Teddy Bears, Periwinkles, Jubilation and Conciliation

I was walking my dog, Snickerdoodle, on the beach when my divorce lawyer called me and advised Conciliation. Oh goodness, not this again. I don’t like talking about divorce.

As he talked, I tried to listen, but I was distracted by Snickerdoodle bouncing along the beach like a flying reindeer, leaping over sea puddles with all four paws in the air. I call him Jubi at the beach because he is so jubilant, running as fast as he can, occasionally looking over his shoulder to make sure I’m near. He bounds to greet other dogs, then turns around and races back to me, his ears flying in the wind. He gallops around me as fast as he can and races back towards the other dogs. His joy is contagious, and he makes everyone at the beach laugh with his antics.

I asked my lawyer what Conciliation was, and after he explained that it involves getting together with ANOTHER LAWYER (read between the lines, paying another lawyer), I said it sounds a lot like Mediation, which didn’t work for us at all. He said Conciliation is better than Mediation, because you meet with an objective lawyer who reviews your case and gives you an impartial view on what the outcome would likely be if your divorce went to trial. It’s supposed to save you from wasting time and money by going to trial. Right.

You say Conciliation, Lawyer, I call it a Dance with the Devil, and an expensive dance with the devil. But isn’t that divorce any way you look at it? Dancing with the devil? It’s awful, it feels like flames are lashing you, your bones are on fire, up is down, wrong is right, nothing is fair, and with every passing day, you may as well be setting your bank accounts on fire.

When my lawyer heard my reluctance, he said I would love the guy overseeing the Conciliation, that he was a “teddy bear”.

Well played, Lawyer… now I was intrigued.

Who wouldn’t love to meet a life-sized law-practicing teddy bear? If lawyers looked like teal teddy bears, wouldn’t court be so much nicer? I agreed and spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about what the “conciliator” would look like. Would he have round ears? Kind eyes? A furry pot belly?

Coincidentally, I call Snickerdoodle the “Teddy Bear Scoundrel” because he looks like an oatmeal teddy bear with his unruly hair falling over his big brown eyes, and he’s a scoundrel for sure. There isn’t a slipper around that Snicker hasn’t tried to eat. Sometimes I imagine his photo on a WANTED poster in the Old West: WANTED! The Teddy Bear Scoundrel! For crimes of jumping on the counter to eat the kid’s spaghetti!

And, that rascal dog just greeted me from a forbidden spot–the kitchen desk! I just got home from driving a carload of 7th grade boys home from a party, where the boys argued over whether the lyrics are “Ompa Gangnam Style” or “Whoopem Gangnam Style”, then they surprised me by asking me to play “Let It Go” from Frozen and proceeded to belt it out along with Idina, commenting on the greatness of the song; and when I drove down my driveway, there was Snickerdoodle standing on the kitchen desk watching my car arrive. Grrrrrrr! Snickerdoodle!! But like Idina and the boys sang so passionately, “Let it go!”

And by the way, Snickerdoodle has a lot of different names. When we got him, we let my ex name him, hoping it would help him them bond. (My ex was not a pet-lover.) He named the puppy Dizzy, as in Dizzy Gillespie, because all our other pets are named after musicians: Ella, Monk, Bootsy, and now Dizzy. Dizzy is a good name for him, because he’s a little crazy, but I always felt like he should be named after a cookie.

After my ex left, I renamed most of the pets to try to capture their personalities. Ella became Miss Pepper Caliente or El Diablo. Monk became Whipped Cream Marshmallow Fluffy Tummy, for obvious reasons, and Bootsy got to keep her name because she looks like she’s wearing little white boots. Princess Pumpkin came along later, so her name has stayed somewhat the same. Well for a while it was Princess Cream Puff Chanel Smushface Pumpkin, but we call her Princess Pumpkin for short.

And I renamed Dizzy–he is now Snickerdoodle.

But the pets refuse to answer to their new names, so now I have to throw their original names into their new names and it gets complicated.

You can probably see how my thinking can complicate things. My ex is trying to get a divorce, I’m trying to stay in my rainbow marshmallow world and pretend this isn’t happening. You see the problem? (I know! Let’s rename divorce warm chocolate chip cookie! Maybe that will make it easier to swallow. But probably not. It would just make the world hate chocolate chip cookies–which would be a tragedy.)

When I showed up at Conciliation (in my tutu and my sparkles shoes), the Conciliator looked like a regular human, with regular human ears and no fur.

However, the Concilation lawyer did have kind eyes and a comforting voice, so I suppose I got the teddy bear connection. And as he talked, trying to talk me into an agreement, I imagined him dancing a teddy bear dance. It made the whole process less painful. After reviewing the facts, the teddy bear offered up his opinion, to which I replied, “No way!”

Instead of shaking his head and staring at the ceiling like others do when frustrated with me, he said, “What part of this makes you feel bad?”

Oh Teddy Bear… what part of this makes me feel bad?

ALL OF IT!!!!!

1. I hate divorce. I didn’t ask for this, and I don’t want to be here.
2. I hate that my children are suffering.
3. I hate talking about money. (I’m not a money person, and in fact, I don’t understand the point of exchanging dirty green money. Why is it green? Who put all those ugly symbols on it? Why isn’t it pink or covered in rainbows? Who decided it had value? Who decided that a green piece of paper with a 20 on it was more valuable than a green piece of paper with a 5 on it, and why must I go along with this fantasy? If I had my way, I would want everyone to pay me in fairy dust, aka glitter. It’s much prettier than green paper. I also would prefer to pay people in glitter. But alas, no one will take my fairy dust as payment, at least no one over the age of 10, so I am stuck dealing in green paper.)

Dear Teddy Bear Conciliator, ALL OF THIS MAKES ME FEEL BAD!!

I told a shaman that I get confused whenever anyone talks about the divorce because there’s so much emotion swirling in my head. She told me I needed to have a mantra and asked me to clearly state what I wanted. I said, “I want this over with a fair and just settlement”. So she said, “Say those words to yourself over and over whenever you have to talk about the divorce.” I didn’t believe something so simple would work, but it kind of did. I mean, it didn’t solve anything–here we are still limping along trying to figure things out two years later, but it did help to clear my mind. I say it to myself when I enter a meeting with lawyers and accountants, but then they start talking of taxes and capital gains and my brain checks out.

Yuck.

Can we get back to unicorns and rainbows bouncing on pink marshmallows?

ANYWAY, after hours and hours of Conciliation, the Teddy Bear talked me into some sort of deal, at least I think he did. Nothing was written down and I’m not even sure what the deal was, so for all I know, we agreed to keep disagreeing. By the end, my head was spinning and I couldn’t hear a word or understand what anyone was saying. I just wanted to go home and bury my tear-stained face in Snickerdoodle’s fur.

I drove home and I didn’t feel good about any of it. And what do I do when I don’t feel good? I bake cookies!!! And with the warm kitchen and smell of melting chocolate in the air, I took a little cite of cookie dough to help me ponder.

It’s all sooooooo sad!!!!

Can I just say that again?

It’s so sad!!!

It’s sad that love doesn’t always last forever.

It’s sad that we lost our family, the family I thought I’d have forever, the four of us.

It’s sad that I lost the man I thought was my soul mate and true love.

It’s sad that I wasn’t able to make him feel loved, adored, and cherished enough to want to stay.

It’s sad that the kids have cried themselves to sleep umpteen times.

It’s sad that a while back my son got into the car and rocked back and forth sobbing and saying, “It isn’t real! It isn’t real! It isn’t real!” What can I do but but hold him? I myself can’t believe it’s real.

You know what else this is?

SCARY AS HELL!!

I’m scared of how I will support my kids after being a stay-at-home mom all these years.

I’m scared of how this will inform my kid’s future relationships, and I’m not even sure I want them to go through relationships, because I am terrified of them getting their hearts broken like mine.

I’m scared of them building their life with someone and having it ripped away.

I’m scared of their sleepless nights, their burning bones…

I’m scared they have learned the fairy tale isn’t real.

I know the ax comes for everyone, every single one of us, and that’s the great promise of life—you will have your heart broken over and over.

But I guess the other promise is that you will feel your heart soar. You will fall in love, you will hang on their every word, it will feel like starlight is dancing around the two of you when you look at each other, it will feel like it’s the two of you against the world, and you will know intimate things about each other that no one else knows, and you will know you have each other’s back, and you will picture growing old with them, the ugly scratchy dirt brown cardigan he will wear, how he will shuffle when his hair turns gray, and you will love him even more in his vulnerability.

But now they have learned it can all be taken away.

You can love someone and he will give you a diamond ring with three diamonds on it, saying it represents his love for you and your children, and that he considers it his great honor to hold those three hearts in his hands, and he will never hurt those hearts, and then he will crush them all.WTF!!!(I sold the ring and took the kids to Paris, but that’s a different story.)

It’s sad!

But… those hearts will mend, hopefully stronger than before. In Japan, they mend broken bowls with gold, making them more beautiful than they were before. It’s called Kintsugi, or “golden joinery”.

Maybe that’s us, mended with gold.

And maybe the fairy tale is that you will see incredible things in life, taste amazing things, hear music so transcendent you will feel you are touching the face of light, witness miracles every day that will take your breath away: like the diamonds falling out of the sky when the sun shines a certain way on falling snow; autumn leaves the swirling like golden confetti; a forest of pink blossoms; the warm brown eyes and jubilant prance of the Teddy Bear Scoundrel.

After Conciliation and baking cookies, and pondering, I felt like I’d come from the boxing ring, so I took the kids and Snickerdoodle to sit on the rocks at the beach.

Something about sitting on enormous rocks worn smooth by the crashing waves centers me, grounds me, and makes me feel supported. We sat on the rocks, not talking, just watching the sun dance on the ocean while Snickerdoodle raced up and down the sand, making us, well, snicker.

I looked down at the rocks and saw a periwinkle shell, which is a tiny gorgeous purple spiral that attaches itself to rocks. If you pick it up and hold it gently in your hand and softly hum or sing, the periwinkle slug actually comes dancing out of its shell.

I’m not making this up.

No one ever believes me when I tell them about Periwinkles, so I take them to the rocks and show them. After my brothers’ brutal divorce, I took him and my sisters out on the rocks in the sea. I told them about the Periwinkles and they said, “No way!” And when I turned around, every one of them was holding a periwinkle and humming gently and cooing in disbelief and laughing like gleeful children when the creatures came dancing out of their shells.

The kids know all about the magic of Periwinkles, and whenever we are on the rocks at the beach, you will see all three of us holding the purple spirals in our cupped hands and humming softly.

Maybe that’s the real fairy tale: a gentle touch and a soft song can make a sea slug dance right out of its spiral shell.

If that’s not a miracle I don’t know what is.

And maybe peace will cup all of our hearts and hold us gently, with a soft song to make us dance.

And then Snickerdoodle bounded over, splashing the Periwinkles back into the sea, and we followed his jubilant prance, arm in arm, back to the car.

And guess what the beach is called? Singing Beach. For real. Just like a place in a fairy tale.