waiting for my daughter

I am waiting for my daughter to come tell me she is leaving her husband. I have two old friends who remind me of my girl and they are intelligent, gentle human beings. They work and volunteer in humanitarian fields but they had difficulties choosing life partners. They have been married multiple times to jackasses who lack the realization they are jackasses.  My daughter is like them.

I don't mean to put the spotlight on me but I can't stop feeling terribly awful about all this. Usually, I allow myself one day of self-pity and then dismiss it but this is not happening. I cry while I pick through the broccoli stalks at the supermarket.

There are three children involved and we know they will not go untouched. Years ago my own divorce left my kids staring out their classroom windows, confused and alone. One of the teachers had the stupidity to call my eight-year-old son on the carpet for this behavior putting his desk next to hers facing his school mates. She was a jackass, too and I wasted no time telling her. I was a nice person up until that moment.

I need a distraction and decide to see a movie. I pick Gravity.

Sandra Bullock, weird name, is in a space pod and she realizes there is no fuel and despite all her heroism and intellectual capacity she is doomed. She's too scared to wait around for the oxygen to be depleted so she shuts down the tanks and lays back to die. Suddenly her flight companion played by George Clooney is at the window banging to be let in. We thought he was dead being shot out into the void earlier in the movie but then he opens the pod door and and climbs in next to Sandra. Why isn't she sucked out? Why isn't her skull crushed into frozen red meat like the other dead astronauts? But there's Clooney with a bottle of vodka he picked up from a Russian satellite station telling her it's not hopeless. He says they can use the launch jets to shoot them over to the Chinese space station and eventually home. Space is a veritable United Nations it seems. He's telling her she needs to get her life back. After her young daughter's death all she does is work and drive around at night and listen to the radio.

I'm starting to feeling better about Sandra's situation and my own life and then there's my mother's voice in my head for crying out loud saying, " those boys will be all right, they will be in a better environment." I know this is what she would have told me if she were alive. If she were alive.

I'm convinced all that's left of my mother is in a brown cardboard box, her ashes from the University hospital, sitting on the top of my bookshelf. I will not see her again. I am an academic and a scientist and it's not going to happen. And maybe Sandra and I invented our own saving moments to get past it, to get past whatever makes us stare out the window and do nothing to save ourselves. So anyway, that's the story. I'm going to be fine. We're all going to be fine.