The Never Normal

After being separated for a little more than two years, I received final divorce papers in the mail on Saturday, complete with Judge McN’s signature dated Christmas Eve, 2013.   I have a thing with dates and would have preferred one less easy to remember… less, well, holy.  The joke’s on me, I suppose.  Oh well.  For the judge it’s just a piece of paper he has to sign.

I’m lucky that Andy and I get along and are friends, because it makes everything a whole lot easier.  As if underscoring the unimportance of our official split to him personally, Jonah ran around for a while yelling mamadaddy!  mamadaddy!  That’s right, Boo.  Mama and daddy love you so much, no matter what.

Andy called me earlier today;  school’s closed for MLK Jr. Day and so he’d picked Jonah up for a visit.   He told me Jonah wanted to talk to mama on the phone.  This is kind of a new thing because he was never much interested in the phone.  Even with his new willingness to hold the magic plastic piece while speaking and listening to invisible mama, I have to do most of the work.

Hi Boo!  (silence.)  Are you watching Oompa Oompa?  yes.  Can you say “I love you mama?” I love you mama.  I love you too Boo, mama loves you so much.  Be good for daddy, okay?  okay.  Bye bye sweetheart.  bye bye.

It’s the closest thing we get to conversation, but light-years beyond how it was years ago.  It’s part of why I keep this blog — so I can look back and measure progress, both his and my own.  Andy also said Jonah was being exceptionally good today, and I’ll talk to him later to see how long it lasted.

On Saturday I wanted to take a couple new pictures of Boo, but when I ask him to smile, he turns all silly and gives me a hammy, angelic grin:

I changed it a little in my photo editor to make it look creepy, for fun

I think it’s much cuter when he doesn’t know you’re taking the photo, like here at his improvised bathtub/swim-up bar:

Most of what happens regularly every weekend happened again.  The endless requests for grandma’s house? and, of course & most especially, car ride?

It’s a 90 minute car ride each way to him, and then I take two car rides with him, Andy drives, my mom stays back at the apartment and either struggles with the Internet (I am trying to be more patient as I teach her the simplest moves of the mouse) or watches QVC or FOX until we return.  Always on our car ride, Jonah wants music and he wants it loud.

We know this not because he tells us turn it up, but because while the music is already playing he will say music on!?  over and over until it is at his desired level, which means that for Andy and I to have a conversation, we have to raise our voices.  We don’t want to hurt Jonah’s hearing of course,  so at about the halfway point we tell him “this is as loud as it goes” as if he understands what we are saying.  Maybe he does, but still he asks for “music on?”

This is what it is now, our strange little family, usually interrupted by Jonah’s dissolving into tears and sometimes an aggression or two.  Practice radical acceptance, they taught me in the hospital.  DBT:  Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) combines cognitive and behavioral therapy, incorporating methodologies from various practices including Eastern mindfulness techniques.

It would serve me well to read through the notebook I kept there.  Eight days of wisdom-teaching does not a wise woman make.

But I’m facing forward, moving slow…forging ahead…