How You Doin?

Please, please tell me you read the title of this post in your best Joey Tribbiani voice.

So. It's been a while since I've written here. Well over a month, I think (I'm too ashamed to look right now). There have been several nights where I spent all of my dreamtime writing on this very page. I can't remember exactly what the subject was but man, it felt good. And so real! I'd wake up and for a few seconds, truly believe that I'd woken up in the middle of the night and spent time writing.

Of course, it wasn't true. The poor neglected blog just sat here, gathering virtual cobwebs and so many spammy comments from love spell-casters it took me about half an hour to delete all of them.

I want to tell you, if there's anyone still reading here, I'm sorry. I wish I had an excuse. Of course, I do have some excuses. My mom died. We had a really insane presidential election. I have two teenagers and two adult "children", three of whom live under the same roof as yours truly and just between me and you, they're driving me batshit crazy. More on that later.

The mom thing? Oy. Thanks to all of you who reached out, sent messages, sent a card, sent good vibes. A very special thank you to my friends who made it to the memorial service. Losing my mom was tough. And I can't help but wonder if it was harder because of our twisty and knotted and complicated relationship? Would it have been somewhat less painful had we been super close? Or is it this difficult for everyone? Sweet Jesus. The pain. The guilt...augh. Time has helped and the sadness has abated. But that guilt. It's real.

Her service was lovely. It was somewhere just east of WTF Egypt, because her husband "knew a guy who knew a guy who owned a funeral home" and gave him a sweet deal. My brother was here from Vegas, and I was able to get up at the end and say a few nice things about my mom and the years we had that were good. Her husband managed to paint himself as a saintly caregiver rather than the sponging, abusive load he really was. So be it, we are done with him. When my mother died, so did any obligation to acknowledge him as anything other than a wretched memory. Oh, but this happened:

After the memorial service, he had a gathering at their house. Now, I swore I wasn't going to set foot in that nightmare chamber ever again, and so my sweet aunt and my badass daughter went to gather the few things I wanted- her original wedding rings from my dad, an old painting she'd had in her bedroom and any old family photographs. My daughter, Molly, approached him and mentioned the wedding rings. She said he disappeared into a room for a bit, and finally emerged with a dusty jewelry box. He said to her, as he handed the box over, "The stuff in here can't be worth more than a couple hundred bucks. She can have it." I found the rings, an old locket that my grandmother had worn, and the rest went to the trash. My mom didn't wear a lot of jewelry and most of the rest were kitschy costume pieces that had no real meaning. I held each piece, studied it, tried to remember my mom wearing it. Nothing spoke to me other than the rings and the locket, and so that's what I kept.

He's selling their house and leaving Minnesota. As I used to say back in my flight attendant days, as the passengers filed off the plane..."Buh bye."

The election. Shall we discuss? Nah. I'm not going to get into it here. I've said my peace with like-minded friends and respectfully talked about the weather with my other friends. I am not one to bash others for their opinions and feelings and I'm not going to start now. I did kind of lose my freaking mind in some comment sections for a while there, and if any of you happened to stumble upon that, my apologies. I was grieving, dammit. I'm a divorced mom hovering at the poverty line in Minnesota who happens to work for a public school so I'll let you guess if I'm celebrating or shuddering.

My sweet old college boyfriend talked me off the ledge via facebook messenger one night. He sent me links and talked in short sentences and convinced me that I really won't lose my job and my house and end up in a van down by the river. So thank you, old college boyfriend. That was kind of you and you made me feel better.

We'll be okay. I mean, we have to be, right? As I am wont to say, my superpower is optimism. Naive as it may be, it's saved my butt in the past and it's basically all I have to cling to now so it's on.

Oh yeah. The kids. I kind of vowed to not talk smack about them here anymore. So let's just say that sometimes I worry about their skills as roommates and leave it at that. One of them is living in a dorm but comes home almost every weekend. Right now he's my favorite. Oh shush. They rotate.

There you have my apology and my excuses. I offer them to you along with my gratitude. I don't know how many of you check in on the hausfrau facebook page but a whole bunch of people there made this crabby old divorced lady feel very loved today. They also gave me that little itch to write something here and while I don't know if anyone else is glad about that, I sure am. Thirteen or so paragraphs and I'm starting to feel like the real Jenny again for the first time in many long, dusty ages.

You are my tribe. And I've missed you.