The Daily Chai Has Her Bubble Busted

Today's Chai Latte told me that it was getting sick of always having to be available for me whenever I ordered it. Like I thought I was the boss of it. I told it to shut it and then I drank it. That'll show it not to get too uppity with me!

No, I'm not going crazy. I'M KIDDING. Chai Lattes don't talk, silly. They just hum quietly sometimes.

What to write about, what to write about? Hmmm....well. Kate asked me today if Daddy and I really had to get divorced. And I was like, crap, how do I answer that question? Because the truth is, we don't HAVE TO get divorced. Not really. We could continue on and pretend everything is okay and maybe even pretend we still love each other and pretend that the last five months didn't happen. Stop the sale of the house and run into each other's arms like they do in the movies and say, "I'm so sorry," "No, I'M sorry!" We could kiss and everything would be okay. On the surface. But nothing has changed and nothing is fixed and nothing will ever be the same. So doesn't all that fakeness sound like fun? Like an authentic life? Do you think you could do it? I can't. I actually wish I could. I wish I could take everything back and change how I dealt with my marriage when I was unhappy, instead of clamming up and pretending everything was okay, day after day, when it most definitely was not.

The sad fact is, I didn't deal with the problems in my marriage until it was too late and now here we are. So I looked at Kate when she asked this question and I tried to figure out an honest way to answer her that would be the truth without blaming her dad (or me) too much and still be somewhat satisfying to her as an explanation to why some marriages end. If not satisfying, at least something she can understand and accept. Because she's nine. She knows some of the reasons why we broke up, but she doesn't know everything, obviously. To her, we just got in a really big fight and then the next thing she knew, we were living separately. That was one doozy of a fight! And yes, it really was, but that isn't the solitary reason we are headed for divorce. Obviously it takes a lot more than that, but I can't tell her all those things. But...how do I justify the big D without explaining some of it to her?


As I pondered these difficult questions, she said, "Because if you guys stayed together, I could stay at my school and stay with my friends and I wouldn't have to leave my house."

And that, my friends, is how you get told that it isn't always about you.