Fortune's Wheel

It's been a while. I never meant to stop writing here, but life caught up with me, and I didn't need to vent as much.

At the start of the whole divorce from PdeFF (a/k/a the Insane Ex) my entire goal was to survive with the girls reasonably happy. No more, no less. My finances were in ruins, my career a shambles, and my ability to enjoy and appreciate life severely compromised.

Those days are over, and the original goal now seems so puny. The girls are thriving. Tigergrrl is a star in school, on her basketball team, skiing with friends, in community service (recycling, food prep for a shelter, otherwise working on improving the world at school and at church), and this year she has gone spelunking, white-water rafting, and hiking with a pre-teen group that suits her well. She's enjoying (something I never did) middle school. DestructoGirl is loving being a big first grader and is drawing up a storm and preparing to be the next Dorothy Hamill or Peggy Fleming, or whoever.

We own our own home with a bedroom for each girl and a dog whose biggest problem is that by picking where she'll curl up for the night, she'll be disappointing at least one child.

I honestly never thought this day would come, back in 2005-2008, a time that shall hereafter be referred to, in hushed tones, as The Dark Time.

I'm doing well in my job, I'm thinking about returning to a higher level position (in a few years -- I'll wait until DestructoGirl is several years into her schooling), and everything except for worries about some friends (unfortunately, luck and success run in cycles, and my up cycle is a down cycle for people I care about) and PdeFF (jobless again, darn the feckless fool) is pretty much on an upswing.

It's funny how the wheel turns. I have no doubt that I have many more catastrophic failures ahead of me before I die. I plan to die in my 90s. NuclearGrammy died recently, just missing her 100th birthday. I don't want to live that long, but at age 50, I'm feeling just slightly more than half-way through this whole deal.

I hope to be writing regularly again, but the sturm und drang and excitement of before (remember, The Dark Time) seems unlikely to return. Thus this might turn into a knitting blog. Or a dog-training blog. Or the blog of the lamb chop mother: I don't threaten to trash stuffed animals and my kids STILL do well (take that, Amy Chua*!).

Next post, maybe: of dogs and men.

*Please note, it may be possible that Ms. Chua wrote her dreadful child-rearing memoir as a joke or something, but even so, she's only slightly less idiotic that Lori Gottlieab and only slightly less hateful than Caitlin Flanagan. You read in on the Internet, so it must be true, right?