You Can't Always Get What You Want

"But if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need."
The Rolling Stones

I have three best friends. Baton Rouge. Arkansas. Virginia. All three are the kind of ride-or-die friends who will commit capital crimes for you without your having to ask. They were there for the beginning, middle, and/or end of Surviving Him the First Time, and they all had to overcome very strong feelings to permit me to get married for Round Two. When trouble first started this summer, I did not tell them. I knew they would say nothing, and I would know they were trying NOT to say "pack your sh*t." I have never asked them what they thought when I finally told them, individually, that my marriage was taking a break. What all three of them said was "You are beautiful. You are amazing. You are brave and strong and smart, no matter what. And you don't have to live like this."

 

There is nothing that heals like your best girlfriends and their endless love, strength, compassion, and wildly inappropriate supplies of laughter. Baton Rouge has the gift of company. She waits for permission to say the truth, and while she's waiting, she rests with her head and her heart as low as mine. Arkansas has the gift of poise. She is that saying about how graceful and beautiful a swan is while paddling like hell underwater. Virginia has the gift of guts. I can do anything because she says I can, and she will mercilessly take you down if you get cross ways with me. Baton Rouge and Virginia were there the first time I fell in this hole, so they may be operating from muscle memory. Arkansas joined up when I got kicked into a different hole by a different a-hole, and so everybody knows the drill.

 

A few months before my wasband moved out, my sister, due to some personal and financial setbacks, moved in. So it came to be that we were again under the same roof, nursing ourselves through a series of personal failures, and with no words, but with loose shoes and wet towels and missing hairdryers and "borrowed" purses, by benefit of living under the same roof again, we were saying "Sister, I see you, and I've got you." She cleaned my house and fed my children when all I could do was sit in a chair and try not to cry. She picks up from detentions and brings children to therapy appointments and takes the dog to his grandparents and brings baseball bags to have zippers replaced. While she was running my errands and jumping in when a dad was out of town and a babysitter canceled, she was putting herself back together too. Now I'm ready to do the things I'm supposed to do after my house sells, and so is she. I did not know that I needed my sister to be under my roof for what was about to happen, but the Godiverse did, and so he put her there.

 

Then a couple months later after it all went boom, I found out through my sister that a family she babysits for was going through something similar. Not just a random family she knew, but a family I gave her after they moved to Baton Rouge, where she was, from Washington, DC, where I was. Their baby girl was my baby girl (now she's a tall, lithe, beautiful girl) and now our families were in the same kind of trouble, right around the corner from each other. We were both home alone, though how we got there was drastically different, and we were both running houses with jobs and two kids. Once we discovered that, we should've combined our two households to save money, because we did not spend much time apart.

 

It was her marble counter that kept my face cool while I was sobbing about the latest blow to my family. Her family room is where I acknowledged, with tears and fears, that this was not going to end the way I wanted it to. I came running for all her moments as well, and there was a sisterhood built in those four months we spent in that boat together that will last for life or longer. Even my wasband was worried for me when she and her family, completely intact, moved to Nashville to start over. We did not know we needed a friend in the boat with us, but the Godiverse did and now I have a fourth best friend. Nashville.

 

Sometimes I think taking that commuting/telecommuting job with the crazy demands and hours was the biggest source of poison to my marriage. I cannot put my culpability on a job. I made the decision to ignore the right things and nurture the wrong ones. The Godiverse said that husband or no husband, I could not stay there. I needed to stay home to save my marriage or save myself. Days before our first major holiday as a broken family, after being alone for months and having just been given a court date for the final adoption hearing, I had to admit to him that I needed to find a new job. I could not be what I needed to be for my kids and for myself working eleven-hour days every day, two of them eighty miles from home. So that job ended, and I sat home for a month, being present for my boys and getting clear to make decisions for us. I got a new job, for which the bump in salary is EXACTLY the amount I needed to cover after school care and I leave work every day in time for taekwondo or baseball practice.

 

 

I met who I wanted to marry when I was fifteen years old. I wanted to marry him, build a home with him, make a baby with him, raise a family with him. I do not get any of that sh*t I really, really wanted. I did get a whole bunch of stuff I never knew I wanted but cannot live without. My dog. My oldest son, who needs me to fight for him every day. My youngest son, who has none of my DNA but almost all of my personality. A whole lot of grit and a really big adventure. And an unshakeable, proven, limitless faith that we get what we need when we need it. Every single time.

I came home Monday night, left the children doing whateverthehell they wanted, and climbed into bed to catch up with my Sister. She's gotten herself a very fancy big-girl job, which positions her to get her own place, right at the time I'm putting our house on the market. This is ending, this year that we have spent sifting through the shattered pieces of each other the way you can only do when the pieces are yours to admire, not to fix. Into my room came Landen, who had finished his movie and wanted to get in my bed with me, followed by Jake, who had come in from outside when the streetlight came on. There I was, in a huge bed I have been feeling empty and abandoned in for months, with all the people who make me the most Me and the best Me within arms' reach - my sister, my sons, and my spaniel. When all you've ever wanted does not stay put, you are left with more free space than you've ever cared to inhabit. And when the emptiness of that space makes a constant, deafening, pounding noise, announcing the vacancy over and over again, you forget to notice when that space gets filled with more goodness and light than was there before.

 

Quite literally, I noticed that my empty bed is full of the love I have poured out in my life finally being returned to me while I was watching other things.