Dreams in the Bounce House

It's been the rainiest August that I can remember -- all on the weekends, it seems -- so today I decided to check out the new bounce house play facility with the kids.  They each got to bring a friends, so I wasn't too worried about having an appendage dragging me into a bounce house made for people under 100 pounds.  (I'm always afraid that I will get into one of those and it will split -- not because of me -- but it will look like it was because I'm so heavy that the bounce house popped!)  It was a good tactic, that worked for the whole time we were there.

While the kids were jumping and running like maniacs, I had a lot of time to take some stock of my life this summer.  Major bummer that it is, my relationship with my ex-husband has gone from "eh" to "blech!" between Memorial Day weekend and what is now almost Labor Day weekend.  He's got problems; they're not new.  (There are a lot of reasons that B and I got divorced and, unfortunately, none of them have resolved.)  That being said, I have worked very hard to try to have a cordial relationship with Bo and Jojo's father, for their sake and, frankly, to make my own life easier.  Unfortunately, he has been completely unreliable, to say the least, as far as his custodial weekends go. A few weeks ago, I determined that we needed to have our custody arrangements put in writing so there are no lingering questions, and I told him about it, which he disputed, but then acquiesced.  My attorney filed a petition for a custody conference that, frankly, does read rather harshly, but this is what she told me has to happen in order to get a conference quickly.  Remember: he knew it was coming, and the goal is to have our arrangements committed to writing and filed as an agreement in the court.  

Well, he went...ballistic, to say the least.  I was in the bounce house-a-rama being screamed at by my ex about how he is going to destroy me with witnesses and a dossier that he has amassed on all the ways that I'm a terrible mother, etc. ,etc.  While this is happening, I'm hearing "Look here, Mommy!"  "Watch this!"  and smiling and waving at the two children that have kept me tied to this maniac.  So, I tuned his verbal abuse out long enough to dream about how things might have been if a) he was a more reasonable person, or b) I was a more self-assured person who didn't feel that I needed to marry this person to avoid the ridicule of my family over a broken engagement, or c) I would have listened to the minister who pulled out of officiating our wedding because she told me that she could not be a party of a wedding that she knew would never work.  He screamed himself raw and hung up on me long before I realized that the cell phone went dead.  Then, I heard "Hey, Mom, check it out!" and my son did a half-gainer off an inflatable platform into a ball pit and stood up with a flourish "TA DA!"  Reality:  I would never have Bo or Jojo if I didn't first have B.  And my life dream of being a mom would have not come true when I was 32 and 36...that's the fact.  All the bullshit is worth making that dream come true.