This Mama’s Dharma

Last night was filled with nightmares.  In one, I was out to dinner with my ex and his new wife.  Everything was going relatively well until I went to the bathroom and came back finding them in mid-PDA.  I flipped out, and this involved me cursing, shaking my fist at her, and giving them the finger [...]

My son and his father are quietly playing downstairs as I write this.  They are drawing pictures together at the dining room table and I am staying out of their way as they re-establish their bond.  Earlier in the morning, they were playing upstairs, loudly and boisterously, and H was throwing Sami around and doing [...]

Tonight I had a fairly awful talk with my ex.  I started out simply by asking for some explanation of what has been up for the last 10 months, as well as some kind of reassurance that he was going to stick around this time and that he was really ready to come back into [...]

Oh, my.  On days like these I am reminded of how fragile I can be sometimes.
All it takes is “a thing” to get me spiraling.  And there’s almost always “a thing.”  Life is full of them.
Work was hard today.  I can’t really write about it because I feel weird writing about work stuff on this [...]

“Mommy, I so love you!” declares Sami at least once a day.
Does he know what this means?  I don’t know, nor do I care, because it’s just wonderful to hear.  He says it joyfully, authentically. 
I’d like to think he’s picked it up from me.  I tell him I love him all the darn time.  I [...]

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 [...]

Today I have experienced some powerful shifts that have reframed the way I look at my single parent life.  I have been holding on to a lot of beliefs that no longer serve, and now I see them for what they are: not truth, certainly not Truth, just stories that I like to tell myself [...]

I am currently reading a book entitled Dark Night of the Soul by Thomas Moore, and I am very much appreciating the way he puts despair into a cultural and mythological context.  So unlike the bland psychological approaches that dominate our culture today.  Even I, as a professional critic of the mental health industry and [...]

I am hungry.
I have never felt this empty, this hollowed out, this vulnerable — not that I can remember.  Perhaps I have always felt protected by the love of a man, or the interest of a man.  The attention in some way, shape, or form.  Even if everything else was going wrong in my life, [...]

A light blue cast of my ex’s lower teeth sits on top of my toilet, a bizarre bit of sculpture that I can’t seem to part with. Every time I go to the toilet I think about putting them away or emailing him to ask him if he wants them for future dental-related issues. [...]