Most days I feel at relative peace about the bum rap I got  dynamic between my ex and me. I have reframed negatives into positives.

For instance: having Luca just every other weekend works for everyone. Luca is a high-octane teenage boy who likes the bells-and-whistles stuff. His father is a high-octane man who likes the bells-and-whistles stuff. There’s symmetry there. And, at the risk of sounding retro and sexist, I do think that teenage boys need to be with their dads.

Another upside to Luca spending most of his time with Prince: he fights with his dad a lot, and not much with me. I like that. I like the fact that they fight a lot (not healthy, but true) and I like the fact that Luca and I don’t spend enough time together to have that many fights.

The fury I felt after being strong-armed into giving Prince all major decisions for Luca has subsided. I am palpably happier, and lighter-in-my-steppier, now that I’m no longer attempting to co-parent with Attila the Hun.

Now, I rarely sweat the small stuff. A few weeks ago, I arranged a haircut for Luca. Prince sent me explicit instructions, complete with photos of approved coifs, for the hair stylist to follow. Not so long ago that kind of control-freak move would have sent my blood pressure soaring. But this time, I stayed calm and carried on.

Finally, there’s this: I don’t get child support, even for Franny. This used to infuriate me. But when I put the scary part (financial insecurity) on the shelf, I feel relief. Because I don’t have to beg Prince for the check every month. Now that he doesn’t pay me child support, he has way, way less leverage with which to torture me. I like that.

And yet.

Even with my higher-planed, evolved mindset, I still find myself occasionally wanting to drop Prince in a vat of hot lava.

Today was one of those occasionsallys.

Prince made all of the kids’ summer plans. In return, I asked for one thing. I asked to send Franny to visit  my sister’s family (aka The Unimportant Relatives) for five days in June. I asked, very politely, in an Our Family Wizard e-mail.

The reply that I got? NO. NO, because he might want to take her somewhere those five days and he’s not ready to commit. NO, because I should schedule Franny’s trip to see my family during the other weeks that she’s in town. NO, because he is a VIP around whom other people have to cartwheel and I’m not.

He didn’t actually say that last part, but that’s what he meant.

I immediately wrote back something snarky, but deleted it. Then I wrote back, trying to appeal to reason and reciprocity, until I remembered who I was dealing with, so I deleted that.

I sat in my chair at work, heart pounding, homicidal thoughts racing around in my head like bumper cars, unable to focus except when I had to hospitalize a girl who threatened to drink hair spray.

Finally, I sent my friend Miranda a Facebook message explaining Prince’s latest maneuver. Miranda also has a VIP ex and she has been known to talk me down off a ledge. She is kind of like having a Divorce Anonymous sponsor. So when she advised me to “back off from OFW,” for a day, I complied.

I went home, put Franny to bed, and drank a glass of wine. And I realized that Prince wasn’t making me feel crazy; my struggle to accept reality was.

I was expecting parity where none exists. I had forgotten that my ex is someone who will never be capable of reciprocity. I had forgotten that he will never think to himself: I got everything I wanted post-divorce so I’ll throw Pauline a bone with this trip thing.

And when I remembered what I’d forgotten, peace started to seep slowly back into my psyche. The trip issue would resolve eventually, I told myself, and wasn’t worth having an aneurysm. I felt so much saner shifting my focus from what I couldn’t control — Prince — to what I could control — my thoughts.

But is it so terrible if I still, occasionally, think about dropping him in a vat of hot lava?

Franny picked these

Brunch: Luca’s Appetizer

Brunch: Franny’s Appetizer

We shared this

To All of Us

Today, I’m thankful for my family.

Ina Chadwick

Journalist Ina Chadwick endured a nasty divorce and custody battle during the days when no one spoke about either. Thankfully for her, she regained her children; thankfully for us, she retained her sense of humor. Here is the story of the death of her ex-husband.

The text icon on my iPhone that’s been charging all night says:

“Dad died this morning at 6:00 a.m.” J.

“Dad” is the father of my three grown daughters and the blood grandfather to my five grandchildren. The fact that he abdicated his role, but didn’t lose the privilege of calling himself “Dad,” when he became terminally ill, still rankled me.

I take my ceramic robin’s egg blue cup, still warm from the just-finished cycle in the dishwasher. Its contours feel good in my hands.  “Died” is final and an exploration of feelings is useless.

The fact that his death is announced in a cartoon text balloon is not without irony.

I had wished this man, who a marriage therapist nicknamed, “Straight Arrow,” dead so many times would I confess to murder if the wish came true?  Ah, what a relief that he hadn’t been the death of me.

***

We had been divorced for … I don’t know how long? I like to tell people “divorced before I was born,” because I was so young when we married. I do know that during the first year of our divorce, he was careening between sorrow and apologies, begging and bullying. He promised a laundress in one diatribe. He had his stubborn ways, and since all I knew was how my father had his shirts delivered from the Chinese Laundry right to the apartment door, I had to learn good wives were supposed to iron seven pinpoint oxford cloth shirts for the five-day work week in New York.  He said he didn’t like being left with only one choice on Friday.

Actually, ironing was a pleasant task at first. The immediate reward of placing those white and pale sherbet shades of long-sleeved, slightly starched shirts onto the hangars to all face the same way in his closet, gave me a sense of accomplishment.

Within four years we had three children under three, and I was now also getting the children’s laundry done. I had to skip his dark socks. Yet, every morning while he was in the shower, I’d spray the dirty socks with spray starch, put them in the dryer on high heat and let them toss around for a few minutes. Voila, I came back from the basement, I’d smile and hand him  warm socks.

When he developed a virulent skin condition on his feet resistant to all topical salves and cortisone infusions, I bent my head low and  changed detergents at the doctor’s final suggestion. My burden of guilt was assuaged by an insidious gleefulness over gaining  some power in this marriage. I had no idea that my actions were hostile, until the therapist who declared the likelihood of us ever have a working relationship nearly impossible, pointed it out.

I could only admit that I was afraid of him, especially after his  hard-headed resolve allowed him to ignore the screams of our youngest child whose head got stuck between the bars of the crib while I was out. I returned in time to save her from strangling to death. He hadn’t gone upstairs to investigate the screams.

The marriage guru who often saw us on Saturdays in Central Park with our babies and paraphernalia pronounced that without an heir, “Straight Arrow” would always be angry. Maybe I should try for a boy?

I was  worried I had taken the first step down the path of sociopathic behavior with the socks, and I would probably poison him with the same detachment as my practical solution for not getting his laundry done on time.

***

When the word “divorce” left my mouth, terror gripped my throat. He had stalked me into the bathroom after I told him I was taking a paying job at Democratic headquarters where I volunteered a few hours a week and wrote speeches. “No wife of mine will ever work, and you will not vote for Hubert Humphrey. There are no Democrats in this family.”

“What’s for dinner?” he asked derisively. “Better practice-up for the hash you’ll be slinging earning a living without me.”

As the Vietnam War churned on, and as Simon and Garfunkel seeped into my consciousness, I couldn’t ignore that we had nothing in common, except our beautiful babies; the ones I insisted we have early on in the marriage, but without saying so.

I fully intended to be a working writer. Perhaps I also  intended to fill in the empty spaces of family. I had grown up with an absentee alcoholic father, and manic depressive mother who despised me.  I craved loving all babies, which I now know was an effort to remake my reality into safety and re-parent myself.

***

Several years after Straight Arrow moved out of state, he filed a motion to have the children removed from my custodial care because of my “Bohemian Lifestyle.”  I had fallen in love, and was openly living with someone who loved me back, and who adored the children in a way I’d never seen a man do before. He was gentle, and tireless with them.

A willing out-of-state lawyer took the case on Straight Arrow’s behalf and I was served with a complaint that I had to answer in the court where the plaintiff, “Straight Arrow, ” was trying to gain full custody.  The burden of proof was on me to clearly show that my lifestyle was not only secure for our children, but also far healthier than the life of the neighborhood orgiast and chronic philandering drunk he had been when we were married. Something I never knew until years after we split, and too many years after it mattered. Our close friend  neighbors were liberals and Jan and “Straight Arrow”  were having a husband-sanctioned, experimental affair, democratic in principle, because anyone could take part in the festivities. I thought he was out playing chess once a week at their house.

When we first met, I found his brain dazzling. I wanted him to teach me everything he knew. I was 16. He was 25. If you asked him how to change the fuse, you’d learn the history of the Ohm and the Watt.  A science lesson I could learn hands-on. He taught me how to listen to Ravel, how to go crabbing, how to watch the telltales and know the difference between sailing ahead of the wind or behind it.

After  a prolonged battle with chronic heart failure, a quadruple bypass and malfunctioning kidneys, he became aware that the cancer he been told had been removed from his bile duct had returned, but no one knew where.  Only his blood work showed the cellular markers.

***

We had been stranded with one another in an empty room for a few minutes at a family party that same week as his blood work came back tainted. “How do you like living in a newly constructed home?” I asked cordially.

We had lived in a stucco 1925 Tudor style home and the next home he bought, the one to which he essentially kidnapped the girls, refusing to allow them to leave after the summer vacation, was a turn-of-the-century Victorian.  He went on for five straight minutes about grooved ceiling moldings. There is nothing harder for me than to look interested when a wood fanatic is talking.

“You just noticed that about Dad?”  My girls said when I asked about his mental status.

“Well,” I defended, “he was an engineer.”

“Mom, he’s got  Asperger’s,” said the oldest.

The children would rather think congenital disabilities, not character flaws on a tragic scale. It was embarrassing for me to admit I’d married a bully, a bigot and a  boring asshole.

When he had his first massive coronary and was given only a five percent chance of survival, Daughter Three who hadn’t had contact with him for nine years came to me. “What should I do?” she asked.

“Is he conscious?”

“He can hear,” she told me.

“You have to go,” I said. “You will never forgive yourself if he dies.”

“Buy him a portable CD player and Pictures at an Exhibition,” I suggested. That had been the first musical piece he led me through, note by note, visual by visual, so many years before. I can still remember the rapture in his eyes at my joy. He could  stroke the meaning out of every note for me.

“What happens if he doesn’t die?” she asked.

“You’ll deal with that later,” I said. I meant it. I knew she could.

He’d been a three pack-a-day smoker from the day that I met him. A morning beer drinker who also loved his Scotch. Now, in his early 60s all he was allowed was a dainty glass of red wine at dinner. He obeyed. The girls reported he was now “reachable” as a person.

“Almost there, Mom. You can see it in his eyes.”

I remember that just-below-the-surface inaccessible look, fathoms deep if you were willing to get the bends.

“You don’t want to talk politics with him,” they laughed. They told me he had become a very lonely man. Their stepmother had become a hoarder, filling each room, including every bedroom, with  bags of potato chips, tins of canned chicken, and cheap paper towels. When the cancer returned and they visited they had to book a motel.

“Granny Janis could be on a TV reality show,” one of my grandsons said.

Though there was no treatment that hadn’t already been tried, Straight Arrow drafted a “Resuscitate at all costs document.” He refused morphine.

The girls made a pilgrimage to Maryland from Connecticut  every week for eight weeks, driving and in between living their lives as housewives, working mothers of school-aged children.

They spoke to me only briefly each week. They spared me the details. I had thought so many times that his suffering was something he deserved. He had caused so much suffering to others. I didn’t have to mourn. I just had to say a simple “goodbye” in my heart.

I remembered the moment when Daughter Number One was born, and when he saw her, and I saw him, and we fused in a bond that could never be broken. The day his heir was born to his second wife, he was drunk in the waiting room. Older, more jaded.

The hoarder’s house had no room for a hospice bed. He could not die at home. In his final hours, a man whose home was his fortress and castle, a man beat his chest in a thunderous roar over what political party his wife would belong to had not even been granted a small space in a bedroom he could call his own.

Close to 6 AM on the morning he died, he was being forced out of the hospital into a long-term nursing care facility that required a chunk of change just to get in, though his outlook was for less than two weeks.

He had not been able to stand up by himself for months, no less dress himself. His son never came to see him, not once.

When the checkout nurse came to ready him for his release, she found him on the floor, his skull fractured from a fall. His determination to walk to the shower killed him.

He did not need any attempts at resuscitation.

I put down my blue coffee cup. I texted back, “Is there anything I can do for you that would make this easier?”

“Thanks, Mom. Can’t think of anything.”

Later she texts, “Can you go the mall and buy the boys blazers for Dad’s funeral?”  I hate malls, but I am going to mourn by doing things that I hate because the death of an ex is no simple goodbye and I  knowingly gave the patriarch cruddy feet, and I am still forgiving myself.

Ina Chadwick holds nine New England Press Association Awards from the prehistoric days of newspapers. She has extensive name-dropping credentials in literary journals and online.  But her most significant brag is about producing live storytelling programs where everyone’s personal truth and connection through Spoken Word can be heard. “Real People, Real Stories,” at www.mousemuse.com.  Collateral damage from the heartache of no awards in marriage choices will alternately provide this site with material. 

My single-mom-sans-child-support budget doesn’t allow for many luxuries. Gone are the weekly yoga and Pilates classes, the frequent lunches and dinners out, the Starbucks afternoon pick-me-ups.

But the one indulgence that I have yet to jettison is my bi-monthly pedicure. I can kind of justify the expense because once, years ago, I had an ingrown toenail that got horribly infected and required being sliced out. The podiatrist told me I was prone to ingrown toenails, and getting regular pedicures might help prevent future ones.

So every other weekend my feet find themselves soaking in a tub of warm, soapy, jet-propelled water, my back rhythmically kneaded by the massage chair. As the pedicure lady works her magic on my cuticles, I sink into tabloid heaven, reading which star rocked her outfit, which celebrity couples are getting married, or having babies, or splitting up.

Always, I try different colors of nail polish on each fingernail before I settle on the shade for my toes. Yesterday I picked this one, peppy and optimistic for spring.

What do you think?

Light My Fire

Today, I’m thankful for my bi-monthly pedicure.

Splash News Photography

I’ve been sort of following Gossip Girl star Kelly Rutherford’s custody battle saga. I say “sort of” because hearing about any custody battle, after barely surviving my own, makes me want to crawl into a bomb shelter.

I don’t know why Rutherford’s judge granted her ex the right to take their two young children to live with him in Europe. I’m not going to speculate on what she might have done to lose custody or whether or not the judge is biased towards fathers.

But when I read the latest on Rutherford’s court case, how the legal fees and airfare to visit her kids have virtually bankrupted her, when I saw the photos showing how much she’d aged — not so much aged as worn soul-tired and heartbroken — in just a few years, I couldn’t help but wonder:

Are custody battles worth the fight?

*          *          *

One afternoon shortly after I commenced legal proceedings to retain joint custody of my son, I sat at a conference table across from my attorney Sidney. After discussing specifics of my case, in particular the personality and financial profile of my ex, Sidney put down  his pen and looked at me.

“You are not going to win this. You should give him sole custody of Luca.”

“I can’t!” I gasped. “I can’t give up custody of my son!”

Sidney gave me a patient smile.

“Do you really think the judge would take away my custody?”  I asked. “I mean, doesn’t a mother have to be, like, a crack addict to lose custody?”

Sidney uttered a line that perfectly sums up the travesty otherwise known as family law:

“You don’t go to family court to get justice. You go to get answers.”

I didn’t like that answer. So I asked my then-therapist, who specialized in high-conflict divorce, what she thought about my situation.

“I’ll ask you  what I ask all my other clients,” she said. “What’s the worst nightmare you can live with?”

“What? What does that mean?”

She gave me the same patient smile that Sidney did.

“Think of the worst nightmare you can live with. Because that’s what you might get if you go to court. You’re better off now giving your ex everything he wants.”

I didn’t like that answer either. Nor did I like the answer Atticus’s friend, an appelate lawyer, gave him about my case.

“Louis says you’re going to lose,” said Atticus. “Prince has too much money and he’s the kind of guy who won’t stop fighting. If he gets a verdict he doesn’t like, he’ll just appeal. We need to throw in the towel. Now.”

Atticus had actually been the one who convinced me to fight for custody. It had taken all the stamina I could muster to high-jump over my reluctance. Now that I was in the ring, I wasn’t prepared to take off my gloves.

I consulted with Sarah, a smart blonde forensic psychologist often hired to weigh in on celebrity custody cases. I had seen her a few times before, and she had encouraged me to try to retain custody.

But this time, after hearing about Prince’s latest Ninja moves, she said very gently:

“You should give Prince everything he wants.”

“I can’t!”  I practically sobbed.

“I’ve seen what custody battles do to people, Pauline. Financially, psychologically. And in your case, at the end of the day, I’m not sure what you’re going to get out of it.”

I still wasn’t ready to quit. Until a few weeks later when I told Sarah who had been appointed as our custody evaluator.

“I don’t trust him” she said. “He doesn’t understand Parental Alienation, and he’s lazy. You don’t want the judge reading his report. Get out now.”

This time I listened. I had lost six figures, ten pounds, and hundreds of brain cells. Luca was being ravaged in the parental cross-fire. So I settled. I gave my ex what he wanted: essentially full custody of Luca and — due to my inability to pay for a forensic accountant — no child support payments.

I was officially living the worst nightmare I could imagine.

*          *          *

In hindsight, I believe the advice that had been impossible to stomach was the advice I should have followed all along. I was fighting a fight I couldn’t win, and I got tromped before I reached the finish line.

Ironically, and perhaps karmic justice-ly, giving Luca to Prince brought my son back to me. When I got myself out of the equation, Prince realized he couldn’t handle Luca on his own, and Luca realized I wasn’t so bad after all.

And me? I can honestly say I “won” by “losing.” I learned to detach from the toxic struggle in which I’d been locked since the beginning of my marriage to Prince. While I would never suggest other single mothers forego child support, in my case not being financially dependent on my ex has been liberating: Prince has lost his primary leverage source and I don’t have to grovel for the check every month.

Given that I rebuilt my relationship with my son by giving up custody, it’s easy for me to look back and say my battle wasn’t worth the fight. There are times when parents have to fight: when their children are being abused by the other parent, when one parent wants a moveaway order, or when that other parent is sociopathic.

Absent these circumstances, I’m not sure that any custody battle is worth it. Kids are always sucked into the vortex of conflict and the richer, crazier parent is usually the victor.

I couldn’t have known any of this two years ago. But if I were advising others contemplating a custody battle, I would ask them this:

Are you fighting a fight you can win?

One upside to being divorced with a somewhat traditional timeshare agreement: every other weekend you get  to yourself. Pure gold.

This weekend, for me, is one of those weekends. It was preceded by an unusual consecutive four weekends of having kids, so when I dropped Franny off at her dad’s, freedom hit me like a sudden blast of air conditioning on a hot summer day.

I didn’t so much drive, as sail, to my friend Vivica’s bungalow, where she shaped my unintentionally unruly hair into an intentionally unruly coif.

New ‘do

Then I threw on a black top and jeans for a date. And, no, my kids don’t know about this one.

First Date Wear

I had time to kill en route to the wine bar, so I stopped at a funky boutique that sells art along with clothes. After trying on a dozen tops, I got this one, for eighteen dollars.

Because you can’t have too many black t-shirts

The date was with a nice guy. A successful white-collar, environmentally-correct, NPR-over-coffee-in-the-morning, Jon-Stewart-in-the-night  kind of a guy. I so wished I had liked him. Unfortunately, no chemistry.

This morning I awoke to one of my greatest hedonistic pleasures: reading the Sunday New York Times in my pajamas, uninterrupted by young people to whom I am personal assistant.

Highly recommend “The Unlikely Chef” in today’s Lives section

Tonight, two friends are coming for dinner. It’s pot luck, and I will be making Southern Spring Salad with Basil Vinaigrette. If you like salad, this one is to die for.

page 91

Next weekend, I will be back in full-on Mom gear, complete with sleepovers and schlepping.

So today, I’m thankful for a weekend to myself.

Last Tuesday I arrived at work to find an agitated Reggie in the rotunda. He had returned from his AWOL with Sydney, drunk, talking mess about going off on Staff if he couldn’t take a peer’s skateboard.

“Pauline, can I take Dwayne’s skateboard?”

Reggie lurched for me but the Staff Supervisor stood in his way.

“Nuh-uh, Reggie,” Brenda said. “You’re not gonna drag Pauline into this.”

I sighed and walked into my boss Sharon’s office. Normally unflappable, she was as frazzled as I’d ever seen her.

“He came back this morning and has been threatening everyone. He’s in my office every two minutes. I’ve had it with him.”

I was close to the end myself. The past few months — chock full of hospitalizations and arrests and threats to peers and fights and fruitless meetings, phone calls, and e-mails with social workers – had been agony. Agony being unable to stop the train wreck that was Reggie.

“And — get this! Sydney’s with her birthmom,” said Sharon.

“What?!”

“Jane called me.” Jane was Sydney’s adoptive mother.  “She went on Facebook and found Sydney’s picture with her birthmother.”

“But Sydney’d never met her!”

“Well, she has now. I guess she found her on Facebook too. Jane said they both looked high as kites.”

I sat on Sharon’s couch and took this in. Jane and her husband had gone to the mat for Sydney. And now Sydney had left them to return to her original mother. A mother like so many of the other mothers of the kids I work with: drug-addicted, abusive, and abused.

“Jesus,”  I said.

*          *          *

A few hours later I stood in the doorway of the boys’ living room as three male Staff members held Reggie face down on the floor. Reggie had broken the TV and hit a Staff in the head, and was now being restrained.

I could hear Reggie’s soft moans as he cried.

Sharon and Brenda stood behind me.

“We could call the PET team…” said Sharon.

“Nuh-uh,” said Brenda. “He’ll have calmed down by the time they get here.”

“Then I’m calling the police. I can press charges against him for breaking the TV.”

“Sharon…” I said.

“Pauline, he’s got to go!”

*          *         *

An hour later, I stood in the doorway again, this time watching two policemen flank Reggie. He was standing now, his hands cuffed behind his back, his legs trembling, tears streaming down his face. The corners of his mouth turned down as he sobbed.

As the cops led Reggie out the sliding doors to the lawn, Sharon and Brenda once again weighed the odds.

“Bet they just give him a talking-to in the car, then bring him back,” said Brenda.

*          *          *

The police ended up arresting Reggie. Sharon closed his bed. Which meant that when he was released, he couldn’t come back to our facility.

A few days later, the police released Reggie to his mother. His on-again, off-again drug-addicted mother who had come back into his life when she learned about his trust fund. The mother that every child advocate in Reggie’s life, every social worker, and lawyer, and therapist, had tried to shield him from.

I walked into the rotunda to find Reggie’s mom sitting in a chair, like the Queen of the Nile, a trash bag full of Reggie’s belongings by her feet.

“Hey, Pauline, how you doin’?”

“Fine, thank you. How’s Reggie?”

“Oh, he’s doin’ real good, real good.”

“Good. Please tell him I said hi.”

I walked into Sharon’s office and closed the door. We looked at each other and shook our heads.

“Who would have thought Reggie and Sydney would end up with their mothers?”  I said.

*          *          *

That night I sat in the auditorium at Franny’s school and watched her class perform the play they had written. They had studied Civil Rights all year and Franny played the role of Rosa Parks.

Lily-white, freckled Franny sat on a makeshift bus seat, and repeated her one line, with all the grace and dignity of the legend she was channeling:

“I’m tired. I’m not giving up my seat.”

After the performance, the kids served the parents a meal they had made: stew, cornbread, incredibly sour lemonade, and lots of desserts.

Franny serves stew

I looked at Franny, at all the kids — well-groomed, well-educated, well-positioned in the world — as they served their parents dinner. I thought, what a roll of the dice it is, who you’re born to, and the circumstances you’re born into.

And after working with emotionally disturbed, at-risk youth, I can tell you this: ruptures with parents can break kids. Forever.

“How is it?” Franny asked, watching me put a spoonful of stew in my mouth.

It was bland. And needed salt. But of course I didn’t say that.

“It’s great,” I smiled. “And you were an awesome Rosa Parks.”

Franny grinned up at me.

Those of you who don’t have young children may be unaware that a strain of head lice known as “Super Lice” have taken elementary schools hostage. Super Lice have outsmarted tried-and-true OTC pesticides, which is why, every few weeks for the entire school year — and I mean every few weeks — I’ve gotten an e-mail from my daughter’s school warning me of yet another lice outbreak in one class or another.

Until this year, we had escaped the hell that head lice rains down upon a household. We had escaped for so long, in fact, that I had gotten a bit cocky. I didn’t think that “those families” who got head lice were slovenly, exactly. But on some subconscious, holier-than-thou level, I thought they just weren’t that careful.

And then.

And then, one Monday morning last January, I got another e-mail from Franny’s school. Another e-mail with “Head Lice Outbreak” in the subject heading. I read the heading with a tacit yeah-yeah-yeah…until I realized that my scalp had been itching madly all weekend.

So I went into my bathroom at work and stared in the mirror. I put my fingers on my hairline and a bug wandered out, as if on cue.

“Hmmm,” I thought, in my lice-only-happens-to-other-people way, “I must have caught fleas from the cat.”

So I called a mom in Franny’s class who’s a nurse, and I described what I’d seen crawling out of my scalp, and how, by the way, my scalp had been itching all weekend, and did she think it could just be fleas?

She did not! She told me I had head lice and I needed to treat them right away!

I left work. I drove right to one of those fancy Head Lice salons and I showed them my scalp.

The head-lice picker (yes, this is a job) peered at my scalp, looking through swatches of hair.

“You have lice,” she said, definitively. “In fact, you have a severe case. You’ve probably had them for months.”

“Months?! But how did I not know? I didn’t see anything!”

“Nits tend to be brown on people with brown hair. You don’t always see them until they hatch.”

Ew.

She put a smock on me and put goop in my hair and began combing. Combing out nits and head lice, one by one. I sat in a chair in a room full of 8-year-olds looking up at me from their DSes and Nintendos.

For four hours I sat in that chair. The lice-picker combed and washed, and combed again. She sold me special shampoo and conditioner, and this stuff you put on your scalp to chase lice away which is probably useless but by this point I would have put a dead chicken around my neck if I though it would do the trick.

She gave me instructions on shampooing, and washing bedding, and putting clothing in bags for 48 hours. Then she told me to come back in two days for another treatment.

“Check your kids,” she said. “They have to have them.”

Except they didn’t. I checked, Prince checked, Prince’s wife who’s a former nurse, checked. They didn’t have them. Just me.

I don’t know quite what to make of it, how I wound up with lice-resistant children. But thank God that I did, because my two head lice treatments at the swanky lice salon cost me my Anthropologie spring wardrobe budget.

I now have head lice PTSD. I am hypervigilant, scanning my hair, and my kids’ hair, for lice. Any sensation on my scalp and my heart starts to race.

But today, I’m thankful for not having head lice.

I arrived at work Monday morning to find voice mails and e-mails alerting me to  the weekend news: Reggie had AWOLed off-campus with Sydney.

Reggie and Sydney are a bizarre combination. Reggie has borderline intelligence and Sydney, while not high up on the IQ scale, is one shrewd cookie. So we — the treatment team — were all scratching our heads imagining this unlikely duo roaming the streets together.

Sydney was adopted when she was five. “We didn’t know about her history for a long time,” her distraught father told me, when I called to tell him there was still no word from Sydney, “the caseworker kept it from us.”

Sydney’s father was referring to the sexual abuse Sydney had suffered in foster care. The sexual abuse that ignited a chaotic adolescence marked by heavy drug use and sex trafficking in different states.

Working in residential, you begin to spot the kids you can help, and the kids who are too far gone. Sydney belonged to the latter group.

Multi-ethnic, mocha-colored, flawless-skinned Sydney would sit on my couch, arms crossed, rocking. The psychiatrist told me the rocking was a residual effect from meth use. I think that’s true, but I also think she had so much internal chaos that she rocked to try to dispel it.

When she rocked on my couch, she told me how she and other underage prostitutes had been corralled into a hotel room in Vegas, told to keep their heads down in deference to their pimps. She told me that she drank, or smoked meth, or shot up heroin, until she wound up in the hospital.

“What?” she asked, when she saw me looking at her. “What are you thinking? That I’m disassociated?”

“Is that what other therapists have told you?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I just kind of know what it means,” she said.

“What does it mean?” I asked, knowing full well what it meant: a phenomenon in various psychological and psychiatric disorders, in which people feel cut off from themselves and their surroundings.

“It’s like…I’m funny, I make people laugh, and I can talk to anyone. And people think that I’m part of the group, but I’m not. I mean, I’m there…but I’m not.”

“Is there anyone you feel close to?” I asked.

“Not really,” she said.

“Would you like to? Feel attached to someone?”

“I don’t care,” she said, rocking. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

*          *          *

Reggie sat in my office for his Treatment Plan Review last week. My boss chewed him out for his ongoing offenses: frequent on and off-campus AWOLs, yelling at Staff, insisting that he be treated as an adult when he was acting like a nut case.

“Your social worker is trying to find you a better place, Reggie,” said Sharon. “And I’m trying to help her. But when you AWOL, and threaten to fight people, you put me in a very difficult position. How can I advocate for you when I don’t know if I can trust you?”

“You guys took me too seriously. I wasn’t going to hurt that girl.”

“But you said you were, Reggie,” I said. “And then you’ve told me since then you’re going to run your program, but you don’t. So how do we know when to believe you?”

Reggie paused and looked around the room at the treatment team members.

“I’m bored,” he said.

*          *          *

Apparently, Sydney was bored too. Because on Sunday evening, after Sydney’s parents returned her from a home visit gone awry, she and Reggie walked out the gates of the campus, out into the foggy  night. Staff filed a Missing Person’s Report on Sunday night, but on Monday morning, when I arrived at work, there was still no word from either of them.

I talked to Sydney’s mother on the phone for a long time. She told me how the home visit had blown up: how Sydney cursed out her parents, and told them everything bad in her life was their fault.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have brought her back early,” said her mother. “Maybe if I’d kept her at home this wouldn’t have happened.”

“You did the right thing,” I said. “You can’t keep a kid at home if they’re acting out like that.”

“She said everything was my fault…I feel like this was my fault. If I’d just kept her home..”

“If you’d kept her home, she would have run off a different time,” I said. “This is what she does.”

“We’ve tried everything,” her mother broke down in tears on the other end of the phone. “We don’t know what else to do…”

“There’s nothing for you to to do. It’s up to her now,” I said.

*          *          *

I sat in Sharon’s office later that afternoon. A Staff said that he had driven past Reggie and Sydney in a bad part of town, and pulled over to tell them to come back. They just laughed, and waved him on.

“Sydney can handle herself,” said Sharon. “She’ll just turn tricks. But Reggie…what’s he going to do out there? How’s he going to take care of himself?”

I sighed and shook my head.

“I don’t know.”

I don’t know what to make of it, and I’m still, in my Bad Divorce PTSD way waiting for the other anvil to drop, but I am basking in Prince’s cease-fire. For reasons not at all clear to me, my ex’s incendiary e-mails have dried up to an occasionally imperious jab. When I told him Atticus and I were splitting, he didn’t harangue me for a second divorce. Instead, he said: “Oh, that’s too bad. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

When I told him I could no longer afford to split the cost of Franny’s tutoring, he didn’t balk, or threaten to take me to court. He didn’t accuse me of mismanaging money.

A couple weeks ago, after Franny’s school performance, I stood next to Prince while we were waiting for her to come out of her classroom. We exchanged logistical information when it hit me: talking to Prince felt easy and devoid of tension.

For the first time in ten years, I feel that we are truly divorced. Because there’s nothing like ongoing litigation, or post-marital mud-slinging, to make you feel joined at the hip.

I still don’t trust this peaceful punctuation, however, so I find myself wondering why Prince has cooled his fighter jets. Perhaps it’s the fact that he has essentially full custody of Luca. Perhaps it’s the fact that he no longer pays child support. Perhaps he was happy to see Atticus go. Or perhaps he’s happily remarried and finally ready to move on with his life.

I don’t know what’s changed for him, but I do know what’s changed for me. I have learned to detach from my ex-husband. Some days detachment comes easier than others, but compared to how tangled up my psyche was with Prince’s a few years ago, I am more zen than I ever dreamed possible.

I attribute some of my new stance to maturity, but more so to this blog. Over the past two years, I have blogged my way out of the codependent morass — “if I could just get him to do xyz, my life would be so much better!” — we existed in when we were married. And I have blogged my way into a place of relative balance: what my ex thinks of me is about him, and is really not my business.

Still, the potential for Prince-shigas is ongoing, and I can’t completely let down my guard. I just hope, should the next storm cloud appear, that I will remember to do the only thing I can control: take cover under my umbrella of detachment.

Today, I’m thankful for Peace — outside and in.