Dispatch from the Bathtub

Right now I am moving slowly

Dear Reader,

It’s June and I’m inching my way back to you. The past three months have been

I actually can’t describe how it’s been. I lost my beloved stepfather, crawled through the brutal final stage of my divorce settlement, and finished my first semester of grad school.

I feel like I have stepped through a doorway into a world where everything is different. Things that have been untethered for years are suddenly very stable. There is now permanent child and spousal support, a consistent amount of money coming in every month. After nearly two years of being a full-time single mother I am sharing some custody with X and have a night alone every week, 3 nights on alternating weekends.

Right now I am moving slowly. On Tuesday nights I come home from work and draw a bath, put on a baseball game, and drink one beer. I leave the house messy and sometimes fall asleep before nine pm.

Right now the grief of it all is fuzzy. I can’t quite make out the shapes. So much has been lost, some of it imaginary and some of it real. The fantasy of mom plus dad plus child equals family. Many, many friends. And a person who was my parent—a kind, wise, silly, easy-loving, soft poet of a parent—since I was twelve years old.

I have a strange relationship with grief. I lost my first dad very suddenly as a child. It was the nineties and societally we did not yet have tools to know how to grieve. There were no Instagram accounts with people who have devoted their lives to showing you how to do it. And my mom was a single mother of four who also did not have the tools. We were not religious. I did not really grieve.

Now I have so many tools. I have Instagram. I am in therapy. I bought a grief journal. But mostly I just get into the bath and watch baseball. It’s halfway between grieving and numbing out. Enough for now.

All my love,

Kate