is a single mama in the city, super-savvy editor, writer, video host and shameless shoe whore.
When he saw this, he thanked me
Monday, June 6, 2011 I've read a lot about divorce. About being the best single mother I can be and still embrace the times when everything goes completely awry.
About meditation. About traveling alone and traveling alone with a child. About dating with a child. About changing tires and teaching a child to help you change a tire. About kicking my own financial ass and raising a child to be more fiscally responsible than I was for my first 36 years.
About sex, marriage, uncoupling, introducing a kid to a new beau. And about Katie Holmes and the Housewives because...you know, all this other stuff is some heavy shit.
But it felt like time to do more.
Maybe it's because I no longer define myself as Divorced Lady. Or maybe it's I recently realized that even though the Ex is no longer a primary relationship in my life, I give him enough energy and emotion to make it appear that he is.
I've chosen since the day I left to put my son in the center, and I have. Now his needs are different, the situation is different, the way we all relate is different. So it's time to study up, to be hopeful there will be an ease in this still-tough situation that's been normal for a long time. It's time for it to be easy.
Perhaps that's what Lil E got when he read the title himself. Or was it that he simply saw me trying to make things better for him, the small child in the middle of a whole, big past? Whatever it was for him, the moment was powerful for me, too.
I opened the box, pulled the book from it. Lil E asked to see it. I held it in his direction and he took his time, carefully sounding out each word. Divorce was one word he read quickly, like he knew it deep in his consciousness well before he recognized sight words like cat and dog.
"Thank you, Mommy!" He said it enthusiastically. No sadness, no worry. Just happiness that I met him in the place where he clearly is -- or clearly was to me in that brief second.
I closed my eyes, nodded, smiled. I asked him to take it to my room. He grabbed it in his hands, sticky with something, so much dirt under the nails.
I found it later that night when I turned back the covers and adjusted the pillow. It was there, hidden half under my covers and half under the place where I rest my head, wrestle recurring nightmares, have worked so hard to sleep more, better, deeper. It was waiting for me.
Was it a thank you? A reminder? An intimate gesture of hope between a single mama and her sensitive boy?
I'm not sure yet. But I am reading. I promise to him and myself, I am reading.
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