Who is in Your Bed?

This is my beautiful bed and its biggest fan...Layla.

Today I am going to take on bedroom politics.  I don’t care who you are having sex with.  I want to know who you are sleeping with.

Attachment parenting has become quite popular and I have many friends who sleep with their kids.  I have gone back and forth on this issue and on most days (or nights), I am flexible about having one of the kids sleep in my bed at a time.  Jonah has become pretty independent and has always been my good sleeper so he is usually fine with not only sleeping in his own bed, but also falling asleep there.  Layla is a different story.

Read the rest of this entry »

The World’s a Roller Coaster

As my blog has developed more readers, it has brought me into contact with so many interesting people for whom I have developed an affection and with whom I feel a connection.  My readers’ comments have not only given me new ideas for my blog, but they have also expanded my perspective of life.  Just yesterday I wrote about a reader going through a breakup who had told me of her experience riding a roller coaster this weekend, and how fun it had been.  Well today, synchronicity struck again, and my sister, brother-in-law and I brought our kids to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.

Read the rest of this entry »

How to Deal with an Impending Breakup: Summon a Patronus

One of my readers wrote to me recently saying that she appreciated how happy I was with my divorce and was inspired by it, but that she needed more.  Her husband had just decided to end their marriage and was looking for an apartment, and she felt like her life was spinning out of control and wanted some concrete steps on how to get from where she was to where I am at.

I am such a positive, forward-looking thinker right now that I almost didn’t want to go back in my mind to those early days.  But as synchronicity would have it, reading Harry Potter with Jonah forced me there.  We are reading book three, The Prisoner of Azkaban, and Harry is being tormented by these entities called dementors, who, as their name implies, drive one crazy by bringing up each person’s worst memory, in Harry’s case the memory of his parents being killed.  Professor Lupin helps Harry learn a spell that can potentially defeat the dementors, if done correctly.  He needs to summon up a Patronus, a protective spirit that brings happiness to all around it, thereby banishing the dark thoughts of the dementors.  The spell for the Patronus is simple, but not easy.  Harry has to concentrate unwaveringly on a really happy memory, his innermost feelings of joy.  Well, the lesson of this spell was not lost on me.  Focusing on happiness always trumps darkness and depression, but in the face of such devastating and debilitating emotions, it takes a lot of concentration to get to a peaceful and loving place in your mind.

So I decided to sum up the strategies that I used in those early days to overcome the pain and find my way back to the light.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our Divorce March

My dear friend Barb says that she wants to see a movie made based on my life/blog.  In her vision, Maggie Gyllenhall would play me and Johnny Depp would play my ex.  She stipulated, however, that it would be the moody, intellectual, glasses-wearing Johnny Depp, not Jack Sparrow Johnny Depp.  Well, that made me laugh because not only is that a perfect fit for my ex, but also because there was this one Halloween where he dressed as a pirate, and, well, he unwittingly did quite the impersonation of Cap’n Jack Sparrow.

We had just been separated a few months when Jonah decided that he wanted to have a Halloween party for his kindergarten classmates.  As always, I bought beer for the adults because I believe that a bunch of parents of young kids who barely know each other need a little social lubrication in order to mingle.  Since it was fall and I had made pumpkin treats, I got some good dark beers, not really noticing that one particular chocolate stout had a really high alcohol content.  Maybe he was getting into his pirate role or maybe he is just a little shy and didn’t realize that the beer was particularly alcoholic, but by the end of the party my ex was pretty inebriated.

Read the rest of this entry »

Layla, You’ve Got Me on My Knees

Today is my sweet Layla’s birthday, and all I can think about is the ways in which the history of my marriage is intertwined with her identity.  Don’t get me wrong, she is definitely her own unique little person, but she is also our karmic child, the one who seemed destined to come to us.

Maybe it’s her conception that makes me feel this way.  Jonah was about 18 months and we were contemplating having a second, but we kept vacillating about when to do it.  One night we went to dinner at some friends’ house, and they had a boy and a girl exactly two years apart and they got along so well that we were charmed by the idea of doing the same.  I just happened to be ovulating then, so in our typical intuitive way we said, let’s do it (and do it we did).  Within a few hours I knew I was pregnant.  I don’t know how I knew, but I knew.

Read the rest of this entry »