My summer drew to a close this weekend… kind of a weird thing to say, since it’s only July 21. But yesterday I drove my daughters back to their Mom’s house to get some visiting in with her family before their school starts.
When you’re divorced, your calendar is set not so much by the seasons, but by the visits.
Two years ago all of us were right in the same city, so moving back and forth between houses was routine – as regular as the tides. I’m not saying it was easy, but at least we had a system in place, and even those weekends or weekdays when they weren’t staying with me, I was still involved in their daily school and sports events. When I was transferred all the way across the country, we faced a much larger challenge – we patched the holes as best we could with phone calls and FaceTime, and I flew back to them every 6 weeks or so, and flew them to me at Christmas, Spring Break, and the summer. As a result, my holidays were always over whenever the girls left; my summer was officially done when I put them back on the plane.
Just a few months back I was able to get transferred again – not exactly to where my girls live, but close enough for government work (literally, figuratively). What took a day of plane travel now just takes a few hours in the car, and they’ve spent the last 8 weeks with me in my new house and city. With this distance, I can see them every couple of weeks, and we’ll be able to manage the longer holiday and summer breaks so they’re not such an all-or-nothing affair; none of us will have to juggle the logistics of trying to get three young girls on a plane, crisscrossing the continent.
My personal calendar looks like a rainbow Rorschach test: it’s color-coded to days and events that I try to interpret and weave into visits both to and from the girls. It’s a complicated way to live – there’s a lot of heavy lifting – but somehow, some way, we make it work.
Awwwright, you’re asking yourself, what’s this got to do with writing? Here’s the payoff: Clearly life – your life – seeps into your prose; it can’t help but soak in. None of my characters are in my exact situation (and every reader should rejoice), but as I’ve been working through my revisions I’ve definitely noticed that the protagonist of my current book (the one I’m shipping back to my agent next week) certainly struggles with feelings of frustration and loss – it’s a constant theme of the book, just as it’s been a huge part of my life and what I’ve coped with every time my girls head back to their “other home”; more so the last year when I was so damn far away. That loss – the time I miss with them, so horribly rendered in primary colors in my calendar; the sports practices and homework problems and the tiny moments that pass so fast you don’t realize how important they are until they’re gone. Because all of that has so readily affected my life, it’s been impossible for it not to equally affect my writing.
This isn’t meant to be maudlin, it’s simply a reality, and my girls and I have adjusted to the reality of our situation. We find the humor in it, we find the adventure in it, and we hold on to each other as we find our way through it. Sometimes I think I’m writing for them; so that one day maybe they can pick up something I’ve written and say, cool, my dad did that. For the past year, when we’ve been apart, I think I’ve been writing to them…my way of saying I miss you guys…
Leave a Reply