Sesame Chicken Crack

I have not yet come to terms with the idea of this blog. I am pondering its purpose. Part of me thought this would be a diary but a diary is private. There is some privacy inherent in being anonymous I suppose but that doesn’t take care of the question of why do I want some random person to read this? And quickly following the footsteps of that first question is this one: and if I’m thinking of someone else reading, what should I be writing? Initially the idea of a diary was to use the writing I would do anyway—assuming I would journal anyway, and put it here. Now having slept on that idea, and wished 50 times that I had unpublished rather than published, I’m second guessing myself. I guess it’s not a mystery why though I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I have had a memory, I have never tried to become one. Well I did, a long time ago—back when I had the balls to do it. The best thing would be to just let it go and be honest. All of the above is an attempt at honesty--although it sort of reads like a bullshit disclaimer. My instinct is that my musings about the lack of a unifying theme to my content and the lack of a unifying justification for my content can end up being--you guessed it!, my content too. That's either lazy or really stupid or.. honest.

Yesterday I realized that being in my broken family moment is like being a crackhead in a crackhouse. I was sitting there at the favorite family chinese restaurant with him and the son. This was the first time in six weeks we could actually do this. It took us a while to start speaking again and then after just speaking we were able to slowly progress being able to make a joke. Then there was the time we dared move from a random joke (say a pleasantry or something related to the news of the day) to a joke with context, you know an inside joke: that was a big step because it evoked we once shared an inside and that was going to hurt. But we went for it. And we made inside jokes. At that point I started to panic a little because in the past, when I’ve tried to walk away, this process of the quick return of the familiar—usually brought upon by this superhuman need to laugh together again has been my undoing. One moment I’m laughing with him, the next moment I’m telling him it’s okay to come back to my couch. Panic but not capitulation, I said, and kept moving. I told myself this is good that we’re talking and laughing, it’s healthy. It’s probably not healthy—it’s not healthy that we both feel compelled to absolve one another and forget all the bad. But I told myself it’s healthy. And so we’ve progressed to this moment of being in the favorite family chinese restaurant. We have the conversation we always have there where he talks about how much he loves the family that runs the restaurant. They have known our son since he was one. The girls have all grown up into these cute, hip, Chinese uptown girls. They are precocious bilingual entrepreneurs all of them—full of work ethic and charm, having grown up running a restaurant with their mom and dad. And my Ex always gets misty eye about it. And talks about how great that would be for our son to grow up around his own business. “And really learn it from me.” And just like that, it’s like we bought a ticket and jumped on this train, rushing down the tracks of his dream trip—as usual, as always. In my mind there is old familiar panic but also a new reticence: I know I'm not supposed to be going down memory train with him anymore... In my head there is a big battle going on, while he speaks, about the subtle ways in which the familiar tries to seduce and take over. And I look at my son and he is delighted. He has not been delighted in so long, he has been weary and annoyed and mad at life. He has been mean to me and missing his father and finding ways to tangle up all his emotions and my exasperation into this manic little repertoire of tantrums. But none of it is t here right now. Right now in the favorite chinese restaurant he is fully completed and reconstituted as his own true fantastically happy self. He is himself again, because we are there, all three of us. It's a three person ritual of profound significance: we order Sesame Chicken, a large one, with house special rice. We talk about the Chinese zodiac on the place mats and whether it means my son and I were born in the place Dragons come from--and no, we laugh, it doesn't mean that. We let our son pretend to read off all the fortune cookies; according to him they are usually self-serving and complimentary, “I am a wonderful child because I ate all my chicken and now I will get to watch Star Wars.” The owner plays with him, we play with his girls, ask them about school, tell them how tall they’ve gotten. My son goes up to the counter to pick out his own drink in the fridge. Everyone calls him by his nickname. He feels special because customers can't go into the fridge themselves and we smile from knowing exactly how his face changes when he feels special. We mention once again how the building across the street is really the one we always wanted to live in but never could afford—because it’s so well situated in terms of the park and the train and the nice grocery store. And I have to pretend that I really understand that this separation is for the best. Fake it til you make it, I tell myself. Remember all the bad. And I do. But this scene, this unit that is not broken, this conversation that has been going on for seven years, this way my kid looks up at us when we're both there, it pulls so hard on me. I feel like the crackhead in the crackhouse.