5:00 a.m. and my alarm clock is beeping in the dark. The girls have their arms and legs wrapped around me and I have to extract my own arms from the tangle one at a time before I can slide myself close enough to the clock to hit the snooze button.
5:18 a.m. I think this is the third time the alarm’s gone off now. I turn it off and walk to the kitchen, put some water on the stove to boil so I can make coffee.
John moved out over the weekend. It’s a little wobbly around here. The house is torn up from pulling apart seven years of shared stuff. The kitchen is still a disaster from being emptied and separated. My pretty new orange and clear-glass French press sits next to the stove and the space where the coffee pot was is taken up by dirty dishes and and empty tomato and strawberry containers.
I have a shitload of work to do around here, and the house is the easy part.
The kids are doing what kids do when things suck: they’re fine one minute, sobbing in my lap the next. They love me, they’re mad at me, they are extra-helpful, they stare me down and tell me no. I can hardly look at Willow without crying. She sometimes calls John’s apartment his hotel. She wants to be there and here at the very same time. She wants her family back under one roof. But, mostly she’s alright; she and Sophie have been playing very complicated games with stuffed animals and Playmobile people. Honestly I haven’t been listening too closely, because I am pretty sure the games are all about parents dying, moving away, or losing their babies.
The boys are a little big to process all this through play. They’re sad, but they are more cooperative and helpful. I think they may be cutting me a break.
I’m mostly fine, but I’m also kind of a huge mess. John and I aren’t fighting, we even took the girls out to dinner together Saturday night after a long day of soccer games and moving. Yesterday he stayed with the kids so I could run errands and go sign Soph up for Brownies (god help me).
Now it’s almost 6:30. I’ve made the lunches, relocated a couple of spiders, made the girls go back to bed twice. The sun is about to rise. Then I will get the kids up and dressed and fed and we’ll go back out into the world.