Life in Lynchburg

Ugh…I just almost finished a blog and boom it locked up on me.  As a writer, I just hate it what that happens.  I can bemoan the situation and what was lost, or reboot and try to write as quickly as possible trying to recreate it.  I can not go back and recapture lost time.  I can just move forward and make the best of it.  I have not always been like this.  About 10 years ago, in the midst of my first family.  Is that a politically or emotionally correct term?  I was a writing a screenplay.  I had 30 pages written and they were a great 30 pages, or so I thought at the time.  I can’t remember the details, but for some reason they were accidentally deleted or became corrupt or something.  I remember having a choice to make, I could quickly rewrite them or try to recover the files.  I decided to a recovery strategy.  I went out and bought expensive auto-recovery software and tried to piece together the missing parts.  $250 and about a month’s worth of effort I was unable to recover my work.  I then I had to start over.  What a waste of time and effort.  I should have followed my first gut, and not looked back and moved forward immediately.  Its interesting that as soon as I lost this past blog I took a nanosecond to think about it and then started to write again.  I guess I am learning from my mistakes.  I’ve always been very good at that.  It’s all spilled milk in the end. 

Now back to what I was originally saying before the lock up.  I am having a great weekend so far.  I am staying with my sister in Lynchburg.  She really has a great family although I didn’t really fully appreciate them until a couple of years ago.  Her kids are the same age roughly as my kids.  They grew up together separated by the expanse of the west coast and east coast.  They saw each other about 1-2 times a year.  But lately their visits have become far less frequent.  This is one of the sad realities of divorce.  New families, new cousins, new lives on both sides of the fence.  But whenever they do get together, they have a great time.  Just seeing them all together having fun just warms my heart.  Kids don’t care about details, who is wrong, who is right, they just accept their reality for what it is and make the best of it.  As we age, that is when we develop our sense of justice, fairness, prejudice and retribution. Kids are much more innocent.  They just want to have fun and not worry about all the details that grown ups seem to care so much about. It made me remember by best friend from Jr. High.  His parents and my parents, I gathered, didn’t get along.  They weren’t really enemies but they just weren’t the best of friends.  It was uncomfortable for the grown ups.  But somehow this kid and I got to be best friends.  The parents put aside their differences and just let the kids be the kids and play together.  I always appreciated that about my parents and his parents.  They got the heck out of the way.    Kids are in survival mode when faced with crisis situations.  They are looking to emotionally survive.  They don’t care about the details.    I hate the fact that my kids went through what they went through.  I also hate the fact that I made it worse.  There are always two people at fault in any conflict.  I am trying to own my culpability, even now.    I have been trying my best to lessen this conflict and Jennifer has sure helped me.  Its always nice to have another’s person’s perspective in a difficult situation.  I feel with Jennifer by my side I am a better person.  Isn’t that what a spouse is supposed to elicit?  Anyways for the afternoon I saw two of my kids just having fun without any of the stigma of divorce. The kids were just being kids and having fun. It was so incredibly heartwarming.  We played together in the pool all afternoon.  I was really roughhousing with my nieces and nephews.  They still think Im cool Uncle Ricky.  Everyone wanted to be on my team.  It reminded me that just a couple of week’s ago, Jenni’s nephews, or my nephews now, were visiting.  They are younger, around 4 and 2.  I was able to wrestle, tickle, and roughhouse with them all weekend long.  This is very healthy for kids.  I did a documentary on Raising Boys.  I was able to interview several childcare experts and one specifically described this type of play, Zestful Play.  It is very healthy for kids, especially boys, because it gives them a type of security.  I haven’t been able to have this with my own children for nearly 3 years now.  But for one brief moment I was able to experience it again though my nieces and nephews.  Of course I’ll be able to experience it even more when Jennifer and my baby is born.  Im anxious for this to happen.  I keep asking Jennifer to hurry up and make her two already. 

I feel very blessed.  God gave me a little reminder today of all that I have to look forward to again.  I can’t wait.