My Obvious Status

….Written in June, 2010, and I don’t have the courage yet to update.

I have never been a status girl.

I have tried to make peace with it, all my life, my mom’s voice trying to explain why some people care about the details.

Details irritate me.
They bore me to tears. They seem to be the kind of conversation Aunt June has with Betty, who wants to know if little Jane has gotten a ring yet, or if so and so graduated yet, if anyone had “heard” Mr. Jim had been fired as chairman. They seem to happen a lot at cocktail parties where everyone is smashed, or baby and wedding showers, where the women throwing them seem far more competitive than they let on.

Of course, I realize there are the exceptions.

So here is my status, and I have seen every reaction under the sun in explaining the details, so much that I waste little energy anymore, rarely giving a damn about what people have to say. On one hand, I patiently answer the same questions over and over, knowing it is a very unusual thing for people to imagine possible.

On the other hand, the people, and I would say there are now a lot of them, who have been around and know us, don’t even remember a time it was anything but ordinary.
I am divorced, 32, the mother of two precious girls, and my ex husband, the father of my girls lives with us, as my roommate and friend. It has taken us ten years of hard work on ourselves individually and apart, a partnership we have been able to build for the sake of our girls, something I never imagined possible.

We have been divorced for a few years, separated for more, but live also with my Baby Bro, and my mom, who just moved out. I hate to use ex, but haven’t found the perfect blog name yet, but he moved in to take care of my mom and well, all of us, a couple of years ago.

He came and took over all the responsibilities that my father left behind.
It was quite a shock to our family, a 31 year marriage gone, as well as our father, so he came to take over bills, and we have perfected the passing of the Olympic torch, the hand off being our two girls, him working long early days, while I hand them back for work nights and weekends.

We named this place Rehab House, my mom, divorcee, Baby Bro, and I, all in agreement the girls were our real interest, never having to leave the home, the rest of us migrating in and around them like flies, swarming, hopeful to get our time in.

We also have been grieving here, my mother as you can imagine, devastated, and I would cry with her during the day, divorcee cooking the meals at night, making stir fry and salmon, nourishing her, all of us looking at her and each other, too afraid to say out loud what our eyes could not stop watching.

I noticed Baby bro looked down and Divorcee had to look away a lot.
I didn’t come out of my room for a year or two.

We all went through a lot of rage and tears, having group discussions on topics I thought I might scream if I heard them one more time, one more day. Our home was rarely left, nor were any outsiders allowed in, something shocking I hadn’t even realized until Divorcee introduced me to a man he knew I would love, and I did, just enough to let him come see this Rehab production.

I remember him, right after we ended, about to get in his truck, my heart broken and him saying to me in the driveway, “Sweet K, you’re not crazy. That house has more love than any place I’ve ever known or seen my whole life.”

Baby Bro introduced us to fitness, a garage made into a gym, a personal trainer he is, a hilarious person who made family night the best ever, usually involving food someone else paid for, beer, episodes of “The Bachelor” and “Hoarders,” some of our favorites. Mainly because of the way he impersonates, the way we make fun, and laugh with pain from Divorcee’s rants over how people could die in their own shit rather than wipe their own ass. No one does a Bachelor impression like Baby Bro, who thankfully does not live in the living room any more, an arrangement we used to call the “boat.”

He pulled the two couches in our living room together, with his blanket, not an early riser, a yeller in the mornings when the girls would be running through the house like hoodlums. He did not stop playing video games for so long I thought my head might explode.
We were on constant guard for unwanted calls and visits, mail delivery, and car break ins.
It was like living in a hamster wheel, all of us scratching and clawing to get out, to find the coping skills for ourselves, and make them up on cue when we saw another one of us falling over the edge.

It has been a couple of years and my mother has just moved, Baby Bro hard at work as a trainer, Kat in first grade, Lola going to Kindergarten soon, me enrolled in Photography school, our financial and professional goals just beginning to manifest when I began to realize this is not forever.

It’s hard to believe we wont always be this, and we tease we are moving from rehab house to sober living, all of us needing each other less and less, our healing indicated in our new relationships and friends, our finances, and I can see we are clearly moving on.
It is an experience only we can know or hold, something now I see has humbled and taught me lessons you can’t buy in the finest school or have put on your finger, like that perfect engagement ring. It is the finest cut diamond, pure, expensive, and without a doubt, a cut so rare no one else will ever own.
Something I thought would never end is coming in sight and I see I will make it on my own, financial independence a goal I have been trying to touch for so long, a battle I would rather die than give up fighting for.
I see all the gifts, my relationships with Baby Bro, his with Divorcee, a walk in Dad, helping him with car troubles and money, making his favorite ziti, being the butt of all our jokes. My mom spent precious time with my girls I would have never dreamed would be such a gift to them, to her, to me. One might find it strange I suppose to see someone you once were married to fight over popcorn while watching movies and discussing LOST with your own mom.
I look at him and see nothing but a brother, a good father, a flawed person, like the rest of us. He is family. But one day he will find a woman he deserves, and I will totally have her back, seeing as two little girls covet their daddy, and I pray she is organized for Kat, can cook for him, shop, and understand Gucci, Prada, and red lipstick, for Lola’s sake.

Clearly, I did the status all wrong, as far as the details are concerned.

I did it all backwards, first, I got married when my friends dated, had children while they married, and am now divorced while they are just now pregnant, having kids. I am single, trying to understand what that means as a woman, a mother, a woman with her own dreams, terrified of monsters under her bed, tricks played on her heart. All the while, my little girls asking about a Papa that once lived there, and where he went, my Baby Bro sleeping in the living room in a bed we called a boat, our 95 pound Golden Retriever Willy, chasing him through the house, howling while Nana is trying to watch “Dancing With the Stars” on Tivo. I have been dating for years, and none have yet to meet my girls, while they pick out heels and lip gloss, helping me get ready for dates and sleepovers, brushing my hair as Daddy fixes them dinner in the next room, yelling that I have ten minutes before I will be late. And yet, it is as if it were the most normal way of being in the world.

As if “Normal were a Setting on the Dryer.”