New day, new male cow excrement

Remember those weeks where you just wanted to bury yourself in bed and let the throbbing tragedy be muffled by your heavy, depressed slumber?  Yeah, that.  I just watched my entire paycheck be gulped down by a bill that I spent the previous hour frantically making phone calls to avoid.  The ding of my phone notifying me that my account is now hundreds of dollars overdrawn brought me back into the comforting arms of my bed.  Children still needed through my tears.  So and so looked at me this way.  I can't find my fairy house.  Look at this octopus I made with bendy straws.  Why are you crying.
I lie to my children a lot.  I carefully picked over the real reasons I was crying, an exercise that dove me deeper into the sadness.  The final response- after it was weighed for the possible level of inquiry it would illicit and the amount of life altering thought processes it could set off, was that, "I'm sad about the way I wish things could be." My eldest accepted that answer, responded, "I love you Momma" and left the room.
A friend told me that these challenges are being given to me in this life because I am being called to "level up".  On the path to enlightenment there are obstacles and navigating them is the test.  I don't like it.  I am very, very attached to the way I want things to be. I've let go of the physical manifestations- the house, the yard, the marriage.  Now I just want the peace.  I want a break from defending my children's growing up against the chaos that disguises itself as faithful, truest love.
On that note, I also want to say: faithful truest love doesn't ask you to be someone you're not.  It doesn't fight for you to have angry relationships with other people.  It doesn't leave you in lurches of sadness while it goes off and shares it's body with another before coming back to you.  It doesn't require you to tippy toe about, just in case it is having an insecure moment.

I'm not delusional about what love looks like.  I think it allows for all parts of oneself to be perfectly present, even the yucky parts.  I think the results can't be that you are left questioning and stressed and turned upside down and wondering what essential parts of yourself need to be remedied.  No.  That is not it at all.

Imagined Life (written mid-May)

What makes a particular day hard?  I don't get it.  Why is it that tonight I am sitting here with the tightness in my throat and a burning ebbing in my eyeballs.  Nothing has changed.  And then why do I fire up the Adele Pandora station, letting the musical mood draw my tears to spilling over?

It's a weird thing to think about him as once my partner and lover.  I cannot imagine being naked with him.  Yet I did it all the time, for years.  Where did that feeling disappear to?  Was I really a part of that story?  Maybe it was just a novel that I read voraciously over and over.  I read it so that it became a part of who I was.  But since I wasn't really there, it makes sense that I don't have that specific experience to call on.

He is here sometimes and he hugs me like he is coming home from so far away.  His body feels like a place I want to stay forever.  I feel loved, held, cherished, appreciated.  He smells like home.  He feels like home.  He is still the man who left us.  How can I possibly feel so much peace in his arms.  It makes no logical sense.  And then he leaves again.