Well, things have been going pretty well, so inevitably everything starts to fall apart at once. My boyfriend’s hiring agency is taking forever to find him a new job, and while he’s not putting that on me it goes without saying that it’s stressful as fuck. He’s also had it with his living situation, his roommate flipped out on him over some almond milk being in the recycling bin, and he doesn’t even drink almond milk, AND he keeps his trash and recycling separate because he knows his roommate is, to put it generously, particular like that. Now dealing with those two things alone is hard enough with Portland’s job/housing scene as they are at the moment, but of course everything happens in threes.
This morning he learned that his daughter’s mother and her boyfriend broke up last night. Rather, he broke up with her seemingly out of the blue, to her. Now, as a woman I take pretty seriously my responsibility to not talk shit about other women, especially ones I don’t know personally. Obviously I only know about her through my boyfriend, and he himself doesn’t like speaking poorly about her, even when he tells me hurtful things she’s done, her being the mother of his child and all that. So, that’s my preface to say that I know she has her struggles, as we all do, and I’m sympathetic to that and I try my best to keep that in view even as I describe my own perspective.
For the sake of clarity I’m going to use single letters to clarify who I’m referring to. M is my boyfriend, V is his daughter, and J is her mother. Now, J is obviously reeling from the breakup of a relationship that had a real, positive, stabilizing effect on her and wanted to see V, who was slated to spend the weekend with M (they usually split the weekends) due to some schedule swaps they’d made last week. So M is very accommodating and drops V off with J for the afternoon, and the two of them actually speak face to face, like an actually conversation, for the first time in like three years. Just so you can get a sense of how monumental this is. Now, what was originally going to be a few hours, got pushed off until this evening, which got pushed off to tonight, at an hour past V’s bedtime.
And now J is saying she wants to make changes to the weekend schedule to have V more because the weekends are going to be hard, and I’m glad that M told me this over chat so that I have some time to deal with it because I’m taken aback by my reaction to this. Like I said I’m sympathetic to anyone going through a breakup, but I’m really not sympathetic to putting your emotional needs on a 6 year old. Let alone disrupting her schedule so she’s more available to attend to your needs. It definitely reminds me of my own childhood, and I’m clearly getting emotional because it’s (I want to avoid triggering due to it’s being a medical term and the discourse) reverberating with me.
I just hated lack of structure growing up. I think I realize now why I went through all that trouble to go to boarding school, and why I’m trying to find something to structure my life with, a bit more thanks to this. There’s something comforting in the midst of daily life to *know* you can look forward to something, you know? That it’ll be there, whatever it is, if it’s a bookclub, or a gameshow, or a religious service, or a pickup game, or whatever, to provide you with a sense of consistency and community. It can be just about anything but I think it’s really important to seek out whatever you want it to be and make it a structuring force in your life, if you can, to balance out the ups and downs.
In conclusion, V struggles enough as it is being back and forth, which is what it is, but she needs to know that her life is going to have some consistency even in the midst of adult incoherency. M is much more stable than J is, so the trick is to support J without her feeding into her instability in such a way that it undermines what M provides for V.
Phew. Ok, deep breaths. I’m an adult and I can make choices for myself now.
