Things are as settled as they can be.  The back and forth reconciliation was short lived.  Was this a good or a bad thing, I have no idea anymore. There is at least one new girlfriend currently playing house over there.  There are 5 children, my three, and the two from his second marriage, that rotate in and out of the house like one giant shell game.  One of my children says nothing about this, the others speak about the new woman as an interesting, though transitory addition to the household.  There is, for my most sensitive child, some implied eye rolling.  Their former step mother is now in nearly exactly the same place I am.  I find surprisingly little joy in this.  Everything seems so complicated, even legally. “Unfortunately,” my attorney wrote to me recently, “you are in sort of uncharted territory as there isn’t case law to help us wade through this as it’s unusual to have to ex-spouses receiving child support at the same time.” I guess I need Charlie Sheen’s lawyer for this mess.

Their former stepmother and I have had a year of trying to repair things as much as these things can be repaired.  We’re both tired, run over.  But she got to where I am much faster than I did.  She seems to accept already there’s little if anything she can do about what he does.  This took me a decade. But now we are in the same boat…the same leaky, un-seaworthy boat.  She’s just added more holes to it in the process.

But right now that’s the worst of it. Occasionally someone will say something offhand about him.  Saw him here, saw him there, with this person or that person.  They add some kind of commentary.  This is sometimes delivered like gossip I might want to hear, as though forgetting my kids are part of this sideshow.

My dear narcoleptic, Roo, had surgery last year to try try and help his breathing at night. He has apnea and narcolepsy which seems kind of unfair.  It hasn’t helped at all and I think has actually made things every so slightly worse.  However, we do finally have a recipe that keeps him awake for the most part on weekdays.  He takes Xyrem before bed, then wakes at 1 AM for a second dose.  It is the date rape drug, highly prized apparently, very controlled.  I may have said this before, but we are supposed to cross out the name of the medication with a sharpie before we even throw it away in case someone finds out we have it in the house.  I guess I just outed myself, so hopefully we don’t get burgled.  The drug puts him into a kind of coma, a very effective rest state, during which pretty much nothing will wake him, but then wares off, hence the second dose at 1 AM.  He wears a sleep mask at night that is noisy but in a Darth Vader whispery way. It’s not bad and certainly better than him not breathing at all, which is part of the apnea.  Then in the morning, he drinks two Rockstars and takes Nuvigil to keep him awake.  On weekends, to avoid building a tolerance to Nuvigil, he skips that and naps instead.  That’s okay too. It’s manageable. It’ll never be cured and it’ll never go away, but he is managing right now.

I am grateful for lots of things.  Despite a recent diagnosis for Clyde of Chiari malformation (unfortunately NOT the cause of his migraines) he is healthy.  They happened to find the Chiari after MRIs looking for the cause of his migraines.  Chiari is malformation of the brain that causes it to kind of push outside of the base of the skull.  Clyde has it very mildly and he is asymptomatic.  A Stanford surgeon thought we should do surgery, an Oakland surgeon thought we shouldn’t.  We are waiting and watching and monitoring.  I’m not adding brain surgery to the things that keep me up at night, unless I absolutely have to.  Though the migraines are unrelated to the Chiari, the migraines have decreased dramatically lately.  We are down to about one a month and it’s fucking fantastic.  He loves to read, he loves to play sports, he worries about people, especially his sisters who he defends when he feels they are being accused or treated unfairly.  Ivy is still comical and strange and lovely.  Hazel is clever and hilarious and works very hard in an insane school district that piles on the pressure.  They take nearly everything in stride, more than I am able to do.  They accept that twice a month, they go and live in another place for a week and they seem to manage.

One last thing, remember this? She reappeared two months ago, after spending several months on the run.  It was an incredible relief to know she had been found and then a terrible tragedy to learn what had happened to her while on the run.  She is in a facility designed to both to offer trauma counselling and rehabilitation.  She is angry and sad most of the time, but she is now able to have outside visits with me.  A few week back I took her to get her nails painted.  On the way back to the car, we ran because it had started to rain, and her flip flop broke and she laughed.  It was probably the first time I’d heard her laugh in a very long time.  So maybe she will be alright.

Over the holidays, we took the Amtrak Coast Starlight to Portland.  If you ever have the opportunity to do this, I highly recommend it.  It is the best kind of borrowed nostalgia money can buy.  The train winds through the mountains on a snowy overnight journey, passing through the Cascades.  There is a movie car and a snack car and a dining car, and the kids thought it all amazing.  The bloody marys and the french toast are particularly grand.

One of the few photos we took in Mexico. There might be vomit on this curtain, who would know?

Two years ago we went to Mexico with the kids.  It was a slight disaster in that it rained the entire time and we spent much of the vacation playing ping pong indoors.  The kids however remember the trip quite fondly.  Ivy was involved in an odd musical set to Bjork music and Hazel got familiar with the trapeze.  But oh my God, the rain.  When you tell people you had a rainy vacation in a warm climate, most say the same thing, “Oh I love  tropical rain!” What I think people mean to say is “I like small bursts of rain that clear up in 20 minutes. ” This was not that kind of rain.  Undeterred though, we thought we’d give Mexico another try.  This time, Playa del Carmen, near Cancun.  This is the Caribbean side of Mexico which means the water is Windex blue and the sand talcum soft.  I’d done some research on the weather and plenty on the hotels in the area and eventually decided on a hotel called the Riu Tequila, deciding that anywhere with tequila in the name had to be good.  Plus, there was no way we’d have the same luck twice.

The trip there was fairly smooth, and while it was raining upon arrival I told myself this was temporary, despite what Yahoo weather seemed to indicate day after day with their lightning bolt icon.  Maybe this just meant we’d have a couple of showers and then back to sunshine.  Plus, I was distracted by Ivy, who hadn’t been feeling well on the airplane and had complained of a headache.  She’d had a virus the week prior but it hadn’t really morphed into anything else and the doctor had given us permission to fly.  She seemed to get a little better once we arrived at the hotel, but sometime during the night, she stood up in the bed, reported she felt weird and then threw up all over her siblings.  After I wiped down the bed as best I could, I took her out to the hotel patio for fresh air.  There was a thunderstorm but she insisted on huddling in a blanket in the rain.  Sometime later Hazel came stumbling out looking for us and stepped in a puddle of vomit.  While she was trying to get it off her, Clyde came out and Hazel managed to flick some of it on him. Clyde, having the well developed gag reflex that he does, threw up too.  So that was the first night.

Just out of frame: rainstorm and ice bucket for vomit. Vacation dollars well spent!

It rained all the next day – heavily, horizontally, and no matter which weather report I checked, they all predicted a long week of staying indoors. Sometime during the afternoon, after a soggy all-inclusive meal of chicken nuggets and overripe pineapple, Arun and I looked at each other in despair.  “We have to get out of here,” I said.  There was the cost to consider.  We had spent thousands on the vacation, the flights, the all inclusive food, drinks, the hotel room.  But what difference did it make if we were miserable?  Yes, I could have as many Pina Coladas as I could drink.  But did it matter if all I did was cry into them?

The hotel pool in Santa Monica. Much cheaper than flying to Mexico.

After just 48 hours in Mexico, we flew to Santa Monica.  There we mostly salvaged the trip.  We went to Universal Studios,  took a mostly not-suitable-for-children, star tour of LA including where all the stars overdosed or were shot and spent a day at the beach.  We went to the Santa Monica pier and threw money at rides and carnival games and overpriced food.  But I didn’t really care.  At least I wasn’t still in rainy Mexico.

Universal Studios, Not pouring with rain.

A couple years ago, flailing, bereft at times over my shitty custody situation, I became a court appointed special advocate for children.  This basically entails being an advocate for a child currently in the system – this might mean they are in foster care, a group home or in some other way being tracked by the court.  The advocate (me) is the central person tasked with tying all the pieces together – the social worker, the educational components, the psychologists, the attorney etc.  I act as a buddy of sorts to a child, while making sure the services they need are provided.

just after swearing in…

A week after training (and after being sworn in by a judge) I sat with a stack of  case files.  They each held information about a child and were were filled with police reports, social worker write-ups and sometimes photos of abuse. It was grim. Eventually the manager of the program pushed me in the direction of one of the files. This girl in particular, said the manager, really needed someone. With a waiting list of several hundred children, she had been waiting a long time for an advocate.

It seemed like a good fit in a way. Though I had initially wanted to work with someone closer to the age of my own children (in a somewhat misguided attempt to fill the sad void the off weeks of custody had provided) I knew I could do something for her. She liked art. She liked to run.  She wanted to go to college. These all seemed like good, happy things for a 13 year old to enjoy.  She had already been removed from her mother’s home due to abuse.  Her siblings had as well. They’d been placed in the home of a relative who was already over taxed taking care of other children in a tiny house with very little income. Further in the report I learned that when her mother went out, which seemed to be often, she was the one feeding her younger siblings.  She was only eight at the time this began happening.  “What did you feed them?” I asked her once.  “Cereal,” she said.  “That’s all there was.”  In this weird sad way, we were alike –  both mothers. I felt a kinship with her.

I had absurdly high hopes when I started the job. Embarrassingly so. Like I remember thinking she would be a phenomenal success story – a future Stanford grad perhaps, a phoenix rising from poverty, abuse, god knows what else.  I thought I myself had this kind of power to pull this off.  She was 13 when I first read her case file and though her life to that point had been characterized by abandonment, abuse and neglect, none of these things seemed insurmountable to me.

For that first year, even the second, everything felt very possible.  We did her homework together, I took her to movies, out to eat, to get her nails done.  At first she didn’t talk much but over time she did.  I heard from the program manager that she liked me very much and liked spending time with me.  She seemed to genuinely want to do well in school. She wanted to go to college.  She did not, and this was her big fear, want to work for McDonalds.

But in the last year things have started to go wrong. She got into a fight at school and was arrested.  I’m still unclear on what happened exactly, but I know that it was with another girl at school and the police were called.  She’s now on probation.  She got a boyfriend who was verbally cruel; he casually called her a whore, a slut, a loser.  I told her to get rid of him. “He’s an dick,” I said. “You are better than him and you have no time for that bullshit.”  She listened.  She agreed.  They split.  Then she started smoking pot, nearly constantly.  She became friends with a dealer who provided her with an endless supply.  Our educational plan meetings in the county office and at her school revealed she was barely attending classes; no one knew where she went during the day.  All these things happened gradually and at first I was able to tell myself they were normal teenaged things.  After all, I reasoned, I’d had crappy boyfriends and skipped algebra. And depending on how you measure these things, I turned out fine.  But for people like her these things are more dire.  The safety net many teens have – involved parents, resources, money, a steady home life, make for a soft landing.  For her though the crappy boyfriend can easily lead to pregnancy, the skipped classes to dropping out, the idle pot use to full blown drug dealing or worse.  This is what poverty and neglect do, cut holes in net.

I continued to take her out to eat, go to movies, attend court dates and educational plan meetings.  She never wanted much from me – to go to Olive Garden, to see a movie, maybe to go and have our nails done.  She still listened to me when I alternately pleaded and lectured.  She told me everything, all her fears and worries, all her risk-taking too. I wrung my hands.  I begged her to go back to school.  We still had a good time those evenings.  We still laughed all the time.  We still joked with one another.  She still seemed like she was listening to me.  I once got on her about writing in all caps all the time on her Facebook page.  We weren’t friends on Facebook, but her profile is open to the public. “Knock that shit off,” I said, “You look like an idiot.”  And she laughed.  She listened though.  She stopped with the all caps after that.

After a while, she didn’t want to see her therapist anymore.  She was done with her tutor who’d been provided by the county. “You told me you never want to work at McDonalds.  I remember, that’s what you said.  But that’s all that will be left,” I pleaded.  I tried coaching her, I tried cajoling, I sat with her teachers and principals and made plans she agreed to stick to.  She became increasingly complacent about it all, defeated.  At one meeting I went to, attended by social workers, educational advocates, therapists and caregivers, we passed around an attendance sheet for everyone to write their name and who we were.  She wrote her name and next to it:  “The problem I guess.”  That’s how she saw herself.

A few weeks ago, the social worker called me. She had, in his words, gone AWOL. I didn’t really know what this meant.  He seemed to be saying she wasn’t missing exactly but that no one knew where she was.  No one, to my knowledge, had filed a police report and though I suspected she had simply run away (she’d done this many times before, though only for a night or two to a friend’s house) there was no talk at all of her being taken or kidnapped.  I didn’t know whether to be worried or not.  She had no cell phone that I knew about.  I checked her Facebook page, she still appeared to be posting. But her profile picture changed.  In the most recent one, her eyes are at half mast, a cloud of pot smoke blooming from her mouth.  Last week, she posted photos of  tattoos. “Loyalty,” said one in curling script.  And another one, MOB, which depending on your internet source either means money over bitches or member of bloods.  I really hope it’s the former.  I remembered a long time ago telling her when she said she wanted tattoos, that she had to make me a deal:  no boyfriend names and nothing on your neck.  She had at least stuck to that deal.  The worst part for me though is realizing that with the time stamps on the messages, there’s no way she’s going to school anymore.  I remember a few months ago being heartbroken she might have  to repeat her grade because of all her missed classes.  I’d  kill for that now.  She won’t be repeating anything because she’s just not going back.

This week, after messaging her many times on Facebook, she finally responded and I asked if I could please see her.  She was reluctant.  She may have thought I would bring the police because she ran away.  I convinced her to let me take her for a meal.  I thought if I could just get back into her life, I might be able to steer her back home and get her back into school.  If and when they find her, she will likely move her to a group home. I thought if she voluntarily went back to her relatives, she might still have a chance.

We were to meet at her old school near her old house.  On the way to meet her, I stopped at the convenience store and bought some gift cards for her.  I didn’t really know what else to do.  When I got there though, she wasn’t there.  I waited. I drove around the neighborhood and then parked in the school parking lot.  It felt so awful, sitting in that parking lot as it grew darker, knowing she wasn’t coming but hoping she’d appear anyway.  It dawned on me as I sat there that I may never see her again either because she doesn’t want to see me, or because something will happen to her.  I’ve written her several times today on Facebook and she hasn’t answered me.  It feels like such a loss.  Like, at the end of it, she still ended up doing drugs, maybe dealing them.  She won’t finish high school and college seems at this point, a silly pipe dream.  I still have this small hope things will turn out okay though.  It’s hard to accept that the only things I managed to accomplish were tattoo guidelines and when to use all caps. Can’t I do more than that? I don’t know.  I guess it feels more and more unlikely as time passes.

I am sad, but I’m not depressed.  The upside of dealing with the quagmire that has been my ex and his wife (soon to be ex I hope) is that I have learned the art of detachment.  The worrying over my children, the never-ending chant that goes through my head of what will happen next? has so changed me that I am able to mentally detach from people, even my children.  When I find myself worried and sad when they are not with me, it only lasts a little while and then my head just shuts it down.  It’s self preservation I guess. In the car that night, when I realized she wasn’t coming, I put my head on the steering wheel and cried. But then I drove home and I mostly pulled it together.  She will either come back to me or she won’t. She will either return to school or she won’t.  I can keep trying to reach her and I will. But for now, that’s all I can do.

And yet.

He is (according to a text I got this week from my ex’s ex, which to be honest is suspect) ‘”begging her to give him another chance.”  Approximately two months ago he told me very clearly that one of the reasons he was moving out within days of telling me he was splitting with her, was that he couldn’t have any more dealings with the police.  And she was acting crazy enough that he thought this would happen. He’s is, after all, still on probation.  A visit from the police would not go well for him. He said she was yelling a lot.  She had a right to yell; I still think she does.  He’s slippery as an eel and was calling him on it.  That said, all her “I am woman hear me roar” shit I’ve listened to about how she was going to find peace and give a good home to her younger kids (she has two older ones with another man) is just an unbelievable crock. of. shit.  And no, I don’t care if either of them are reading this.  I’m not going to password protect non-fiction anymore.

So what is it? Why is she even entertaining this idea.  Why is she entertaining the idea of round two.  She has moved out once before, the first time for 6 months to an apartment when she vowed she wouldn’t take his crap anymore.  Then she moved back in.  And I navigated the kids through that debacle as well.  Things were the same between them, according to her.  So, not good. As soon as his travel ramped up, the anxiety rose to meet it.  She grew suspicious of his travel schedule, wasn’t able to get ahold of him some nights – he was evasive and argumentative when confronted (which is the sure sign of a liar).  He said she was crazy.  She said he was a cheater.  It hardly matters who is more right.  The point is they are the most toxic couple I have ever had the displeasure of knowing.  The last round of sitting the kids down and explaining that they were once again splitting up was a heartbreaking experience.  But there was a finality to it.  Now it appears the death knell has rung to soon. I could be stuck with them as a couple, as the horrible force of destruction they truly are.  There are some people that should try and work it out for the kids.  I believe in working through hard times, in forgiveness, in compromise and even a certain level of swallowing your personal unhappiness for the sake of a steady household.  But this? Is fucking insane.  The only thing I can think of is that he is lonely and she is in love with drama.  She is highly strung, needs to be needed and though I bet she is telling herself this counseling they are  trying is for the good of her children, that can’t be the reason.  Him chasing her, begging her, is what she wants.  And he doesn’t want to be alone, hence the new girlfriend.  I’m so very tired of them.  Really tired. I know that I need to detach.  God, I am trying.  I have a wonderful life and I am healthy and have a good job and lovely children and kind friends.  I did counseling for a while and mindfulness training. During it I was coached to imagine the hurtful people tied to me with ropes, tugging at me wherever I go.  The way to get rid of them mentally, to free myself from the sadness and upset they cause, is to imagine cutting the ropes and letting them fall away from me.  But I can’t ever seem to find a knife sharp enough.

A few months ago, in early January, I went to visit my cousin in the UK.  My family, both my father’s and mother’s side are in England.  My parents came here shortly after my dad got his doctorate in physics. He was offered a job at Stanford’s then new accelerator center.  He’s a physicist by training, a particle physicist if I have that right, and the center was doing groundbreaking work with particles.  My parents met in Manchester and then found their way here.  But no one else came really and so extended family is still in various parts of England.  My cousin lives in Newcastle, a few hours outside of Scotland.  She has children around the ages of mine and we get along so well that we lament often the miles and ocean between us.

I’ll get to where I’m going.

On my way to the airport, I got a text from my ex-husband’s wife (the stepmother to my children).  She wanted to talk to me. We had, over the course of the past few months, forged an uneasy peace that was actually working decently well – still is, actually.  She wanted to talk, she said it was urgent.  My mom was in the car, as was Roo. But I texted her that I would call her once I was at the airport and through security.  When I was finally settled in the boarding area, I called her.  She sounded sad, anxious, scared.  My ex, (her husband)  travels a lot to the east coast for work. That in itself wasn’t new, but her anxiety about what exactly he was doing while there, was.  It was a creeping doubt I knew well.  I had lived it myself.  Trips not adding up, odd receipts, weird phone calls…and then finally confirmation that some trips were not for business.  She didn’t know what to do about it all, but she thought he wasn’t trustworthy, which sounded right to me.  To make matters worse, when she questioned him, he attacked her – she was paranoid and crazy he told her. We talked a little about how she might get proof of what we believed he was up to (I’ll let your imaginations fill in the blank, but it’s likely all the things you are thinking) because I sensed she needed something concrete to leave the marriage. But I also knew that if that proof didn’t materialize, it didn’t necessarily mean he was an innocent man. Past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior and I was intimately familiar with his past behavior.

No more than a few weeks after my return, I got a text from her to let me know she was filing for divorce.  Just like that.  “I’m filing today” she said.  It was surreal to see it spelled out on my phone like that, so simply, so plainly.  In a way I had wished for this for some time.  For lots of reasons, but lately because I knew there was strife in the household and it felt to me like the wounds in the relationship were still bleeding and the only way to staunch them was to just end the whole thing entirely.

As is always the case with my ex, he cares little for the mess he makes.  Or if he cares, it is too late to do much about it.  And so when he casually asked to meet me for coffee, a week or so after her text, I knew this was his forum for delivering the news.  We met for coffee on a Friday.  It was a Friday I was to get the kids for the week (we alternate weeks).  He told me he had already moved out, that the moving truck was coming on Saturday (the next day) and that on Monday he wanted to pick them up from school, announce to them the separation, then that next Friday move them into a new house he had already rented.  They would never go back to their old house.  A house they’d only lived in for a few years, but still a house where their two half brothers were born, a house that probably had seemed more permanent to them than the other six or so their father had moved them to previously.  This is unfortunately what he does.  He decides what’s best for him and everyone better get on board.  So there I sat at Starbucks, trying to get on board.

With the plan for him to tell the kids on Monday,  I took the kids skiing, alone.  Roo had recently had surgery in our never ending quest to get him some sleep (deviated septum) and wasn’t in any shape to come skiing.  I had a somewhat irrational fear that the kids would somehow happen to see the moving trucks outside their dad’s house and learn of the divorce that way.  He doesn’t live near me, but it seemed to me some kind of Murphy’s Law that this would happen.  Over the course of the weekend, I kind of snapped out of the fog I’d been in since he sat me down at coffee and realized that him telling them on Monday, then delivering them back to my house on Monday night (so that I could dress their wounds and put them back together) was completely fucked.  If he was going to tell them, then he needed to deal with the fallout.  So I emailed him and said essentially, the plan is off.  Think of something else.

All this was for nothing though because once we returned home from skiing, I remembered that my eldest daughter  was scheduled to go with her stepmother to a concert (a reward for her straight As the quarter before).  She wanted to spend the night at her dad and stepmom’s house after the show, which I knew to be impossible given that the moving truck had already been to the house.  Her stuff was completely gone from the house  – no opportunity for her to say goodbye, no chance to pack up her own things – just gone. Of course she didn’t know this and didn’t seem to understand why I kept hedging when she asked to spend the night there after the concert.  I texted my ex, who was conveniently in New York, telling him he was going to have to tell them all sooner than he thought or come home early from NY or…I don’t even know what, but in any case it seemed to me like it was his problem to solve.  His response was absurd: “Okay. I’ll FaceTime them to let them know.” Which I guess in the modern age is the way some poor children learn their family has just blown up. At which point I thought: My children are not learning of their father’s second divorce, another move and their stepmother leaving…all via FaceTime.  So that night I sat them down on the couch and I told them.  And my eldest, three when her dad and I split, eleven when her dad and stepmother split, sat crying the noiseless tears of an old man – no sound, just tears.  My son said nothing, just looked into his lap.  My youngest daughter suggested hopefully that it would be okay because they would at least be able to see their stepmother in their old house, which I had to tell her was not the case.  Their stepmother was moving out.  The house was going to be sold.  And then she cried too.

It’s been about two months now I guess.  He’s moved into another house.  The old house sold in a day.  He shares custody of his two children he has with her as well.  So occasionally he has my three, occasionally her two and occasionally he has all five.  I’m still numb, still annoyed, still happy and still sad all at the same time.  I got what I wanted in a way – a resolution of sorts.  But I’m angry that once again I am trying to navigate his mess and to some extent her mess too.  What a terrible thing they have done.  And yes we all know marriages fail, perhaps second marriages even more so.  But marrying after knowing each other a few months, then having more children, then returning to your old fucked up ways – the drinking, the cheating, the gobs of money on strippers.  Then the result of all that – the fights the kids witnessed, the police, her moving out, then moving back in, then moving back out again..all of this dumb bullshit that I’ve tried to steer the kids through.  It makes me very angry.

“It’s like,” a friend said to me recently, “he’s forever the rock star trashing the hotel room.” And she has it right.  In this scenario I am always the hotel manager.  He breaks shit, ruins things, pisses people off, and I stand in the doorway taking in the mess while trying to come up with a plan for how to clean it up and assuage the angry hotel guests.  Just once, I’d like to be the rock star.  I’d like my own put-upon hotel manager to take a long look at the mess I’m in, survey the damage and say: “It’s okay.  It’s alright. I can fix this.”

Yay cake. Mom’s a citizen now!

This time of year, the last week before the holidays start for the kids is always the most chaotic. There is the dreaded holiday potluck at school which, in the spirit of the season, has us bringing our traditional holiday dishes passed down through the generations. I honestly can’t think what this might be. Spotted Dick I guess, or English Pudding or some horrible traditional English dessert that must be set on fire to be edible. My mom mentioned Christmas cakes the other night when we were celebrating her recent citizenship with a Rice Krispy Treat Cake. Christmas cakes are these fruit cakes covered in a thick casing of hardened marzipan-like icing, that are served on Christmas day. They have dates and cherries in them and they are about as dense as a 4×4. They must be, and these were my mom’s words, matured for up to a year before serving. Anyway, with 12 hours to pull together a traditional dish passed down through the generations, I did not have time to mature my cakes and instead threw myself on the mercy of Whole Foods and got a fruit and cheese plate. The lone single mom in the class confided in me that last year she brought hot dogs, and that her holiday tradition is “shower crying,” and I was like, I hear that.

Our Christmas cards are not going to come in time, the result, the harried customer service woman told me, of some kind of shipping error or printing error. I did however, get Ivy’s thank you cards sent out from her birthday party. Faced with sitting down with Ivy for an hour and dictating how to spell “Friendship making kit” and “Brain Quest Bonanza” I put the pen in my left fist and scrawled them all myself and signed her name. They looked pretty legit.

Arun is still coming off one of his drugs that controls his cataplexy. This seems to have exacerbated things at night because not only is he extremely sleepy from the Xyrem kicking in, but as he loses muscle control it’s a race to get his mask on. If we miss what feels like the 30 second window and he doesn’t get his mask on, it’s a comical grappling between the two of us as I try and affix it to his face, tighten the bands and latch the sides, while keeping him upright in bed so I can get the straps behind his head. Last night, not ten minutes after I’d gotten it on his face, Gilbert, one of our new kittens who loves anything that makes a crinkling sound, came to inspect the tubing on Arun’s mask and faster than I could even reach for him, punctured a hole in the tube with his little needly teeth. I knew he had done it because I could hear the telltale hissing of air. I found some duct tape downstairs and in the dark felt around for the leaking air to patch it, thinking…if anyone walks in right now and sees the knock out juice on the nightstand and me standing over Arun with a roll of duct tape, it’s not going to look good for me.

Anyway, Happy Holidays everyone. I think I’ve posted these before from This American Life, but they are both about sleep. One is an amazing account of sleepwalking that is just so incredible and funny that I’ve listened to it more than once. The other is the best account of cataplexy I’ve heard. You might enjoy them. Then again if you are like me and limping towards the holiday finish line, you might be too busy shower crying.

• Act One: Stranger in the Night
• Act Three: I’ve Fallen in Love and I Can’t Get Up

We got two kittens, from a shelter near our house. They climb my dresses in the closet and fall haplessly into the bathtub and heave up bits of shoelaces they have foolishly gulped down. They are like most kittens – slightly idiotic, frenetic, always under foot and adorable. They like to cuddle, but hate my forced morning kisses because my mint toothpaste makes their eyes sting. One is orange with swirled markings and the other is pure black and was mostly chosen because we were told he was the only one left of his litter, since people don’t like black cats. The best way for me to commit to anything is to tell me that no one else wants it.

One of our cats died about 6 months ago, from a fast moving and aggressive cancer. Like it is with all pets I guess, it’s sad not just because they are gone, but because they seem to take with you, a part of your history. She was a cat I got when I was still married to the kids’ dad; a part of a different lifetime. I sometimes struggle when I hear someone is getting married or having a baby and I have wondered for a long time why that was. Why is my first reaction not to rejoice? When I hear these bits of news, it somehow reminds me of another part of myself that is gone now; the hope of a long marriage with children always in the house seems quaint now. When I catch myself feeling maudlin over someone else’s celebration I feel mean, dark-hearted, small, petty.

The twins turned 8 in a flurry of parties and presents and pizza and ice skating and expense. The kids’ dad and their stepmother come to these parties, which makes sense. The kids like to have them there. That’s just what it is. But it’s awkward and I always leave these joint events feeling tired and slightly depressed. Arun and I usually snap at one another. The pressure to chat amiably to the other parents picking up and dropping off their children is taxing. These are all idle complaints, worthy of nothing really. A week or so ago, a friend’s father was in a terrible accident and it appears he will not survive. My children are alive, healthy, happy. How great is it that they can have birthday parties? It’s great. My discomfort at a birthday party hardly seems worth mentioning.

Arun is on a new drug. I keep meaning to write about it. It’s almost a miracle, this drug. It took us a long time to find someone who could prescribe it – you need to have taken some kind of special certification to prescribe it. It’s the date rape drug, GHB. The pharmaceutical name of the drug is Xyrem. They are extremely careful about prescribing this. He had to be tested via a spinal tap to see if he has a certain narcolepsy marker (he does) and we had to agree to black out the name of the drug on the empty bottle when we throw it out the empty bottles (we don’t). The latter is presumably to prevent anyone from realizing he has it and stealing it. For raping purposes I guess.

How it is supposed to work is to give him such restful sleep at night that he stays awake during the day. This kind of works though he still needs naps during the day. But I don’t have to violently shake him to get him up in the morning. It is also supposed to help with his cataplexy, (sudden loss of muscle control due to a spike in emotions) though it’s unclear to me how that all works and right now and he is still on a separate drug for that. I generally get vague answers from Arun about the progress of this treatment, party because he doesn’t ask the same questions I do and partially because he doesn’t remember to ask them. There may be other reasons too. We’re different. I want to understand how and if I’m going to get better. It can be exasperating that he doesn’t, at least not in the same way. In any case, what Xyrem does is knock him into what looks a lot like a drug-induced coma. He is instructed to not just take it before bed, but to take it in bed. It works so completely and so quickly to render him unconscious, that he gets into bed and lies down before he drinks the dose. He must wear a sleep apnea machine which, until the Xyrem, had mostly served as something for me to bang my shins on, on the way to bed. He’s had it for a long time, but never really wore it. Now he has to wear it every night, because if you’re in a coma you could I guess, just stop breathing entirely. The machine makes a whooshing Darth Vader-like sound and that’s how I know he is still among the living. It’s like life support-lite. Some nights the noise of the machine (or the anxiety I feel when he passes out before he puts it on) is too much and I trundle down the hall to sleep alone or with one of the kids. The other day, a friend of mine who imagines disaster even more completely and vividly than I do, asked me what I plan to do if there’s a fire and I have to get him out of the house. I hadn’t thought about that at all. Even after thinking about it for a while, I really have no plan other than to somehow chuck him out a second floor window or drag him down the stairs by his feet, banging his head on every step on the way down. He’s that asleep and he’s a full grown man. It’s not like I’m going to be throwing him over my shoulder and jogging my way through the smoke. When I was little, my dad used to do fire drills in the house and my sister and I would pull out the metal peg locks from the old sash windows in our bedroom, hurl the window open, then jump into the dirt and bushes alongside the house. All the while, he held a timer, like that dad in The Royal Tenenbaums. I may start doing this with children, because if I have to get Arun out of the house, the kids are going to have to save their own damn lives.

I have a short story coming out in the Indiana Review. I think they have first publishing rights, but I’ll put it up here eventually. It’s a story that struggled to find a home, though got a few accolades in various contests. I’m very excited that I’ll be seeing it in print.

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