{by Gailt Breen of These Little Waves}

photo credit: Sean Hubbard/@seanhubbard

I look at him through red rimmed eyes. He wipes my cheek dry with one thumb and asks, Are you happy?

Yes. No. Sometimes.

Yes, when I’m focused.

No, when I falter.

Sometimes.

We sit in the center of our bed like our three children often do. Our room is large but this space in it is small. Our toes touch. Our voices conspire.

He is loving mixed with worry. I am anxious laced with anger.

Anger because he dared scratch beneath the surface of what I want seen. I am faltering.

When I’m focused, I see a straight path to my treasure. The obstacles along the way are simply tasks to complete.

But inevitably, I falter. I falter. It is my own undoing every single time. I steal my own confidence. My own vision. My own focus.

I hide these treasures somewhere deep inside until they are no longer visible. And I replace them with ugliness. Fear. Insecurity. Jealousy.

{by Mary of Giving Up on Perfect}

We sat shoulder to shoulder in a tiny dorm room around a tiny TV, watching one of our favorite movies. Just as Johnny marched over to Baby and pulled her out of the corner, our friend Jared walked in the room.

As he took in the room, looking from one girl to the next . . . to the next . . . to the next, he said, “What is wrong with you guys?”

Blinking, we looked up at him and realization dawned. Every single one of us was staring at the screen with a [ridiculous] dreamy look in our eyes. It was like we were in a trance.

The same kind of romance trance I slip into when I read romance novels.

(by Emily from In The Hush Of The Moon)

there’s nothing colder than a turned back and he shivers

we don’t fight often, and this isn’t a fight, more of a bruised heart and confused language and tripped-up-tired and finally, the back-turn

but it feels like a fight and it rips me because i wonder if he’ll remember this one when it’s over: just like the others

“what others?” husband asks, eyeing my burger as i bite, barbecued offering, and his salad which he says is fancy because of the shredded carrot and he hates shredding carrots and i’m already melting but i hate to tell him this

i remind him of years ago, when i wasn’t eating nor sleeping and the mascara-streaked pillows and the punched walls and the days he’d sit in the car for fear of coming into the house and he says

“i don’t remember that. i remember watching tv with you until you fell asleep. i remember the meals you did eat with me, the pizza we’d share, the popcorn, and i remember never waking angry.”

the carrots taste fancy in my mouth…

{by Lindsey from I Digress: Tales from a Baby-Starved Wingnut}

We are in a house of windows. In a glass house, which is ironic if you’ve been with me for the past 72 hours. Storms are rolling in back to back, rain is coming down in hard sheets. The wedding is outside. Or was supposed to be. Our host has an 80′s love music compilation CD playing in a house-wide stereo system. The bride stands at the window just outside of the yellow lamp light and watches the rain while REO Speedwagon plays in the background. I am oddly reminded of the movie Forces of Nature, where the bride waits in the hurricane for her groom.

It has been a long road to this day. The family is held together by gossamer threads of duty. The grandmother might not come, people are not speaking.

I don’t fit in with these girls. Of all the bridesmaids I am the only one that only knows the bride through the groom. I gravitate to the mother of the bride. Something about the entire day makes me need a mother.

****

I am getting my makeup done. The artist asks if I have babies. I say no, and don’t offer any explanation. When she asks me what I want my eyes to look like, I say dark and heavy.

****

I am getting my hair done. The hairdresser asks me if I have babies. I offer a slightly more hopeful answer than I gave the makeup artist and say, not yet! She does big, loopy curls in my hair while she eats a sandwich and I try not to worry about her dripping mayo on my back. She says her GPS brought her here, she has never been so far out in the country. I laugh. She says, seriously . . . where are we? I tell her the honest answer, that I don’t know. I am just as lost as she is.

****

Every hour the tension increases. The bride is screechy and stressed, her sisters hate her behind her back. Our host, her aunt, gives us a talk about Jesus Christ and His Plan. If His Plan is for rain on your wedding day, you accept it. She says: You have to bend to his will. Submit. What he wants is what you get. I think: Jesus sounds like an angry toddler. She says that one year her husband and her decided to celebrate their anniversary with Jesus. Her husband got her a card that said: Happy Anniversary to you, me and JC! The bride sets her plate down and walks out of the room.

****

The Aunt’s job is to be the time enforcer. In the last 15 minutes she yells the time left before we have to leave every minute. TEN MINUTES, she screams. Peter Cetera sings in the background. NINE MINUTES. My bag is packed by the front door, I stand there with my dress over my arm, it’s making sweaty creases in my skin. EIGHT MINUTES. When it gets down to the last two minutes the bride begins the epic meltdown. She is screaming at everyone except me, because I haven’t even gone near her in the last 2 hours.

*****

I am in the backseat of the car on the way to the ceremony. I hate the backseat, I get carsick. The maid of honor is driving. The bride is rocking back and forth with her veil neatly tucked in her stiff hair, chanting something about hating everyone. Her little sister is in the back with me. We are both texting people about how badly we want to be somewhere (anywhere) else. Her sister says: I swear, she is normally a nice person.

*****

We use umbrellas to shield her on the way in, because the groom is in the parking lot. When it’s time to put on her dress and its not fitting she screams and tells everyone to get away from her. The rain stops long enough to get our pictures taken outside. All of our heels sink into the mud. We forget that we are supposed to have bouquets. We are unhappy and tired but we smile radiantly any time someone raises a camera. I see B across the way, in his tux, and my eyes water. It’s the first thing that’s moved me all day.

{Originally Published on Sweetney}

When I made my list of the best 25 songs of the last 25 years a few weeks back, I burned, just for my own private listening enjoyment, a mix CD comprised of those select tracks. Since that time its been on heavy rotation during the 20 minute commute to and from M’s camp each weekday — I’m lucky enough to have a kid who’s tolerant of Mommy’s need to CRANK THAT SHIT UP — and in that time she’s absorbed all the songs and picked her favorites, notable among them the well-aged Oasis tune Wonderwall. It’s a song that for all its obvious magnetism and hookiness I’ve never fully understood. I mean, what’s a Wonderwall, anyway? And what, if anything, does it mean for a person to be that to someone else? Still, questions of signification and metaphor aside, each time the spare guitar strum of that track begins to play on our car stereo I see the joyful recognition wash over M’s face in the rear view mirror, and when the lesser of the brothers Gallagher begins to sing she does too, word for word.
. . . . .

On Sunday, we finally told her about the split.

For those of you who’ve never gone through a separation (and seriously, here’s hoping none of you ever have to), the awful, soul-rending anticipation of having to break this news to your child — the tiny, blameless person who you’ve made it your life’s mission to protect and shield from all hurts and pains — is psychological torture of a magnitude it’s difficult to fully wrap your head around. Over the course of the past few weeks I’ve said to friends, relative to the crushing dread I felt about having to do this, that I now understand why people stay together for the sake of the kids (or, rather, tell themselves that’s what they’re doing — it’s probably closer to the truth to say they’re staying together for the sake of not having to deal with the anguish and guilt of having to tell the kids). It is the worst thing I could ever imagine having to do, and believe me, I can imagine having to do a lot of pretty awful things. Like having to attend a Celine Dion concert, or watch the complete filmography of Paris Hilton, for example. YES, THIS IS EVEN WORSE THAN THAT.

So Jamie came over Sunday morning with the idea in mind that this was the day. No way out but to barrel through it together, however ineptly, and hope to god we don’t have to look back on this as The Day We Shattered Our Daughter’s Identity, Crushed Her Spirit, And Destroyed Her Self Esteem For All Time. I think some of my generalized terror about this event can be traced back to having known a few very seriously broken human beings who pointed to the cataclysm of their parents breaking up when they were a kid as the hot molten core of their volcanic screwed-up-ness. And when I say “human beings” you should read “people I dated.” This is definitely NOT how I want my daughter to turn out.

{Originally published on Thursday Drive}

I was in the middle of nowhere, but I felt as though I had arrived at someplace important and pivotal. A place that should show on some map of my life with the words Go here.

Heavy and golden, the moonlight sank to earth on a parachute of stars and brought everything around me out of the shadows – the hulking shapes of mountains, open space, a black ribbon of road. Far away, the light of one house.

I stood in the middle of a road in northwestern Montana, shivering with the wind that ran through me like a hundred ghosts. I had stopped to get out, to look. No other car would pass by while I stood there. The night was big. The world was big. How many times had the wind that filled my lungs traveled along the curve of the earth? I breathed in, sure it told me secrets of what my life could be, how big it could be, now that it was all mine again.

Back home in Connecticut, my job waited for me and my husband did not. Our separation was new, no older than a month. With less fuss than it took to plan our wedding, we decided to break apart the marriage, each of us taking uneven halves of the whole, pieces that had never quite fit together and always left a space between two people who tried.

I settled into a new place and then took every vacation day and every bit of cash I could, and I drove – this time, from Connecticut to the western side of Montana, 5000 miles in 12 days. It was the middle of September – now, almost to the date. This time every year, I give myself over to nostalgia for that trip and for the person I was then. Brave. Unafraid to go as far as that, alone, to see something beautiful, to be changed.

And despite the disappointment of a marriage that ended, I still thought I could see ahead and predict the future, or shape it.

The joke was on me, of course. On her, on the person I was that night, eight months before I would learn that I was pregnant with my first child. Whatever I thought was brave or scary before hitched a ride to somewhere far away.

But she learned. You want scary? I told her. Having a baby is scary. Cobbling together a life with another person, with a new life between you, takes guts. Believing that it will all work out? Harder still.

{Originally posted on Mid-Century Modern Moms}

Once upon a time, there was a little boy with a dream.

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