Butterfly, Flutterby

Caroline's second birthday party was last weekend! It was butterfly-themed. Here are a few pics for your enjoyment... I didn't go all-out decorating like I did last year, but I did have boards the next day so that's my excuse. We all had a great time!

I'm two and I'm ready to party! And my mom's living room is a mess!

Cupcake #1: 10:00am. Just wasn't worth the tantrum. Few things are, to me, honestly.

Caroline and Papa (my dad).

She got a whoooole lot of presents... and a whooooole lot of Play Doh.

We had a butterfly pinata full of candy, which was especially popular with the dental students/dentists who were present... ironic?

Mom, why are you trying to BURN ME?!

There you have it... the butterfly party. Some year she will have a party that isn't some kind of bug theme. I guess I figure I'd better get in a bunch of non-pink-princess parties while I still can!

Off-limits

Sometimes I find blogging to be a little... tricky. This might come as a surprise, considering the things I've shared here over the past few years, but I'm actually a very private person in real life. (It helps that maybe only about five people I know in real life read this... as far as I know...) However, I do try to keep some topics off-limits. One of them was the trouble I was having in my marriage. I guess I posted the occasional vent when I was feeling particularly abandoned, but in general I tried to keep that between the two of us. And even so, there have been many things about our marriage and divorce that I have kept private, because discussing them here just isn't... appropriate, or fair.

I guess it's a fine line between sharing too much and just sharing my story. I try to walk it as best I can. I don't want to stop telling it, because I find it therapeutic and lord knows I need all the therapy I can get, and also because I know there are a lot of you out there who follow along with all my trainwrecks of various kinds, and hey, who wants to disappoint the internet?

So, I'm about to break one of my rules and talk about one of my off-limits topics. Because I need to. Because it's important to my story.

Men. Dating. Life after marriage. Let me preface all of this by saying that I do not involve Caroline in any of it. I don't want her to get attached to anyone who is likely to walk away. She doesn't need to feel any more abandoned than she will when her father moves 2000 miles away and stays there for the rest of her life.

I haven't been seriously involved with anyone since Tyler, although, as I type that, I wonder if it is exactly true. No one I've called a boyfriend, anyway. Mostly it's been a distraction. Recently, though, it was somewhat... more.

Letting people in right after a divorce is dangerous. Also stupid. Stupid is a key word here. Almost having a doctorate doesn't necessarily exclude me from being a total idiot, if I haven't already proved that point over and over again.

Needless to say, whatever it was (and really, it wasn't supposed to be anything at all) is over. It happened a little while ago and to be honest, I'm fine, but it's really made me slam on the brakes and take a good look at myself. Since I was 16 or 17, I've been in a relationship of one kind or another. When one would end, I'd leap headfirst into something else to distract myself. This is an awful pattern to get into. You end up with distraction upon distraction, and, if you're like me and you suffer from a depressing and somewhat pathetic inability to keep any kind of walls up, you get more involved than you should, every time. Eventually, you end up buried under all these distractions-turned-relationships and you have no idea who you are anymore.

I might be being a little harsh with myself. Or maybe I'm finally getting it. Maybe a little of both.

Regardless, I'm taking a break. Enough is enough. I need time to deal with myself, and focus on my daughter, and graduate, and get started with my career. I need to stop relying on other people to make me feel like I am worth something. I need to be happy with myself before I can ever be happy with anyone else. I feel like if I don't break this cycle, everything will be doomed to failure from the start. And I have to believe that I deserve more than that.

So no more. I'm calling it quits until I feel that I'm ready to stand on my own two feet in a relationship. No more distractions. I didn't end my disaster of a marriage and take control of my life just to throw it all away again.

She's two!

I can't believe it, but my baby girl is two years old today.

I have her for her birthday weekend, which makes me very happy. I'm having her party here at our place tomorrow (I'll be sure to post pics!). Unfortunately this weekend is pretty stressful since I have two more days of board exams on Monday and Tuesday and Caroline has been very sick for the past week with hand foot & mouth disease. But my mom has helped me a lot with the party planning so I think it should go pretty well.

Okay. Honestly? I'm in a really weird place these days and would like to post about it but I don't want to drag down her birthday post... so I'll just save it for another day.

Here's the birthday girl from a couple days ago, in my bed with all her stuffed animal friends gathered around her to make her feel better.

I had to miss a lot of school (and boards studying time) staying home because of her illness, but I have to admit that it's always nice to spend some lazy days at home with my girl. :)

Happy second birthday, Caroline!!

Matched!

I don't like to leave depressing/trainwreck posts at the top of my blog, and I have awesome news to share, so I'm posting two days in a row. Hell has officially frozen over. Or it's about to, with yet another blizzard on the way...

I got a job! Well, a residency position. I originally wanted to apply to residencies in general dentistry so that I could spend a year learning things I hadn't learned in dental school and building up my speed, as sort of a stepping stone to working as a real live dentist. Plus it's easier to find a job and you can make more money if you do a residency first. The divorce changed that for me, or so I thought-- kind of tough to be on call at a hospital when you are a single mom. So I never applied.

Then, earlier this month, I started thinking about doing the AEGD (Advanced Education in General Dentistry) residency program at my school, because their call schedule is a lot more manageable than smaller programs where there are fewer residents. I wished I had applied, so I asked the director about possibly taking any spots left open after the "match". He replied that he doubted there would be any spots left, so I should immediately get a match number because the match was closing in three days, and that he could interview me the next day.

Actually, it went something like this:
1:50: I send email whilst sitting in boring class.
1:55: Program director responds.
1:56: I open his email and start reading.
1:57: My phone buzzes with a text from a friend saying "Dr. [program director] is coming to look for you RIGHT NOW! HEADS UP!"
1:58: Classroom door opens and he pokes his head in and asks for me.

It was all very sudden.

Anyway. It worked out. I matched to UConn. I have a job for next year. I'm freaking ecstatic. !!! And pretty flattered, because a lot of people in my class didn't match to any program and the whole thing was all very last-minute for me... as in, I kind of circumvented the entire application process...

So, I can breathe easy and know that I'll at least have benefits, a stipend, and a place to work next year. I can support myself and Caroline and we won't be out on the streets. Which is always a good thing. Now I just need to refocus and find the motivation to get through boards and the next three and a half months until graduation. Easier said than done, these days, because all kinds of things are resurfacing and/or going wrong and/or distracting me from what I am supposed to be doing.

Said the girl who sat on the couch blogging and blasting loud music instead of studying for a board exam which is... um... tomorrow.

But I know I can do it. I know I can. I've come this far.

You will have no problems in your home.

So says my fortune cookie. I read it and laughed hysterically until I realized that it actually pissed me off and then I quit laughing and ripped it up.

Caroline's in bed and I'm lying here on my couch in my pajamas eating Chinese takeout and watching Eat, Pray, Love (instead of studying for boards) because I've had a completely shitty week. I had tried to read the book when I had first started the whole divorce process, but I couldn't get through it. I mean, I was good with the Eat, that was all fine, but the Pray just bored me and I don't think I'm ever gonna get to Love, so I just gave up and rented the movie. It turns out it's kind of bullshit, to be honest, but I think there's some kind of rule that you have to watch it if you are a woman getting divorced and well, what can I say, I'm a rule-follower.

I've spent most of the past six months wondering what is wrong with me, to be completely honest. I don't know if I will ever figure that out.

Uncontested.

Big news. Tyler and I came to an agreement on custody and visitation. Without any lawyers, or mediators, or judges, or hitmen.

::hallelujah chorus::

That was the only issue we had to resolve in order to have an uncontested divorce. For awhile there it was looking like we were going to have to have a long, drawn-out, expensive trial... but thankfully we were able to come to a compromise and now it's all down in writing to be filed at the courthouse before our final hearing. Which should be sometime next month.

Getting divorced is really such a pain in the ass. I don't know who thought of this system, but whoever did is not very bright. So, these two people can't get along well enough to live under the same roof? Let's have them jointly fill out a mountain of paperwork that's about three miles high, and have them arrange to spend some quality evenings at court-ordered parenting classes together! That should go well! Bring it in, you two! Group hug!

But, I guess that's just how it is when it doesn't work out. It takes a lot of paperwork to dissolve a marriage, and even after the final signature, if you have kids, you're tied together in some way for the rest of your lives. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, baby... you, me, and our divorce decree. Romantic, isn't it?

So, here's what we came up with. Joint legal custody. Primary residence with me. Tyler gets visitation every other weekend, and 1-2 weeknights per week for a total of up to 5 nights per 14 days. Alternating holidays. He gets two blocks of two weeks each in the summer. And I have to pay for one plane ticket to North Dakota per year.

He is most likely moving to Denver in the spring or summer, so the paperwork will have to be modified after that. I'm pretty happy with our agreement overall. There are some things I don't love, of course, but in the big picture I would rather give a little more than I would like so that I can maintain a good relationship with him for Caroline's sake. Things between us are civil, even almost friendly, and I hope we can keep it that way because it will be better for her in the end.

Life is good these days. I feel calm and happy and hopeful. And really, all the legal stuff has gone as well as we could have hoped for so far. You really can't ask for much more than that!

"I don't think she smiles like that"

Caroline is in North Dakota with Tyler for Christmas. She will be there for about 2.5 weeks total.

Sucks. A lot.

I'm trying not to be depressed about it and to take advantage of the time to study for the next part of the boards, which are coming up in January, and to sleep in and spend time with friends. Spending the holidays without your child, though... well, I don't even really like to think about it, much less write about it, so I won't.

I miss her. I don't want a whole lot of things in life, other than to be a good dentist and to be a good mom. When half of that is missing, I feel... at a loss. Empty. Purposeless. I keep the door to her room shut. I don't turn on the Christmas tree. The holidays aren't happy for me this year.

I can't wait until she comes home.

But anyway. That is not the purpose of this post. This is:

I have a close friend who also recently got divorced. I was spending the night at her place a few days ago (when I had no heat and then a gas leak in my apartment, which is a whole nother story) and we were laying around chatting and looking at pictures from a Christmas party last week. She said, "hey, can I tell you something? This is going to sound so lame. But when I've looked at pictures of you from a long time ago, you have this really big, big smile and it almost doesn't even look like you. I thought, I don't think she smiles like that. But when I look at these pics from Friday, you have that same smile again."

And she is right. I do.

I have to remember that. That even though it's sad, this first divorced Christmas without my baby, I am me again. I am happy again, in the big picture. I can drag myself up out of this unhappy marriage and all the things we did to each other and all the pain and sadness can be lifted.

I can be me again. I can smile like that again.

In fact, I guess I already do.