Roll With It

Dear Ben,

I’m learning, as I get older, that things don’t begin or end - they just evolve. It was drilled home the other night when we had a conversation while I was doing the dishes and you were finishing up the last of your dinner.

“Sometimes I still feel sad that you and daddy split up.”

“Yeah? That’s okay. Sometimes I feel sad about it too.”

“But you said you didn’t feel sad about it anymore!”

“Well, I do and I don’t. I don’t miss daddy the way I used to when he first left, so in that sense it doesn’t make me sad anymore. But I do sometimes feel sad that your family isn’t together the way I wanted it to be before you were born. Sometimes I feel sad that you aren’t growing up the way I grew up with your grandma and papa. That’s what I meant. But it’s okay. You roll with it.”

I ask you to roll with a lot of things. I guess I’m lucky, because you do.

You finished your dinner and that was sort of the end of it. But I thought about it for a long while afterwards. We always think our lives begin when we’re born and that they’ll end when we die, but I’m not sure it’s as simple as that.

I think in a way we exist long before we actually arrive here. We’re a list of baby names and expectations. And when we die, we become the players in stories that get told over family get-togethers. And so in a way, we evolve into this life long before we’re ever born into it. And maybe family and marriages are the same sort of evolution. I guess to that end, divorce is too.

For awhile it’s this consuming drama that seeps its way into every waking thought you have and then eventually, it’s just an anecdote over dishes. An acknowledgement of what it was before it became what it is.

And you roll with it.

Love,
Mommy