Better

He went off to school today, looking wan but happy.  I’ll pick him up early–I still think he’s a bit under the weather, and we have to drive to a soccer tournament for my older son that’s about 3 hours away.  We’re staying in a hotel with a pool and a jacuzzi and everything–I dread socializing with the other parents, as I have ever since my ex-husband and I split up, but there’s nothing for it.  Youth soccer is some kind of bizarre throwback to the worst part of the 1950’s in America, I think–the repressed, racist,  homophobic part.  Maybe it’s just my state.  A divorced person scuttling along the sidelines feels more like an undesirable rodent than like a bona fide parent of one of the kids on the team.

Still, I yam what I yam, and I’m determined to hold my head high.  My divorce was a hot topic among this crowd a couple of years ago, but by now I imagine whatever scandal could be wrung out of it all has gotten pretty stale.  Besides, there are two other divorces just launching in our tiny town.  They’re pretty high profile–one couple was the Head-of-the-PTA type, and another was the Together-Since-High-School-Local-Fixture type, and you can’t leave your house without being accosted by someone whispering excitedly, “Have you heard the NEWS?”  I am, I admit, as guilty as everyone else–I’m dying to know What Happened, even though I know that the public version of what happened bears little resemblance to what REALLY happened.  However, I like to think that from my privileged position I’m better able than most to fill in the gaps.

My mother met someone the other day who was divorcing the man she’d been married to for something like fifty years.  Everyone, this woman said, was aghast–asking her over and over why on earth she’d go to all the trouble of leaving her husband now?  Or at all?  My mother, who’s seen everything, had a different reaction.  “My god, how unhappy you must have been,” she told the woman, who practically collapsed in gratitude.  My point is simply this:  No one wants to get divorced.  The word on the street about the Head-of-the-PTA couple is that she’s not giving him a chance, and it makes me feel ill.  Do people really think divorce is something you just wake up one morning and decide, blithely, to undertake?  Divorce means you’ll be broke.  Your neighbors will gossip about you.  Your children will be sad, and possibly angry.  Your family will say peculiar things that hurt your feelings.  Some of your friends will abandon you.  Everything will change, and if you’re willing to take that burden on–especially now, when we’re all middle aged and lame and boring and want nothing more than to sit quietly with a book and a gin and tonic and be left in peace–you’ve got to be really, really miserable in your marriage.

Anyway.  Think of me and wish me bon courage as I face down the phalanxes of contentedly married Soccer Parents.  And root for my kid–his knee is strained, Osgood something or other disease, which he’s thrilled about because it means, apparently, that he is actually GROWING–but he’s desperate to play.  This is his old team that he’s been on since he was eight, and they’ve all grown up together.  I’ll let you know how it went when we get back.

And thank you, so very much, for your kind comments and well wishes for the sickly one.  Every time the phone rings I jump about six feet in the air, convinced it’s the school nurse, but so far so good.

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