There are a lot of things that my ex used to do that I never had to worry about.  Car stuff was one of them.  We had a very traditional relationship, and very untraditional too, in that he handled the guy stuff AND most of the girl stuff.  He basically took care of everything Grown-up and I did my fun activist and artsy and spiritual stuff. 

The car was one thing he always handled, under the heading of Guy Stuff.  He had been a mechanic in his youth and always knew when a car was making a funny sound and what that meant.  Me, I don’t know that something is wrong with a car until smoke and flames are coming out from under the hood, or the car is driving on the rim because the tire has been flat for days and I didn’t realize it.  I just expect to get in the car and for the darn thing to work and take me to where I need to go.  When that wasn’t the case, he would deal.

My ex knows this, and therefore knew that without him I would have to have a very reliable car.  One of his parting gifts to me was my 2008 Prius - the down payment, anyway. 

I have all these memories of going to buy it.  Those were the heady days when I still had some flickers of hope that we might reconcile.  I hung on to this scrap of hope so tightly that it gave me rope-burns as it slipped out of my grasp.  We went to the dealership as a family, and he watched Sami as he played in the display cars while I signed papers and then we all got in my new car together as I tested it out.  We oohed and aahed over the glory of this Prius with its new car smell and nifty little futuristic touches.  And then a month later he told me that he had found someone new.

But I had my new car.

I am grateful for this car because it is smart and tells me when something is wrong with it.  It takes the place of a person like my ex who knew cars.  Some mysterious light went on on the dashboard the other day and I looked it up in the manual and it told me that one of my tires was flat.  I walked around the car and saw that I indeed had a flat, filled it up with air for a few days, but then it kept going flat, so I knew that I could not stick my head in the sand any longer.

You have to deal with this tire thing, I said to myself. 

Why do I have to deal with it?  I whined back to myself.  I wish I had someone to help me deal with it.  H used to do deal with it.  But now he is gone and I have no one to help me and life is so overwhelming and what do I do?  Where do I go?  Do I go to the dealer?  Do I need to buy a new tire?  How much is it going to cost?  Why do I have to do everything on my own?  I’m so lonely and scared and life is just so full of problems and they never stop and I don’t want to have to face them alone.

Amazingly, I am able to take the simple, objective experience of a flat tire and make it personal!  Somehow I use it to spin the same old story of despair and victimhood and see what he did to me and see how lonely and helpless I am without him?

Well, FUCK that.

I am re-empowered, remember?  I am super 24/7 single mama, right?  Give me a cape and an “M” for “Mama” emblazoned across my chest.  While I am not super enough to change a tire myself, or to know if it simply needs to be repaired or if I need a new one…I do know that there is a tire store on Georgia Avenue and I took myself and my limping car there.  The very nice and eccentric owner and I had a fascinating conversation about books and politics and Facebook and digital media while I was waiting for my tire to get fixed. 

In the end, after a few days of agonizing and avoiding and telling myself these ridiculous stories, the whole thing took about 20 minutes and cost me $36.00.  Double Chai, in Jewish numerology.  That is a whole mess of good luck.

Each time I do one of these simple life tasks, the ones he used to always take care of while I fluffed around doing lord knows what, I feel stronger, more capable.  I want to flip from victim to superhero mama, and yet it is ok for me to be who I am, no more and no less.  Is my heart still broken and ground into dust?  Hell yes.  Am I still scared shitless most of the time?  Hell yes. 

But I am an active agent in my life — through the Sami sweetness, the Sami tantrums, the kindness of friends and family, the extreme disappointment, my sense of failure, the big wooly guilt-suit that I wear every day.  My heart is part flame and fire, loving fiercely, part bitter coal, dead and angry and vengeful.  I live with these contradictions and I cry for no reason and 1,000 reasons and I laugh too loud and Sami loves Eskimo kisses (he calls them “nose kisses”) so I insist on Eskimo-kissing him every chance I humanly get. 

He sings along with his favorite songs in the back seat of the car and I can’t stop smiling because he is ever so slightly off key and off-lyric and I so understand what it means to sing and be every so slightly off, and I love that he doesn’t care in the slightest.  He is just singing and it makes me want to cry because it is so beautiful and so cute and not self-conscious and oh, how he teaches me so much about being human.

This life is big when you open your eyes to it.  Huge.  Even the simple act of getting your tires changed can be a tremendously affirming and satisfying experience if you drop all the stories.  I find that I actually like taking care of my own business.  When the warning light on my dashboard went out, I nodded my approval and kept on driving.