Only Me Beside You.

Sometimes people leave you.
Halfway through the wood.
-- Into the Woods

The rain has been coming down for days, grey skies unleashing their pent up anger to ricochet across the rocky moonscape and bring it to life. The hills have turned lush and green, the parched leaves feeding hungrily in the storms. We rush about under umbrellas, dashing through doors to embrace this rare wintery spell as car lights twinkle with the promise of evenings filled with giggles and hot cocoa.

More than a month into our next chapter, we’re finally settling in to the place where we will dream, plan and build what comes next. Routines and new patterns and places are being discovered and the only pang of regret that continues to gnaw at me is the sacrifice they’ve made to begin anew, leaving their bosom friends behind. 

Only 18 miles away, the distance looms large against the exhilarating fear that comes with the glaring scrutiny of a new school, and new friends. Both excited, both scared, I watched with pride as they walked confidently into the unknown, cautiously searching for their place and their acceptance. But the excited words and the newness of it all could not keep the storm clouds back. 

“I just miss him so much and he is missing so many important things … I just wish … that he could be here … to support me … and tell me how good I’m doing … and to see the things I can do.”

“Sweetheart, I promise you that he’s here. In your heart. And he’s watching and he’s so proud … and if you listen closely you can hear him in your heart.”

(whispering) “I just wish he could come back for just one week ... Just one week … It would mean so much to me.”

Holding her close in the dark, her hot tears rushing down over us both, I can do nothing to ease her pain and that familiar pain that I have failed her, failed them, creeps back to the surface from that place where I’ve trapped it deep inside.

Listening to the rain pelt against the windows, I watch the car lights dance in the window of her dark room as the world around us dashes through the dark. 

There have been too many moments like this one in her childhood, dark nights when she’s fallen asleep in my arms, her soft breathing broken by the soft hiccups left behind once the tears have dried. 

Too many nights where I have lain here and been broken apart by their pain and my inability to erase it. Too many nights where my own tears have fallen on their sleeping foreheads long after they have cried themselves to sleep in my arms. 

Too many nights listening to the rain.     

Inside Out.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Matt Damon. He never fails to entertain, he’s devoted to his wife and family, and he managed to be in the right line when adequate doses of smarts, personality, wit and physical appeal were handed out.

He also happens to bear an uncanny resemblance to my late husband. They run and walk the same way, their knees bend inward in the same way, they’re built the same way and they look the same way. And their escapades are expensive, frustrating and inconvenient.

Thing 1 (whispering in the dark movie theatre): “Look {Thing 2}. It’s going to be just like watching Dad get rescued from Mars!”
Me (whispering back): “Your Dad wouldn’t have lasted a single day on Mars.”

He wouldn’t. He wasn’t able to science the shit out of anything, he misplaced everything and when he entered a kitchen mayhem ensued. And, despite the fact that he’s been gone these seven years, he managed to embed at least one of these things into the genetic makeup of his son.

Team Manager: “He left them in Flagstaff.”

For the past four hours, I have been the NASA of hockey moms, trying to rescue two stranded and very expensive hockey helmets across two hours of curvy, hilly highway, heavy rain and snow against a quickly approaching deadline.

On a day where I’ve also caught a whiff of an entire community’s waste, missed another important milestone in their childhood because I simply couldn’t make things work, drove 75 minutes to arrive at an appointment 45 minutes late and fell on my ass in the pouring rain.

Following a weekend where I spilled a can of cold soup down my arms, fell asleep holding a cup of hot tea, found a cockroach in my purse, wrestled the 10-foot tree to the ground and cracked my thumb down its center.

Days like this are like storm clouds. I can see them gathering on the horizon, bits and pieces piling on top of each other with nothing to slow them down until they erupt and that quiet calm begins again. And yet they aren’t the mess they used to be … I manage to navigate them with a semblance of dignity. Humor. Calm.

And my underwear inside out.