broken things

I think the mood can stand alone even if there are parts to this story that go untold.  It’s nearing 8 am, three hours beyond the normal time I wake up make coffee and let out the dogs.  The phone is ringing into a dark house.   Now these sort of calls are never good they usually come in the middle of night this one came while I was laying in bed trying to decide if the pain my chest was anything to worry about or was it just the edge of pneumonia settling in. 

BC has learned to recognize these calls too.  He rushes to make coffee while I dress for the cold spring unsettling the valley with the threat of new snow.  With little more than a ‘call me’ I was out the door headed to my ex’s on a retrieval mission.  My instructions were simple: come get this kid right now.  

My second-thought call to BC rings in the backseat of the car where Beach left his phone.  My second attempt looking for a backup guy unanswered.  I am alone.

Three hours later Conner and Beach sit noses to the computer watching Transformers 3, home school a total loss while I try without much success to gain lost ground.  I can’t quite shake the feeling standing there trying my best to defuse the situation between them left.  

I have discovered time travel.  Emotions moved me 15 years into the past wiping out my history.  I don’t feel like the woman who preformed surgeries and walked the halls of the hospitals with the big dogs.  I am not the woman loved by the most amazing man I ever met.  I am not the top the biology pack at the U or Dr. Bramble’s favorite student.  I am not anything beyond what he called me today… 

While married we had a way of deciphering whose need was the highest and the other would fold to that need.  There was no compromise and no mercy.  Both of us did & do what is needed and nothing past that.  Today that meant me accepting belittlement while defending the man belittling me to the boy who nearly kicked his own dad’s ass in a disagreement turned scuffle. 

[I could be a very successful member of the North Korean cabinet where the trick to staying alive is simply being able to give up your soul.]

  

There is a lot of honesty here, divorce is not pretty.  People get trampled in the exit, usually small people.  And in defense of my defense of this man, he is trying to raise this kid who seems to still have the boot prints of the massive exodus of a failed marriage across his backside. This is what we have all asked him to do.  We need him to raise a damaged boy into a functional man.  And he is trying.

It shouldn’t matter things said, names called, slights sent it should roll right off me but it doesn’t.  In the next few hours they will patch things up and I will no longer be needed.  The driving around, the phone calls, the extra groceries I bought, the plans I moved, and the cleaning I did will never exist they will vanish with the memory of a bitter spring snow.  What will remain is a boy looking for a way to become a man a little less broken then one given to him to follow.  And perhaps a cashier at a store somewhere on the westside of SLC will still wonder if it was something she said when the woman clutching 2 twenties anxiously noted aloud she hoped she got her math right.  “39.42.” The cashier had answered her, “You did well, Honey.”  And the woman inexplicably began crying.