i remember walking through the grocery store two years ago with r, crying happy tears and joking that for all thanksgivings in the future we'd have to serve ham because i'd forever associate turkey with the devastating feelings of him leaving the sunday after thanksgiving. he laughed and indulged me in my delusion that the future would involve an 'us' or maybe he himself was feeling guilty and unsure and comforted by the inertia of ten years. i said we'd always be best friends, that we'd laugh when we were old about the winter he spent on an air mattress in a rented room with one of our cats. and then things started to really unravel.
he never came home despite my pleas to him and god and santa. he never got a room with the air mattress. he just got a new checking account, a new hairstyle and angry, further and further away from who i though he was. that christmas and new years sucked. and while i was beginning to feel a stirring, i half-heartedly participated in the holidays last year. i felt foggy and happy that we'd survived another year. the kids and i didn't even get a tree. i don't know when it was exactly that things started to change.
at the risk of sounding ridiculous, i celebrated this thanksgiving with gusto, with thanks for what i do have, not thoughts of what is missing and gone. i cannot tell you what it has felt like to be so warmly welcomed into d's family, and so quickly. i feel free to be myself, faults and all, around them. my sordid past, my complicated present, my anticipated future: everything seems to be accepted in the way it was intended.
bb
he never came home despite my pleas to him and god and santa. he never got a room with the air mattress. he just got a new checking account, a new hairstyle and angry, further and further away from who i though he was. that christmas and new years sucked. and while i was beginning to feel a stirring, i half-heartedly participated in the holidays last year. i felt foggy and happy that we'd survived another year. the kids and i didn't even get a tree. i don't know when it was exactly that things started to change.
at the risk of sounding ridiculous, i celebrated this thanksgiving with gusto, with thanks for what i do have, not thoughts of what is missing and gone. i cannot tell you what it has felt like to be so warmly welcomed into d's family, and so quickly. i feel free to be myself, faults and all, around them. my sordid past, my complicated present, my anticipated future: everything seems to be accepted in the way it was intended.
bb