked for us.

Originally, we’d planned to do this as a “Just Us” event. But then we realized there was no way our four girls would want to miss out on their mothers sloshing through mud and climbing cargo nets in running shoes and tutus.

Yes, tutus. We know how to live, people.
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I keep stumbling across the number 15. It’s a number that holds no particular meaning or symbolism for me. Fifteen: just a run-of-the-mill odd number, jaunty and athletic, raring to go.

So I wonder why it won’t leave me alone, this week. I keep hearing it in the loose threads of conversation around me at the supermarket. I find fifteen minutes, exactly, left on the parking meter. Fifteen cents, exactly, in my purse. I stop the microwave when the cheese bubbles over inside. I pay no attention to time. I see later that I’ve stopped it with fifteen seconds left on the clock.

Today, I trip outside the post office. I catch myself, regain my balance. At my feet: the number 15, stenciled in an empty parking space.

Fifteen. The only question I can think to ask myself, “What was I doing fifteen years ago?”

January 1997. Do you know where you were, what you were doing?

The moment I ask myself this innocuous question, I realize the answer lies right there: in the fact that I don’t want to answer it. January 1997. No. I don’t like the answer, for a variety of reasons. My chest tightens, considering that time.

I was finishing graduate school, an MFA in Theatre. I was getting over a breakup so enormous, so sad, that I shake my head just thinking about it, even now. Was it preventable? Possibly.

This leads, of course, to the inevitable bigger question: Could any of it have been prevented—any of the sadnesses since, or to come?

Or is this just the way? Is this just the landscape of any life?

I don’t like thinking about that time. It rattles me. I don’t know why the heart still hurts like it does. I would prefer not to remember.

I met someone, not long after, of course. The way of the young: to think that there will always be someone, just around the corner, someone just right.

I got married in 1999, had a child in 2001, had another in 2003, almost had the book deal in 2005. Those athletic odd years: busy, busy. The last fifteen years have encompassed so many of the ordinary-extraordinary milestones, the ones we tick off in polite conversation with strangers. Yes, marriage. Yes, two children. Yes, a writing career, still promising.

Everything: promising enough.
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I call my BFF at work. We’ve been friends for 35 years, since the first day of first grade, when she wasn’t sure what bus to take home. Back then, she lived one block away from me. When she gave her address in a tiny voice to my teacher, I catapulted my hand into the air. “She’s on my bus! I live on that street! I’ll get her home! Bus 3B to Revere Street!”

I remember the pride I felt, being the one to escort home the shy girl with the long yarn-ribboned, honey-gold ponytails. I finally had a friend. This was good stuff.

Thirty-five years later, we live five hours apart instead of a block. The minute I hear her voice on the phone, though, she is right *here*. She is never far, not really.

We dispense with formalities, as usual, and dive into our urgent discussion.

“OH MY GOD,” she hisses over the phone. “I AM ALREADY PEEING MYSELF. DID YOU LOOK AT THE OBSTACLES? DID YOU LOOK? WE HAVE TO CLIMB A WALL!”

“It’s perfect for us,” I say. “There’s so much mud, no one will be able to tell we’re peeing ourselves during the entire course.”

“Go look at the obstacles. I’m getting off the phone. I can’t be on the phone listening to you look at the obstacles or I will pee my office chair.”

She hangs up, and I adore her even more, if that is possible. I can’t imagine how much I will love this woman by the time we are 80, 90. This is the best New Year’s Resolution ever. We are going to get dirty. Really, really dirty.
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I wake up to Today, December 23, 2011:

Bed: A folded red-striped shirt, under my pillow. Mounds of blankets. The quiet. The calm. A swollen, painful right foot. What happened to the foot, I cannot tell you.

Downstairs: Keurig coffee maker—single servings. More quiet. Dogs waiting patiently to go out. Boxes piled high, waiting to be wrapped. Wrapping paper and gift tags. The tree, decorated for two weeks already, shining. Two cats, no kids—not until tomorrow. More laundry. Emails to answer. Training to complete, online. Shrink-wrapped windows, undone by teenage cat claws.

Outside: Gray, damp. Carpet of wet leaves. Dark bare branches overhead. Some wind, but still, the quiet surprises me.

I wrap gifts. I email. I elevate and ice my foot while I look at photographs and send greetings on Facebook. Do I think about yesterday, the day before, the day before that? I do, of course. But I have become accustomed this house, myself in this house, without the girls, without company. I do fine, now. I try, sometimes, to imagine it’s always been like this, just like this.
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I get by with more than a little help from my friends.

I have no idea where I’d be, if it weren’t for the other single mothers/divorcees (that word! so musty! so archaic!) out there—friends and acquaintances and blog readers. They save this heart and soul of mine.

As my dear darling friend K put it last night: “Divorce runs you through a cheese grater.” All I could do was nod. Yes. That. Exactly that.

You may have wanted things to be different. Your divorce may even have been the right decision. Even so, a divorce will shred you in such a way that there’s no going back to who you were before. Because you—she—is not there anymore. Old friends fade in the wake of divorce, because you are no longer who you were, no longer someone they understand. You will never be who you were, then, for better and for worse. Your children have no choice but to accept the changes in you. Friends, extended family—another story.

K is visiting this week from the other side of the country. A longtime blog friend, we’d finally met in person a year ago in California, and clicked. She gets it. I don’t know what I would do, without her.
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I always knew I wanted to be a mother. I knew I’d regret it, if I didn’t have children. My maternal grandmother loved being a mother; my own mother loved (and loves) motherhood as well. So the decision was not a difficult one, not for me.

Fertility was not a problem for us, and for that, I was grateful. So many friends, I found, were having difficulty conceiving. Even on the very worst days of parenting, I know how lucky I am. I’m not as graceful a mother as either my mother or my grandmother. I lurch, I yell, I am a lousy cook. But the girls know how much they are loved, and they have a good sense of who they are, and who they want to be.

I envy them this, their clear sense of themselves. I envy their wide-open future—the array of options that lies before them.

Ten years from now, they will be off to (or, in Sophie’s case, in) college. Where will I be? What will I be doing?

They know me as a writer. I know myself as a writer, and yet, I want something else. I have struggled for years, to find a foothold as a writer, to find work that allows me to be creative. I keep feeling that I am supposed to be doing something else—but what?
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2011 is winding down. Time to take stock. But not to make stock. Not yet.

2011: Not the best year of my life, but not the worst either. The fact that I’m divorced is no longer the first thing that comes to mind upon waking. I like to think a time will come when weeks will pass without my remembering this label, without my remembering that there was another time, a time of twos and teams and we’ll and ours.

The house purge continues, slowly but surely. I am getting better at letting go, at detachment. It will never be my strong suit, but I’m improving.

One area of my life that I still struggle massively with is cooking. Cooking for one, or cooking for three: I suck. Why do I suck? Why is this such a mental block for me? I can’t figure out why my usual creative approach to life doesn’t extend to the kitchen.

Even cooking with a recipe, I manage to ruin meals. WTF?!?

This week, however, I HAD A CULINARY SUCCESS, PEOPLE! I did! I got it in, just under the wire, before 2012. I am awfully excited to share it with you. Yes, Readers, I am going to share a recipe with you, because I am so darn excited and proud of myself. These are not just ORDINARY fries. These are DOWNRIGHT TRIUMPHANT TURNIP FRIES, a dish for any strong single mama and her brood!

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This Thanksgiving happened to fall on my ex’s week with the girls. The way things have worked out, it’s been a few years since I’ve had the girls with me for Thanksgiving. It’s a bittersweet day, sometimes, because there’s no one and nothing I’m more thankful for than those two beautiful young ladies.

My father lives in Philadelphia; my brother and his family live in Washington state. Finances make it impossible for frequent visits. So most of the time, it’s Mom and I. Her help with the girls has proven invaluable over the last few years. When the girls aren’t with us, though, she feels their absence almost as keenly as I do.

This year, Mom and I were invited to Thanksgiving dinner in Syracuse, at the home of two very dear friends and their two little boys. They would be hosting family and friends. It’s been years since we sat at a long table full of folks, and Mom and I leaped at the chance. We were hungry for a sense of family — and these friends have become chosen family over the past few years. I had not realized how important this was to me, how much I had been missing. With these friends, I am family. I come as I am—however I am—and I belong, simply, sweetly, and without need to impress. With our chosen family, I can just be, and my God, this is precious beyond words.
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