The Long Winter

This has been just a bizarrely transformative time for me, and I think for the whole family (and by “family” I mean my parents and kids, as well as Doug).

I graduated, and gave up my house thinking I’d land in a new one right away, and then I didn’t and it all kind of went to hell, with a bunch of fallen-through business plans and my parents spending most of their time 600 miles away taking care of my 98-year-old grandmother and a new schooling situation for our older son and then The Heart Attack. And trying to regain equilibrium after the heart attack, when everything we’d constructed so carefully to keep us in harmony had all fallen apart, and we were left with old hurts and feelings that are never going to be resolved.

The polar vortex didn’t help.

I didn’t notice at the time how depressed I was. I was functioning, and holding a lot of things together. I fell in love (fell hard) and then had my heart smashed into a soggy pulp. I drifted away from things that made me feel competent.

And in the midst of all of that, some flowers grew inside me and started poking their way to the surface:

A few weeks ago I offered to solve any problem (business or personal) for $250 in around 24 hours. I’m really good at it and it’s the most fun I’ve ever had.

And I’m starting a company with a mission so big it scares me. More on that later.

Some friends stepped in, in ways that have opened me up a lot. It makes me tear up a little.

And my children are thriving.

(And this is just what happened to me. I can’t tell my parents’ story or Doug’s story or my kids’ story. But they’ve all had big years, too.)

This co-parenting thing, we’re piecing it back together. I don’t know if it will ever be as seamless as it was before. You can insert your own “stronger at the broken places” aphorism here. I never know if aphorisms are true or not. This is hard.

But it’s still easier than it was being married to each other. So there’s a lot to be grateful for, every day. And as everything else improves, the co-parenting gets easier again.