Divorce is not for the faint-hearted

Rather than writing my random thoughts as part of my review of Every Other Weekend, I decided to put them in an entry of their own. I've pulled some passages of the book and then will share what the particular passage reminded me of from my own divorce. This is bound to be a very long blog entry, not really book-related. However, through my own writing, you'll have the opportunity to get to know me better.

In the driveway, note the brand-new Chevy van. On family trips, scuttle like a bug to get a swivel sweat. Yell "Shotgun," punch someone in the arm, cry to Mom if you have to - whatever it takes. If you're not swivelin', you're snivelin', 'cause the back seat reeks of sweat and swarms with ants when summer rolls around. They sneak up the tailpipe and find their way in, a little button of black squirm where someone spilt Hi-C from a can.

I don't think my memory here has anything to do with divorce. It has more to do with being a mother of three children, driving a minivan. We didn't have swivel seats in our middle row, but we did have captain's seats rather than a bench in our middle row. When I purchased my Toyota Previa in 1991, captain's seats were a big deal. Most minivans still had middle row benches. 

Once the kids were all out of their car safety seats (which happened a lot earlier in the 90s than it does today), it became a fight to sit "shotgun," in the front seat next to Mom. There'd be running for the car. The punching was also a thing. And I thought my family was unique. Ha!

The summer after my divorce, the kids and I were driving from our house in New Jersey to my parents' beach club in New York. On a good day, the drive took a little over an hour. If I'm recalling correctly, on this particular day, the traffic gods were on our side and we hadn't sat in any traffic at all. My youngest was sitting in the captain's seat on the passenger side of the middle row. I can't remember who was sitting next to her and who was sitting in the third row. About 5 minutes away from the beach club, I hear her say, "I have a stomach ache. I have to go to the bathroom." My response was, "Hold it in. We'll be there in a few minutes." She had a can of Yoo Hoo with her when we left our house. I had no idea how much she had or had not consumed. I then hear what sounds like her pouring the Yoo Hoo out of the can onto the floor of the car. That's what the other two kids heard as well. I'm not sure which one of us realized that she'd vomited all over herself, all over the seat.

Maybe this is a divorce story. My ex-husband wasn't helpful in nearly all ways, but until that point, he'd cleaned up a much larger share of the vomit that had come out of the mouths of our children. Someone else's vomit made me want to vomit. It made me feel like vomiting. Who was going to clean this up? Me, of course!

We get to the beach club, I get the kids up to my parents' cabana, and I did my share of whining about having to quickly get back down to the parking lot to clean up the vomit in the car before the temperature got too warm and the stench got too intense. Several of my mom's friends gathered together to get me supplied with rags, buckets, water, cleaning products. I left the kids with my mom and returned to the car.  I scrubbed, I rinsed, I disinfected. And that day, I left my car unlocked in the parking lot of the beach club with the door near what came to be known as "the vomit seat" wide open. 

Yes, "the vomit seat." Didn't the kids we carpooled around town ever wonder why none of my kids would seat in the middle passenger-side captain's seat? A year or so the Toyota was replaced with another minivan, this time a Plymouth, and "the vomit seat" was relegated to the memory books for me and all three kids.

And then Dad would show up, every other weekend and one night a week, looking like someone had blown him up and had left a weird, featureless man in his place. On Wednesdays, he'd take them to McDonald's and they'd eat in silence, and every other Friday he'd pick them up for the weekends at his house. They were long weekends, dull and quiet in a sad, sort of lonely way.

I can't really speak for my kids. I have lots of details about the time they spent with their father when they were kids. But the memory that this passage sparked has to do with how quickly the kids got thru their dinners out with their father on their Wednesday nights. Neither my former husband nor myself were fans of fast food. So he took the kids to actual sit-down restaurants. When I'd take the kids out to dinner, we'd enjoy our time together without me having to fret over cooking a meal that invariably someone wouldn't eat and when dinner was over, we'd get up from the table and go home. I didn't have to clean up and I didn't have to nag them for help. The four of us liked eating out together and it wasn't a rushed affair. Wednesday evenings, their father, who'd driven however long from somewhere in New York City to our house in suburban New Jersey, would be sitting in his car on the street, reading a newspaper until the kids were all home and ready to go out to dinner. They'd pull out of the driveway and seriously, maybe 25 minutes later, the kids would be ringing the bell. Dinner done. Really? He spent at least 4 times as long driving in the car as he did with the kids. Why?

Turns out, Dad does know his way here. Except that when he shows up now, he doesn't even come to the door. He just sits in the car, staring straight ahead, honking.

Again, our stories aren't even close. But they are certainly parallel. And this passage sparks two different and distinct memories. My kids and I remained in our family home after the divorce. So their dad knew his way to the house. (In the book, Nenny, her mother and her brothers move to an apartment with their mother's friend and then quickly moved into a house with their mother's new husband and his two kids.)

First memory. He's sitting in a car. I can't remember if this was in the early days when he still had his own car or later on, after his car had been stolen, and he'd show up in a different rental car each time. He'd be sitting in the car, head facing forward, with a newspaper pulled up right in front of his eyes, but positioned so that it blocked his view of the house or of me. Did he honk the horn? I can't remember for certain. But as soon as the first kid approached the car, he'd put down his newspaper, get out of the car and start screaming at the other two kids, "Let's get out of this dump." Remember, this was the house he and I bought together with the intention of raising our children there together. This happened for years. Whether it was picking up the kids for a weekend or picking them up for a "quick bite." "Quick bite," an expression he used all the time, being taken far too literally. "Let's get out to this dump." This happened all the time. I was the Girl Scout cookie mom. I had moms in the driveway picking up their cookie orders. And the father of my children is standing in the street yelling, "Let's get out of this dump." Another standing joke with the kids going forward.

Second memory. He might know the way to the house. But a while after his car got stolen, he claimed that he wasn't able to secure a rental car for Sunday evenings in order to drive the kids home. He'd send them home with a "car and driver." Eventually, a "car and driver" often showed up on Fridays for the pick-ups. Anyway, the current memory is about the time that the driver was unable to read the handwritten directions that my ex-husband had given him to be able to get them home. This was in the mid-90s, years before GPS was a thing for ordinary drivers. Of course the driver didn't realize he couldn't read the handwritten directions until he and the kids were crossing the George Washington Bridge. As soon as my middle child realized that they were "lost," she started to cry. Eventually, two or three of them were able to somehow, miraculously, direct the driver back to our house. After that, whenever we'd drive from New York City to our house, I'd throw out the question, "Okay, which way to I head now?" making sure that they'd recognize landmarks and would be comfortable finding their way home.

Little Nenny has always been a nervous nelly. She was born with a natural predilection for alarm. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. This simple irrationality governs her whole life - top to bottom, inside and out.

This describes my youngest. She had broken her leg as a toddler and as such, required much more personal space than most kids need. She was afraid of people getting physically too close. She was afraid of being alone at night. She'd "sleepwalk" down the stairs and lie down on the kitchen floor outside my office, without me even knowing she'd come downstairs. That led to me having all three kids sleep in the same bedroom for probably close to a year. It took many more years for her to be able to sleep in her own bedroom, alone. She was afraid of storms. She was afraid of getting lost. She was afraid of animals. (In the midst of writing up this post, she reminded me that she was afraid of our cat as a child. Our cat. That lived in our house with us.) Once when we had a chipmunk loose in our house, she locked herself in her bedroom for about 15 hours with a towel blocking the bottom of the door. Didn't she have to go to the bathroom? She was afraid of terrorists. But more on that later.

Having divorced parents is like living in one of those claw machines at the pizza parlor: you're just hanging around, minding your own business, and then every other weekend you get plucked up and flung somewhere else. Except it's less fun than the pizza place. It's not like Nenny ever thinks Yippee, a weekend at Dad's.

"Just everyone sit down," Dad finally says, and they sit at the picnic table. He irritably hands out the food and they start to eat. Denny's burger is smeared with ketchup and she practically gags, but she knows better than to complain.

Oh boy! My oldest hated ketchup. I wish he'd known better, most of the time, than to complain. The tears.

Even though Mom's pissed, she lets Nenny come along and softens halfway through the drive. She's like that: prone to rage and then settle guilt for exposing the kids to her wrath.

Isn't this a normal mom thing? Or is it exclusive to divorced moms? Didn't we have a certain level of guilt to overcome, just because we were divorced?

"You ever been to a laundromat before?" she asks. 
"I don't think so," Nenny says.
...
Mom smiles. "Boy, are you spoiled!" She looks at Nenny playfully, but Nenny just looks back. She sure doesn't feel spoiled. Spoiled is a new Barbie every week and trips to the skating rink.

At the end of October a new quiet descends upon the house like nothing Nenny's heard before. Though she doesn't know it yet, it's the silent assault of approaching death. Gramma B's been declining for months. That's what they say, "a steady decline," as though she's slowly crawling down a hill.

The memory associated with this is not good. This was in 2004. Both my ex-husband and I were in relationships. He was engaged to be married. For what seemed like a really long period of time, whenever my ex-husband needed an excuse for not showing up for something or not being able to spend time with the kids, he'd bring his future wife's sick mother into play. One Friday he called to say that he couldn't pick up the kids until Saturday because his girlfriend's mother was really, really sick, on death's doorstep, and he promised his girlfriend that he'd spend the evening with the two of them. I had plans for the weekend that involved leaving town. I stuck around longer and made overnight plans for the kids. Death's doorstep? The father of my significant other had recently passed away. I understood death's doorstep. 

On Sunday, once the kids were home, I learned that my ex-husband's future wife's elderly but not too sick mother wanted to go out to dinner. She wasn't on death's doorstep at all. She was old. She wanted a restaurant meal. I was hurt by the insensitivity of him using a death's doorstep excuse. And hey, could he have not lied? Oh wait. I guess not.

"Get under your desks!" Sister Timothy shouts and peers through the blinds. "Oh no, it's the Russians! Dear God, dear God, dear God!" She crosses herself like crossing's the only thing left.
...
Mikhail Gorbachev comes into the room. The Mikhail Gorbachev.

What's my recollection here?  My youngest was a fifth grader on September 11, 2001. Like Nenny, she was a fearful child. I wish I could remember if she was afraid of Saddam Hussein in the days before 9/11 or the days after. Not only was she afraid of Saddam Hussein, she was sure that he was a regular at our Starbucks! She insisted she'd see him there. I later learned that the guy she identified as Saddam Hussein was an artist who spent an awful lot of time at our Starbucks. He looked nothing like Saddam Hussein. And she could never really explain to me why she thought that's who this fellow really was. We (everyone but my youngest) joked around about it. But she was totally serious. 

Denny's on the Baby-Sitters Club #5 again, Dawn and the Impossible Three, because she forgot the newest one at Dad's. That's another thing about divorce: you pack things and forget things and lose things all the time. There's a trail of your stuff like crumbs wherever you go.

I don't remember too much of that going on with my kids and their dad's house. Mostly because they brought everything back and forth each time they went for the weekend. I found out after they'd spent many weekends there that he didn't have tooth paste or shampoo for them. He expected them to bring those things along with them. As if it was a hotel. Yet, he insisted that his apartment in New York was their "real home."

But she doesn't get up right away. She clutches her book and hugs her knees and sits for a minute on the midway stairs. She knows what it's like to anticipate something, then to have your hope shrivel like a deflating balloon. Every time she goes to Dad's she expects something will have changed, that maybe this time he'll ask how she is, if she's happy, if anything's wrong, but he never does. He's so whacked and floating in his own world of grades and naps and dumb historical facts. The house could be on fire and he'd just sit there, with his cup of coffee and his stack of papers and his pile of red pens.

Then again, he'd always show up. He's never not shown up. That's a different kind of disappointment entirely.

I believe this describes my children's situation. He always showed up when he said he'd show up. That doesn't mean he didn't back out of weekends or dinners with advanced warning. He did that all the time. But we always knew in advance.

As kids, I know all three of them wished that something would change. That somehow the dad that picked them up would be a warmer, "daddier" like dad than the one they really had.  And that was the source of their biggest disappointment. They're adults, and I'm not 100% sure that the disappointment each time they see him isn't totally gone.

Every year the fourth graders at school research a California mission and build a model out of sticks or sugar cubes, and every year it's always the same - tiny Indians in the mission gardens, raking soil or planting seeds or forming bricks, or else praying with some priest in a courtyard somewhere, the feeling one of peaceful camaraderie, of a fair and equitable exchange, and every year, walking through the cafeteria where the models are on display, Nenny thinks, Yeah, right. Everyone knows the Indians were slaves.

Next year, she thinks, when I'm in fourth grade, my model's gonna tell the truth, and pictures sugar cubes specked with painted blood and little figure faces twisted with rage.

Mexican houses! That was the project that my kids had to do in first grade. The dreaded Mexican house project. I was still married when my oldest was in first grade. His father and I had just returned from a quick getaway to Cancun where I'd seen actual Mexican houses. I guided him in his construction of his house. I had him do all the work. I don't think they got actual grades on their Mexican houses, but had they, he would have gotten a D-. His teacher told me that his house didn't look at all like how she'd described the houses to the children. So was THAT the project? That was never made clear. Not to the first graders and not to their parents. His house looked just like what I'd just seen in Mexico! Not to mention that he was "sloppily" done. Well, yes! He was 6 years old and I wasn't doing the project for him. His Mexican house fell apart on the day that he carried it home from school. I don't think I realized how many parents did the projects for the kids so those kids showed up with very well-constructed Mexican houses!

Take two. My middle child is assigned the Mexican house project. I knew better this time. "What did Mrs. Hayes say that your Mexican house needs to look like?" I didn't talk about any real Mexican houses I'd seen before or how her older brother's Mexican house was not well-received. She described the house that her teacher had described to her. And that's how her house was constructed. By her. That's when I learned that many of those over-achieving parents built the houses that their children brought in. You should have seen the house the child of the architect brought in! Well, you can imagine!

Take three. My youngest makes it to first grade. She has the same first grade teacher as her older siblings. The entire summer between kindergarten and first grade, I'm dreading the stupid Mexican house project. The school year rolls along and my dread grows. But no mention of the Mexican house. Ever. June comes. First grade is over. No Mexican house. Hooray! It wasn't until about 3 years later when I'd begun my full-time teaching career that I learned why their was no Mexican house project. Apparently the year that my youngest was in first grade, there was a new, young first grade teacher at their school. She thought the Mexican house project was ridiculous. And she made it go away. I owe great thanks to that wonderful teacher who impacted the lives of both my child and me, for the better, without us really ever having any direct contact with her.

That's the extent of my text-to-self connections from Every Other Weekend by Zulema Renee Summerfield. I have tons more anecdotes. Maybe someday I'll write a book.