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 knew she would come. Just a matter of time—the right moment, a baby girl—and I would let the last of the baby clothes go.

Ruth Alice, welcome to the world. We hope you like the sunhats, especially.

My younger daughter helps me sort through the onesies, the coveralls, the tiny dresses, worn soft from many washings.

“I sort of remember this one,” she says, holding up a yellow floral romper that she could not, possibly, recall wearing.

But a memory of her older sister, at three months old, comes to mind. I recall my relief—after the fourth or fifth diaper change of whichever anymorning it was of all the anymornings—that this particular flowered romper was clean and ready to go. I remember fitting her pale, newly chubby legs into the garment. I lay her back on the changing pad to watch her, content, kicking idly, the summer sun diffusing through her cream curtains.

I remember the old feeling, a feeling that is far more elusive now: this is the meaning of bountiful.

“Don’t cry, Mommy,” my younger daughter says, fetching me from a time when and where she was not, as sometimes I am certain she was sent to do, again and again. “I’m sure I loved it then.”

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My mind staggers, trying to wake itself. I blink again and again and try to catch my breath. Again, I find myself sifting reality from dream rubble.

Another nightmare.

Enough, already, Mind.

*****

“What’s the worst nightmare you ever had?” S asks me the other night, at bedtime.

I contemplate her question. “That a hard one. I used to dream over and over of losing people I loved, chasing after them in dreams—”

I stop myself.

She gives me a quizzical look. “And?”

“The worst nightmares are when you wake up and realize that it’s already happened. That the people you love are already long gone.”

She nods. This seems to make sense to her.

*****

I would have told you there was no way in hell he and I could have become strangers like we are. He is long gone, in every way.

*****

Now my nightmares are without hope that I will catch up to anyone. In my dreams, I don’t bother to go looking for help, for the people I think should be there.

The latest nightmares: I am completely on my own, searching for a home. I am not homeless, but I am without home. I have something less than home: home-less.
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Melancholy and I have maintained an uneasy truce, for a few months.

Then, yesterday, just like that—it edged a foot through the door.

All at once it washed over me. The familiar sense of missing…what?

Someone, something. I’m so familiar with missing what came before, I no longer recall exactly what it is that is gone.

*****

Yesterday: He has dropped off the girls’ autumn coats and jackets, unexpectedly. I hear his voice in the hall, hesitant, calling to us. When are we? For a moment, I forget, can’t say. Could be ten years ago. Could be today. Is today.

The girls run to him. “Daddy!”

I measure my steps carefully. I walk to him. I accept the bundle of pink and purple and magenta warmth. We speak politely, as we often do, for a few minutes. Then he must leave.

“Goodbye, Love,” he says to one daughter, kissing her head. I envy her, although I instantly deny the emotion, stamp it out. I struggle to recall if he ever called me this: “Love.” I was Sweetpea, Petunia, Honey. Wasn’t I?

It matters not a bit, not now.

This is what I marvel at over and over again: that something that mattered so much once can shift, transform, dissolve—then matter not at all.
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Rehearsals for the play are moving along at a brisk clip. The play goes up in mid-October. The last time I was onstage, I was in NYC. I was newly pregnant with my first (and didn’t know it). Having kids put the temporary kibosh on acting, but I always suspected I’d go back to it. I couldn’t have guessed then that it would take me a decade to return to something I love so much. Motherhood—ah, it’s funny that way, isn’t it? One year stretches into three, three stretches into five, five to ten. Stretch marks, it seems, are not just for skin. When children arrive on the scene, time has a funny way of stretching as well, and leaving its marks.

I am rusty. Not as rusty as I’d worried I’d be, but rusty nonetheless. Memorizing lines is a trickier feat than it used to be. So is the physical comedy—two rehearsals ago, while slaying an imaginary crocodile, I also slew my poor lower back, and wound up in bed, drooling and passed out from naproxen and muscle relaxants.

I am mother; hear me snore.
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Vacationing with kids is a daunting enough prospect with two parents on hand. Single parenthood pretty much rules out a vacation feeling like an actual vacation whatsoever. I am okay with this. I am a pragmatist, people, not a pessimist. I like to remind myself to keep my expectations low. Totally works for me. Last year, I pulled it off without completely losing my mind, and this year, I betcha I can do it again.

Consider your average continental U.S. beach vacation. Okay, so I am considering the average continental U.S. beach vacation, done dirty and dirt cheap. You can think about other things. La la la la la you can’t hear me.

It wasn’t always so purty or easy, even with two fairly calm, sturdy adults to drag the four hundred pounds of beach gear two miles to the beach, only to listen to the kids whining about how they like the motel pool better because the ocean is too “squishy.”
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The hardest part of this becoming

real, of fighting tooth-and-nail to

see and to be seen? There will

never be answers, clear endings,

agreed-upon statements of fact.

We leave that to the friends, no

longer so mutual.
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My ex and I have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding our dating lives post-divorce.

It is not a policy that we discussed beforehand. It is not a policy that we discuss now. It simply is. At some point, it seems like it’s got to change. But for now, for better or for worse, this is where we are.

The girls, of course, carry information back and forth like pollinating bees. I know which names they have mentioned to him; I know which names they have mentioned to me. They speculate as much as I do. I can see them working it out in their heads: their parents will be with other people. Some grownup friends are just friends; some are friends with potential to become much more to Mommy and Daddy.
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This is super.

I am downward-facing Jenny. I am on my belly on the rough porch roof, clinging to an air conditioning unit by its electrical tail. The asphalt shingles scrape my abdomen as I clamor for the slipping appliance. I manage to dig the sweaty fingers of my right hand into the vents, but still, the AC slips some more, precariously close to the edge of the roof. Both the AC and my skull are on a collision course with the sidewalk two stories below, or, possibly worse, the roof of my car.
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He first wooed me by asking me if I would collaborate with him.

I did not know then, nearly 14 years ago, that our collaboration would eventually include two daughters.

It is that time of year, the time of awards and ceremony and graduation and promotion to the next grade.

The girls wanted us to sit together, so they could find us easily. I wish we could have found each other easily.
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