Home for this holiday

John is here with me today. It's good to have him home. We stayed in and split a bottle of chardonnay. The dog is very glad that John is home, too. The children are with their mother this weekend. I prefer when they're here with me, but a custody agreement is what it is. Tomorrow, John goes back to New York. It's tough here without him, but at least we have unlimited cell phone minutes together.

Tomorrow, I think that I will have my hair cut.

Thankful for Thanksgiving

This past Thanksgiving was wonderful. My mother came from Nevada; my boyfriend came from New York; my children were with me all week. With the slightly crowded apartment, we managed not to step on each others' toes, to enjoy family time together in a relaxed manner and to stock up a few memories for years to come.

We also put our Christmas tree. Since most of the time there's only my son and I here, it was nice to have family all around to decorate the tree together. This makes my son's 14th Christmas and my daughter's 12th. Counting Christmases seems just so silly on one hand, but on the other, each one is important. I wish I could distinguish one from the other, but basically they all sort of run together. Happy lights on the Christmas tree that is my brain...very bad analogy, but I don't care.

Only 24 more days are left until Christmas. That one and Thanksgiving are my favorites though today they do not compare to the holidays I spent as a child in Nevada. The constant flow of relatives in and out of our home and my grandmother's (who lived just down the street) gave me a great sense of connection. It's a connection I try hard every year to recreate, and given the challenges my family faces in geography alone, that task is no easy one.

8 weeks starting Wednesday

Well, John never was able to get out of Idaho like he and I hoped. Tuesday the 26th marks his departure from the Potato State. He can't get home fast enough. I don't begrudge him the time that he'll spend with his mom and then his dad on his way home to me, but I am so jealous that they'll get four days that I won't. These 8 months of his absence with intermittent weekends and a couple of holidays have been difficult emotionally. Whereas I want him to be happy and successful in his career, I want him here with me all the same. Too many adverse factors come together in this situation. If he's completely out, it's unlikely that he'd get the kind of work he does now. It's not like there aren't gay construction workers, but unless he decides to start his own business, he'll face all sorts of prejudice in the workplace. Even as an independent entrepreneur, he'd have a hard time outside of certain markets. At the same time, I cannot leave my situation because of my responsibilities to my own children prior to their becoming adults. For at least 6 & 1/2 more years, this may be the way we lead our lives. Far from perfect, it still makes me happier than I ever was in a traditional marital relationship. However, were this a more forward thinking nation, many more people would be happy, myself included.