The GGA Project -- Day #100 "Semi-Celebratory Date"

Today was pretty much the looming-largest day for which I've ever had the discomfort of trying to mentally prepare.  Can we say awkward sentence?


A couple of months ago my soon-to-be-ex and I went to court-ordered mediator to try and work out a custody agreement.  This is standard for any parents who don't come to the agreement on their own, and if there are unable to reach agreement in mediation, the mediator makes recommendations to a judge, who usually just puts those recommendations into a formal order.


This is tricky ground.  While I didn't want to agree to anything with my ex that would give him a greater share of custody than I felt comfortable with, I also took a gamble in leaving it to a mediator to decide.

This space left intentionally blank

And when I got home from that mediation meeting, I wanted nothing more than to take my son out for a little Mama/Baby date to celebrate (though that seems like a strange word to use, I'm having a hard time coming up with a better one right now)...something on his level.


Today's New Activity: Introduction to Jamba Joy


I've mentioned lately that Monkey's been teething, and as every mom knows, that can lead to entire days during which a kid will be happy to consume little more than a few cheerios and a cup of juice.  As a parent, this is troubling.  While you know they will survive just fine, you long for a return to the days of smeared peanut butter-and-jelly hair, knowing it was evidence that some kind of eating had taken place.  I wanted to take the baby out for a treat I was reasonably certain he'd like and which would provide more nutrition than the scoop of ice cream he'd certainly have gone for.


So it was that Monkey had his first Jamba Juice, Peach Pleasure flavor.  Well, about 4 ounces of it anyway.  Progress!

After that we went to the nearby library and then the park, where I pushed him on the swing and watched his eyes, so full of joy and innocence and wonder...and I felt immense relief.

To the mediation meeting, I'd brought the happiest picture I could find of my son.  I took it out just before we entered the mediation room and told myself that I would do everything I could to ensure he always retained that joy...that inasmuch as I could help it by providing him with a peaceful, loving environment, he would remain the happy child he has grown to be.  Holding him in my heart, I told the truth and am mostly at peace with where that will take things.

The GGA Project -- Day #94 "Sad Sack Club'"

When I separated from my husband I learned of an organization called Kids' Turn, which facilitates classes for parents who have separated or are divorcing, helping teach them how to co-parent in a positive and cooperative way.  I think it's pretty standard for court-appointed mediators (whom it's required for every divorcing couple with children to see, unless they've managed to somehow come up with a custody agreement on their own) to suggest co-parenting classes; ours didn't recommend it formally but mentioned that it may be a good idea.  And it is.  In theory, it is great to think that we could be assisted in the putting aside of our differences for our baby's sake.


For sure, the success of any co-parenting class depends greatly on how invested each parent is in cooperating in the first place, but I'm sure the skills learned in classes can be helpful even for couples who haven't been able to reach that point just yet.  So far I've had a difficult time talking with my ex about parenting issues because when I do, he thinks I'm "trying to tell him how to parent."  In five married years I still never figured out how to communicate any kind of concern with my ex without bruising his ego in the process.  I've stopped trying, as I can scarcely imagine a more futile exercise--but the recognizing of that doesn't exactly leave me with a good solution when it comes to the necessary discussion of parenting issues.


Enter Kids' Turn.  We've both signed up for the classes, though we enrolled in different sessions.  It says right on the organization's web site that it's best if both parents can attend (I imagine they mean to attend the same session), but it seems the other parents enrolled may have the same issues we do, as not a single (ex) couple showed up to tonight's first class of a six-week course.  It was a bunch of single parents like me, battling the rain and the SF parking to get to the waiting area of an office where the receptionist had no idea we were expected and who began making frantic calls to the people at Kids' Turn to find out what was going on.


We all waited in that office until the poor employees of whatever that office Kids' Turn had rented was had to go home for the day.  Then we moved the operation down to the office lobby, where a few phone calls revealed that the facilitator of the class had gone to another of their rented locations across the city, while the rest of us had been told to go to this one.  By the time we got to the bottom of that, some of the parents had already left.


This was, of course, frustrating.  I'd left 1 1/2 hours early from the East Bay and two others had come from San Jose...it was pretty annoying to think of having made that trip for nothing.  When it was clear our facilitator would not be coming up with a magic solution to the night's snafu, the seven of us who remained waiting decided to go to a nearby diner, since we'd all driven the distances, paid the bridge tolls, and gone to the trouble of arranging babysitters.


Today's New Activity: Dinner with Divorcing Strangers


After my separation, I started seeing a wonderful counselor at Kaiser who helped me in sorting out some of the most rotten of my immediate-aftermath  feelings.  She let me know there was also a divorce support group that I could attend if I thought it would be helpful to be among others in my same situation.  I went to one session and decided that, for then anyway, it wasn't helpful at all.  Maybe it was the fact that most of the attendees were a good bit older than me, with older children, and seemed to have more than their fair shares of bitter between them--maybe those were the turn-off factors--but for whatever reasons I didn't go back.


Now, many months later, I'm in a very different place and eager to be among people who are also navigating the winding and seemingly endless trail that ends at Destination Divorced.  The nice thing about Kids' Turn is that they divide groups by the age group of the children involved in the separation.  So in talking to the other group attendees, I found out that most of them were about my age, involved in marriages of about the length of my own (5 years or fewer), and all of them had a child or children under 4 years old.  Already we all had a lot in common.


I've decided there is no faster way to get a group of strangers to break the ice with each other than to make sure they're all in the middle of divorce proceedings.  You sure have heard the tales being relayed, about calls to the police, about lawyers, about custody matters (the whopper), about promises made and broken, false reports to various agencies, and about how much everybody was eager for the entire process to be over.  It sounds like a terrible way to get to know people.  I can say, though, that tonight was just what I needed.


Just among the women seated right next to me, two had husbands with cultures very similar to my ex's, so we had a lot to discuss on that subject alone.  A man nearby was also headed back with his ex for round two of mediation soon, as my ex and I will be this coming week.  Another man (the only one among us who was already successfully divorced) was revisiting custody matters 3 years later...it was good to hear from him just to know what can be expected further down the line.


Aside from having this instant thing in common with people, it was just nice to be among people who so clearly needed to talk; they seemed uniquely poised to understand how badly others may need to talk as well.  They were a very friendly, open, concerned and helpful group--eager to share what they knew and readily seeking the best possible solutions for their children involved.


The title of this post is, of course, tongue in cheek.  I do have to say that when we left the diner and were walking down the street I mentioned this was the weirdest group I've ever been part of....not that the people themselves were weird, but it was a strange and unpleasant reason to have been put into a group together.  But hey, at least we can sort through the strange and unpleasant together.


I'm actually happy things happened the way they did.  If the class had begun as planned, I sincerely doubt we would have had the chance to get to know each other the way we did.  The rain, the absent instructor, and the almost desperate need among us to connect with others on this path all combined for one of the best on-the-fly hangout decisions I've ever made.


I'm looking forward to walking more of this journey with my newfound, single parent pals.

The GGA Project -- Day #60 "A Little Bit of Letting Go"

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you are bound to have encountered some vague and roundabout posts in which I dance all around the subject at hand without ever getting to the point.  The reason for this was my reluctance to get into anything too personal before I was ready, coupled with my lack of faith in my ability to do so without veering wildly off the topic and into bottomless realms of sticky, yucky material.


At the same time, I've often felt that as long as I wasn't being honest about what this blog, this project, was really about, I was neglecting the most poignant and important stuff of my life as it is in the moment.  I took a small step in the right direction by amending the blog's header description the other day to mention my pending divorce.  Like I've mentioned before, there is definitely something going on in a person's life when she decides to commit to 365 Days of New, seemingly out of the blue and having nothing to do with a New Year's resolution.


I guess it's more of a New Life resolution.


Here's the gist of it: beginning in 2002 and continuing for the following 5 years (though much more sporadically toward the end) I was writing a blog called Monkalicious.  It was one of my cherished hobbies, and thinking about material to write about often added new perspective to all the things that happened to me during any given day.


In 2006 I got married, and though my husband wasn't thrilled about my blogging before we got married, it wasn't until after the deal was sealed (twice, no less, on two different continents) that he let me know exactly the extent of his disdain for my hobby.  Though I did note that his anger seemed most acute following a posted comment by anyone of the male gender (I had a semi-decent blog following back then), I was loathe to think of his criticism as simple jealousy or insecurity, chose to believe him when he said the stuff I wrote about was trivial and pointless, and opted, ultimately, to forgo the writing in the interest of keeping peace (and quiet) in my home.  By the way, perhaps my writing and subject matter was trivial and pointless, but it was something I enjoyed, so I feel I should have continued it on that grounds alone.


The writing was just the beginning of the things I chose to forgo.  I stopped spending time with almost all of my friends for the same reason (to avoid the conflict that would ensue if I saw my girlfriends even once in the span of a month, for coffee).  I stopped doing the things I found interesting and fulfilling, stopped venturing into new places and situations, and slowly began to feel the former lust I had for life begin to drain away, to be replaced by an ever-present, low- to high-level stress, the majority of my time newly devoted to the seemingly impossible task of keeping my husband from becoming enraged (I went back and forth there between "upset" and "enraged," just because "upset" sounds so much more civil, but "enraged" truly is the proper word, and since words are my passion, I want to be accurate).  Finally it came to the point where I thought I may need to chose between my family and my husband.


And maybe I did.  Which is how I came to be living with my son, in my parents' home, in the midst of a divorce.


I need to say something here.  I've said this to my friends, but I want to put it out here in the public record before I really get into things.  I take full responsibility for the choices I made in my marriage.  Though it was my husband's choice to treat me the way he did (which was, I think by any objective assessment of the events, unkindly), it was my choice to put up with it instead of demanding more respect and kindness.  And it was my choice to stay in the marriage as long as I did.  It was definitely my choice, mine and my husband's alike, to bring a child into a little marriage of horrors, and I may always have very complicated feelings about that choice.  It is made, however, and we brought a beautiful soul into the world, and nothing could ever detract from the joy I feel about that.


I decided to file for divorce about 4 months after separating.  Things were very difficult in the beginning days.  First of all, nobody in my family or among my friends had a clue what was really going on in my marriage.  To find out horrified them.  It was with a great deal of help from them, and a few books on the subject, that I began to see the dynamic of my marriage for what it really was.  And I should never have stayed in it as long as it did--not only because it wasn't right, but because there wasn't a chance of it changing.


The first night of our separation, I slept better than I had in a very, very long time.  There was a layer of anxiety whose absence was so strongly felt, I realized I had sorely underestimated how powerful it was in the first place.  In the first few weeks and months, nearly all my energy was spent trying to understand how I'd become so confused about what was normal and acceptable in relationships...it had been a slow spiral downward, so slow my dizziness was just mild enough to ensure I never got too alarmed, too fast, or all at once.  It took the help of a whole gang of helpful, loving, and supportive people for me to unravel the riddle of it.  I sometimes still need help in that way.


But after the initial period of debriefing and confusion, the fog began to lift.


And I began to reconnect with my friends.  And I went to see a couple of movies of my own choosing.  And I went to a couple of places I'd never been to before.


And I remembered what it was to enjoy again.  Not to enjoy anything specifically.  Just to enjoy, without any trepidation...without waiting for any shoes to drop.  The reclaimed sense of freedom was like breathing in the first scent of blossoms in the spring, the reminder that lying dormant for a season (or five) doesn't mean the death of a living thing.  It can make for a powerful reawakening.


It was then that I decided to start writing again.  I created this new blog and wrote a few posts.  But they were kind of few and far between.  By then I was filing for divorce, had a lot on my mind and on my plate, and wasn't taking the time I wanted to devote to writing.  A few months later, after a couple of fun new experiences and a particularly well-timed mini-epiphany during my company Christmas dinner, the idea for the GGA Project was borne.


It has been my absolute pleasure to have the chance to expose myself to so many new experiences, especially those that have come with the help or just the company of friends.  And now, about 1/6 of the way into the 365-day project, I'm beginning to realize that participating in this project truly is helping heal the sadness of what became of my marriage, and pull me out of the state of confusion that followed.  I am fully alive again.  I am reminded of all there is to be seen and felt and done out there.  I am reminded of the brevity of life.  I am reminded of laughter and family and love and joy.  I am reminded of music and arts and sports and parties, of outdoors and brilliant flavors and just pure recreation.


And that, to be perfectly and finally honest, is what this project is about.


All of which brings me to today.  To the inevitability of today, which is the sad part of divorce.


Today's New Activity: Spending the Night Away from my Baby


Just typing that brought tears to my eyes, as I sit here in a coffee shop just down the street from my soon-to-be-ex-husband's house, where I dropped off my son about an hour and a half ago now.

This space left intentionally blank

So...we went through two rounds of mediation, received the custody recommendations from the mediator, and ultimately settled into semi-permanence that exact arrangement, through our lawyers.  Since we separated nearly 8 months ago, my ex has been taking the baby sometimes for a few hours on Sundays, sometimes all day on Sundays, sometimes Sundays and an additional day in the week, and occasionally 3 times per week.  But he's never taken him overnight until tonight.  Our arrangement for the next three months is that he'll take the baby from 5:30 Wednesdays until 5:30 Thursdays, and for 8 hours on Sundays.  The time is very limited because the baby is so young and he's never been away overnight.  And for that reason we have to return to court in 3 months to see if there is the possibility for him to get a stepped-up share of custody, depending on how the overnights go.


Though I've known in my heart that there was almost nothing I could do to keep this day from arriving, it doesn't make the arrival of it any less difficult to bear.  There are very good reasons why I left my marriage, and very good reasons why I am leery about leaving my son in my ex's care, especially overnight, and especially during those long early-morning hours, when the baby--who's in the throes of toddler teething--is most likely to awaken and cry, in need of comfort.  

This space left intentionally blank

I know millions of mothers and fathers the world over have experienced this moment I have found myself in now.  Millions of mothers and fathers have feared and tried to sidestep and ultimately survived this moment, as have their children.  Just as I sat here writing this I witnessed and overheard what was clearly the exchange of a roughly 8-year-old boy between his divorced parents.  It happens all the time.  Just never in my life, until now.