Who Gets The Pew?

In our church, as in most I suspect, families sit at the same spot every week.  For us, it was fourth row back, right hand side of the right hand side.  Easy to walk up front for a reading, or slip into the back to help with the offering.  Right in front of the pastor's wife, a couple of rows back from A and her parents.

We pretended at first.  He told me he was going to get a divorce in mid-summer, just a few days after our last family vacation with friends that we had visited every summer for a few years.  We sat together just like always until he moved out that fall.  

We even had our church family portrait made in September, just before he moved out of our family home.  My oldest daughter scolded, 'This is so fake.'  One of the last times we attended church together I grabbed his arm as we both wept watching our son sing and play guitar - they call it special music.  

I had such high hopes that he would come around and just wake up!  See that this was all so wrong.  He didn't, and maybe some of the circumstances were wrong, but having the chance to live a life of my own, not one that I dreamed up, planned and orchestrated for so many years, maybe that's right after all.

So who gets the pew?  The one who goes to church the most often in our case; that would be me.  What about after the game, if Mom and Dad aren't sitting with each other, which parent should I go to first?  (I told her to go to the one she wasn't seeing that night.) When it came time to discuss custody and visitation, the kids just wanted to be told where to go and when.  

He said it would save gas to ride to the soccer game together just after he moved out.  What are you crazy?  Are you KIDDING?  Like I would even get in the car with you???  I did it once, forgoing my usual front seat for the back.  Once and done.  

I could blame it on myself or I could blame it on him, or we could agree that neither of us were in a place where we could just act as if nothing had happened even though everything had changed, or act 'normal' in a completely un-normal situation.  I know for sure that I could not, would not, especially as things unfolded.  How do you create a new normal when a family is disassembling and reassembling?

He did listen though, when I tried hard not to speak with an angry tone in explaining that referring to me by my first name to our son instead of the usual 'Mom' is disrespectful and discomforting.  Many harsh angry words spilled forth in the emails, phone calls and meetings with attorneys, but if ever there was a crisis with one of the kids, and there were a few, we got our acts together and discussed things as adults.  I am very grateful for that, and proud too.

Perhaps if circumstances had been different, if this had been a well planned, carefully devised process of dismantling our family life with solely the kids in mind (rare, but it happens I hear), we could be chatting frequently about the kids, comparing notes, sharing anecdotes.  Circumstances weren't different.  It was fairly normal as far as one-sided divorces go, maybe even banal; no public displays, no violence, no punctured tires or busted windshields.  Just a lot of private (and on rare occasions, not-so-private) emotions, mostly difficult ones, but some occasional joy.

Another reason to convince myself to accept that things just are the way they are.  It really does save an enormous amount of energy to accept life as it is today, live in the moment, just check in and see that everything really is ok.  What's that cliche?  Today is a gift, that's why it's called the present.

How did you work through all of those every day decisions?