Butterflies...

We have our first real boyfriend.  My oldest daughter, at the very same age that I was and who has never been one to settle, has met the first boy to put that look in her eye and smile on her face, which I recognize all too well.  This is the real deal.  This is the one who must have that extra something that she has been patiently holding out for since she decided she wanted a boyfriend, but not just any boyfriend.  This is the one that could break her heart.  This is the one that she will learn many hard lessons from.  This is the one who I will be watching like a hawk, making sure he is worthy.  

We picked him up for our first date…I mean their first date. And as we got closer and closer to his house, we were both trying to talk each other out of our tummy aches (which, in the moment, my jaded heart hadn’t recognized as very special and exciting butterflies.).  He was a sweet boy, with a lovely family and their adorable family dog.   I couldn’t help thinking, when I met them all, how lucky they were to meet her. 

I’ve put everything I have into raising her with enough confidence and patience to hold out for extra special and to be worthy of it and appreciative of it when she finds it.  My girl has some sky high standards these days and I knew that boy must be extra special. (He better be. My girl is a gem.)  It wasn’t lost on me, the way he looked at her, like he couldn’t believe his eyes.  And the way he smiled and floated on air around her, just as I have been watching my giddy daughter float lately.  

So far, she tells me a lot about him and them (like when they had the “are we boyfriend/girlfriend?” talk and she reminded him that he hadn’t asked her yet, but that he was welcome to ask her next time they saw each other in person.  My Girl.)  It’s not the usual “Whatever, it’s not important, don’t worry about it” (aka “none of your business mom”).   It IS important.  And it’s exciting and new and a start of a magical/horrific dating lifetime filled with heavenly highs and gut wrenching lows.  It’s a new chapter for us.  And I want to know EVERYTHING.  I won’t know everything.  But I want to.  I want her to not be able to stop talking about him, and I want to hang on her every word.  And in very grateful return,  I will try not to gush and choke up everytime I see that twinkle in her eye (because I guess that’s lame), and I will try to keep my very wise opinions  to myself…as much as I possibly can.  Lines of communication can be very fragile at this age.

A few weeks after our first date… I mean their first date, they went to his Homecoming dance together.  He bought three different ties just to make sure he had the perfect color to match her dress, which I thought was really adorable (and smart, because in all honesty, perfection is pretty much what I’m looking for, for my girl).   We stood in his living room, with his family, and took pictures of our children, who were positivley glowing.  Everytime I look at that picture, I am so thankful for that huge, genuinely happy smile on her face, and so impressed that his smile may be even bigger.  

I've learned to embrace the butterflies I get evertime I see them together.  Now if I could just convince her to introduce him to her three precious little siblings. 

Chapter- Unhappily Never After

Chapter-unhappily never after

He hugged me.  We had barely spoken face to face in over two years, after our 14 year failed attempt at happily ever after, as I have tried desperatly to avoid eye contact with my unrequited love, and suddenly, he walked onto my porch and pulled me to him and hugged me. It was a surprisingly comfortable, familiar hug. It was a tight hug, with every fiber of his also battered heart, and his deep breath quivered a bit.  And our war weary hearts beat strongly against each other. 

I asked him what it was for. He let go and walked away without answering, in his truest style, and then stopped and looked back and said “just because”...with tears in his eyes.  And in that moment, I think we both saw two people who had given it everything we could, and neither of which was enough for the other in the earth shattering end. 

I was shaken...to my core. It felt like I was facing a demon I had long given up on. The one who would NEVER come around and realize how lucky he was to have me.  He is the only one in the world who has ever met that whole-hearted, unjaded, passionate woman. He is the only man who that woman ever gave her all. He broke that woman. And suddenly he was standing on my porch, hugging her. 

 It hurt.  It brought to the surface, all the sadness that my anger had buried.  And then It felt a bit healing. I cried off and on, for days, at the thought of it. The tears feel like a release of a tiny bit of that painful notion that he will never consider himself lucky to have been so loved by me, that he will never be sorry for taking me for granted or  ever appreciate all that I poured into him and our family.  Maybe there is hope that he will one day be very genuinely sorry for breaking me, or look back in awe of everything I gave.  

 That full moon was something last night, after all...

3rd anniversary of all the kids in school...

I just sent my crew off for their first day of school.  Oddly, it did not give me the same euphoric feeling it ALWAYS has.  I didn’t spend this summer on the verge of nervous breakdowns and yearning for the first day of school.   And the summer went by in a flash rather than it’s usual eternity.   Don’t get me wrong, it was rough.  It was it’s typical mix of ice cream and swimming and frolicking and playing and laughing and fighting and bickering and tattling and bickering and fighting and tattling and laughing and bickering and fighting, and whining and the endless, relentlessly exhausting task of putting smiles on my precious, ungrateful children's faces, who, quite frankly were just as sick of me and each other as I was of all of them.  But as usual, we made the best and most of it.  And we survived.  

It helps that they can all fend for themselves (far more than they would ever actually let on).  They can get their own snacks and pour their own drinks.  We can go anywhere now, without strollers.  Everyone can buckle themselves into their car seats.  We don’t need diaper bags and snacks and sippy cups.  

Maybe it helped that I was down one kid most of the time (though I missed her like hell) as my teenager found herself a summer home this year and had a two month “sleepover” at a friends house, in an effort to be anywhere else but a house filled with her siblings (can’t say that I blamed her).  Maybe it helps that my boys took every moment that I didn’t insist on entertaining them to entertain themselves with their video game obsession.  It did get a bit worrisome at times, but I just had to keep reminding myself of the summer I spent trying to save Princess Peach.  

I’m sure it helps that I’m forced to share custody of my kids with their dad half the time.  I never imagined  that would happen, but it did, and in the interest of full disclosure, I needed it, whether I knew it or not.  I remember one time, while I was really in the thick of stay at home motherhood, with toddlers and babies and diapers and he was working 9-5, telling someone “I just worry that he thinks he works harder than I do.”  And he did.  Deep down inside, we always both knew he did.  And I think, deep down, underneath other far more painful reasons that I had to leave him, we both knew that I was never going to get the help I desperately needed with parenthood if I stayed.  Shared custody was a necessary sacrifice.  It takes the edge off, and I still struggle to cope with it.  

My growing, capable children and new found moments of silence and a very quiet house on this first day of school morning, have reminded me how lucky I was to be able to stay home with ever one of my children (and there are a lot of them) before sending them off to school.  It was a genuine blessing and there was never ever a moment that I wanted to be doing something else with my life.  One of my favorite things to do every morning when I have my coffee is check my Facebook memories where I have obsessivley document my journey through motherhood.  And they never fail to remind me how much I have loved this job.  Motherhood is my passion and even in the midst of my occasional nervous breakdowns, I didn’t take a single second of it for granted, I swear.  Those years at home with my babies brought me an overwheling and exhausting joy, great enough to overshadow my unrequited love.  He worked hard enough to afford me an invaluable opportunity of a lifetime, and I worked my ass off trying to be worthy of it.  

It’s not lost on me.  And on this third anniversary of having all four kids in school, and surviving a survival of the fittest type challenge,  I can look back at those very long grueling days that I once believed would never ever end, and I would never survive, and pinch myself at the selective memories of that moment in time.