The Daily Chai is Ambivalent

Today's Chai Latte is perfect. I have nothing else to say about it except that my entire day has been made because it started with the perfect drink. Sweet, simple things people, enjoy them all!

Mixed emotions last night as my real estate agent came to take pictures and measure rooms so she can list our matrimonial home. We've been here for six years and I never wanted to move again, but here I am, planning, once again, to move. Balls. God, I hate moving.

We bought this house sight unseen while we still lived in Germany. Lots of people went to look at it for us, but the first time we saw the house was on our final inspection right before we moved in. The bedrooms were a little smaller than I'd imagined, but all in all, I was happy with it. It's an old house in an old town and I loved it. It has some good character, like transom windows above the bedroom doors and some of the original trim has survived. There are windows everywhere and on sunny days it is filled with lovely light in every room. It has a finished attic family room just like the house I grew up in and a creepy old cellar with a working cistern that I have never been fully convinced does not house a crocodile. And I SWEAR I have heard children laughing and running when mine have been fast asleep. Maybe just a trick of the house creaking in its old age, but it doesn't bother me, it just reminds me this hundred year old house has history.

We will leave some of our own history here to carry on. There has been love and laughter in this house and it is the house I brought Anna home to when she was born. It is the house that Kate has grown up in and the only place she remembers as the memories of Germany faded for her. I spent almost two years here as a stay-at-home mom, raising my girls and the happiness of those memories will last me forever.

But it is also a house that has many sad memories for me and my family. By the very virtue of its age and character, it has caused us both stress and in someways, that stress played a part in destroying our marriage. Last spring, I thought if we moved to a new house, a house that we would both love, the stress would melt away, but that is like having a baby to save a marriage. It's a pretty big commitment for a bandaid solution. When I thought about buying something else with my ex and being as house poor as we were planning to be, I backed off the idea. It was yet another indication that my marriage was crumbling. People in a healthy partnership do not worry that buying a house is going to tie them more fully to the other person, they reveal in the happiness of the commitment.

And so, a chapter of my life comes to an end. I am excited about it as well as sad. Last week, I was having a few low moments and I asked a friend to remind why I was doing this again. To remind me the correct path is not always the easiest or the happiest. To remind me that sometimes the things of the greatest worth are the hardest to achieve. He came back with this:

So I, like everyone around me, weathers the storm. I'm even learning to enjoy the storm because I never know where it's going to take me next and I'm always up for an adventure.

The Daily Chai and Kids of Divorce, Part 2

The Daily Chai hates me. It has decided, in its existential crisis that because I didn't order it, it ceased to exist and now, just to spite me, it won't come back. This is what happens when hot drinks start questioning their reason for existence.

I wrote a couple days ago about how Kate is dealing with my separation and the essential splitting of her family as she knew it. Some of you asked, "But what about Anna?" Anna...is a different story. She's only four and she doesn't really understand what's happen or why it's happening. At this stage in her development, she is only beginning to understand cause and effect. Added to that, the world revolves around her and her wants and needs. She understands home and daycare, but her world is pretty small and therefore, fairly uncomplicated. The complexity of adult relationships is beyond her grasp of understanding and she only knows the close, affection bonds between herself and her sister, her mother and her father.  Bonds that have been tested harshly and, in the case of my ex and I, broken. She is striving for independence when she insists on picking her own clothes and getting herself dressed, but she still depends on both me and her dad for the majority of her other needs. She has three feelings: happy, sad and frustrated as fuck. So try explaining that while mommy and daddy don't want to be married anymore, that doesn't mean they don't love YOU! Yeah, right. Really? You guys used to love each other, what happened? Are you going to stop loving me one day? Why don't you love each other anymore? Why don't you live together anymore? Are you going to live together again? I want you to, so you better get on that.

The other night I went over to the house for a visit and Anna came out of the office with a woeful expression on her face and the sad tale of her mean sister Kate not drawing for her anymore because she was doing math. It set the tone for my entire visit, this tearful little face with the trembling chin. She got frustrated when I didn't draw the stick figure EXACTLY to her little dictator's unspoken expectations (I drew it with hands for the love of god, what the fuck was I THINKING??). Then it was time for bed and I do believe all parents will understand the extreme, frightening, nearly bloody tantrum that suddenly erupted at the words, "Okay my darling, bedtime!" Oh well. I carried her writhing, screaming body upstairs anyway and dumped her on my bed to get her undressed.

"But I didn't get to cuddle with you mommy! I want to cuddle!" She screamed in my face. Trying to stay calm, but needing to count to ten, I said, VERY sweetly, "Oh my darling, let's get your PJs on and then we will cuddle all you like!"

"I want to cuddle RIGHT NOW!"

"PJs first, cuddle after," I said, wondering why I had made that stupid stipulation. Now I had to stick to it or be disobeyed forever because my kids will never trust that I mean what I say if I back down one iota from "PJs first, cuddle after."  Why do we put that kind of pressure on ourselves as parents? Jesus.

Well. She started to cry and asked me again, probably for the 58th time since we split up, why don't I love Daddy anymore?

"I do love Daddy, darling, I always will. But it's complicated and sometimes grownups just can't be married anymore."

"Daddy says you don't love him." OH FUCK. Now, I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here because Anna has been known, frequently, to say that I said things or he said things that were completely and totally untrue. So let's just say he didn't say that to her and move on.

I took that little morsel of human existence into my lap and she wrapped her arms and legs around me like a monkey and lay her damp face on my shoulder while I held her tight and stroked her hair. "I think you may have misunderstood Daddy. We will always love each other. But what's really important my girl is that I love YOU.  You are smart and special and you will always be my girl. I will always, always love you and be there for you when you need me." As I said that last part, I choked a little because the hardest part about this is that I'm NOT always there for her when she needs me. One of us is, she always has one parent available when she needs us, but sometimes you just need your mother. And there are days where I'm no where to be found, so essentially, I just lied to my baby. In that split second, I pictured her, 14 and hooked on crack because she was abandoned by her mother at the age of four and never learned how to form lasting bonds with people which led to a life of crime. Yes, that is where my head goes.

Anyway, she calmed down and I put her to bed and lay down beside her in that tiny toddler bed and sang I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane at her insistence. Fuck, that is a sad song to sing to the baby I have to leave behind.

Later, after Kate and I had spent some time watching this incredibly cute Minecraft vlogger (she admitted that half the reason she watches him is because he is so cute and the other reason is because he has pugs), Anna was crying out to me again. I went to her room, "Anna, Anna, my darling, my love, what's wrong now? You need to go to sleep and you've kicked off your covers," I said as I leaned down to tuck her back in.

"I had a hard day today mummy," God, they know how to break your heart, don't they? So back I went into that tiny toddler bed where she "made a spot" for me and I sang Mockingbird to her. Told her she was my girl, that she was my favourite and don't tell Kate. (don't worry, I told Kate the exact same thing moments earlier, they're both aware of my duplicity).

I have no words of wisdom about how to handle this hard time except to say that I express my deep love for her whenever I see her. There is no point in explaining why mummy and daddy don't live together. She doesn't understand, nor should she be burdened with those reasons at her age. Maybe one day, if she is still interested, I will try to explain it to her. Right now,  I concentrate on developing our bond into something meaningful and unbreakable with the hope that it will be strong enough to keep her from losing her mind as a teenager and becoming a prostitute for drugs.

27 Boxes of Books

My dad died four years ago today. No one said anything to me and I feel like they all forgot. They probably did, except for mum. She probably figured I didn’t need reminding, but still. I wish one person would have said something to me today...but no one did. 

To be fair, last year I forgot. I was happily minding my own business on October 7th and in the evening, my mum called me to see how I was managing, on this, the 3rd anniversary of my dad’s death. I replied, “Well, I was doing just fine forgetting about it until you called to remind me. Now I feel like shit that I forgot. What I horrible person I am. Thanks for reminding me.” She felt terrible, but I’m pretty sure I felt worse. 

So ironically,  I celebrated thanks today, on the anniversary of his death. I am thankful though. I’m still alive. But I can’t help but be bitter that I am dadless and that my youngest daughter will tell people, “My mom’s dad? Oh, he died before I was born.” And my oldest daughter will say, “Oh, ya, my grandpa died when I was two. I don’t remember him.”

For those two things I am not thankful.

I miss my dad, although sometimes I wonder why because we had a complicated relationship. Part of me did not like him very much and will probably never forgive him for leaving my mum and me when I was 15, essentially ending my life as I knew it. Another part of me loved him deeply because he was my dad. He taught me why the moon waxes and wanes. He told me never put up with a guy with a temper, because one day the temper would be turned on me. He had this deep, gravelly laugh that I can’t quite remember anymore. He smelled like tobacco smoke and he read copious amounts of science fiction. He paced while he thought about a difficult problem or if something he heard on the news was driving him crazy. He started making bread right before he died and whenever he experimented a little too much and had a crappy batch, he fed it to the ducks in the park across the street. 

When he died, both my brother and I were living outside of Canada and we had to fly home to clear out his apartment. Neither of us had a lot of time as we had to return to our homes, so we left a lot of stuff, but we did the best we could. Perhaps if one of us had had a home in Canada, we would have kept more things that belonged to him. More things that he had once touched. I have one teak box with a few artifacts from his life and I wish I had kept a shirt or something. The most time-consuming and hardest tasks we had was packing up his books because both my brother and I would grab the odd book from his collection as we packed them up and stop to read for a bit. We both packed a box each to take home with us, but there were so many, we couldn't keep the rest. I now have one row of books in my own library that once belonged to my father. I don’t even know why I picked those particular ones or if I will ever read them and I couldn’t tell you the title of even one. My eyes pass over them, unfocused, when I go upstairs to pick a book out. I suppose it’s a type of avoidance. One day I will pick one out and hold it and think about my dad holding it, reading it. Maybe I will picture him standing in the bookstore, deciding whether to buy it or not. Bookstore visits were a thrice-weekly occurrence for my dad. In any case, I have not read any of these books yet. But I will.

So what it came down to was packing up my dad’s stuff, taking a few small things and donating the rest to charity. The last night was packing the rest of the books. We packed all the books and loaded them into a van and drove them over to a used bookstore. It was dark, raining. Middle of October in Southwest Ontario, you know? So we get to the used book store and they don’t want them. We stare at each other in the wet and the gloom and decide to take them to Value Village. It seems like a good idea because the money will go to charity and we both think Dad would like that. So we unload the boxes and there are so many of them. I tell Dave we need to count them and we come up with twenty-seven. And that’s it. My dad’s life came down to 27 boxes of books abandoned on a rainy night on the cold pavement. 

I wonder what I’m supposed to get out of this experience. Losing my dad at the age of 31 and having this difficult, often sad, often strained relationship with him before he was taken from us. In my mind, I see his books that he loved so much being dropped off at some second hand place and us driving away. It took every ounce of strength I had not to run back and take every book back with me. I wish to this day that I had. 

Do you want to know what I got out of it? To be thankful for every second I have on this earth with these dear people I love. To love life and read books. To look at the moon and remember what he taught me. And to feed the ducks.