Wobbling and Falling My Way Around the Rink

Over the holidays, I had the chance to go ice skating with my daughter and three of her younger cousins. My daughter knows how to skate, but her cousins were beginners. I wondered how long they would last on the ice, slipping and falling their way around the rink before they'd want to pack it in and do something else. To my happy surprise, they kept at it and skated for 90 minutes until the rink closed.

As a parent, there is almost nothing funnier than watching a kid trying to learn to skate. It's slapstick watching them tentatively wobble forward on shaky skates, then haplessly gyrating their arms to regain their balance right before the inevitable splat-fall on the ice. The adults burst into laughter every time one of the kids fell. Heartless, I know. But watching a brand-new skater fall over and over again is like watching the characters on Gilligan's Island repeatedly trying and failing to leave the desert island -- only funny. Later that night, we saw all the movie footage my father had shot and we laughed all over again.

My 6-year-old nephew probably fell about 1,000 times. But he always got up and continued on slowly around the rink, at first using the wooden walls to balance, then later winging it on his own. I skated with him sometimes, and every time he took a big fall, I helped him up and reminded him that he could take a break to warm up anytime he wanted. But he didn't want to stop. He loved ice skating so much -- even though he was bad at it and his jeans were soaked -- he picked himself up and kept going. If he was frustrated or angry at how difficult it was to learn to skate, I didn't see that. He didn't let those emotions get in the way of trying. It was remarkable, his determination.

Finding my way after divorce sometimes makes me feel like a young kid learning how to skate. You fall down a lot in the beginning. There's no way to avoid all the nasty spills and the embarrassment of repeatedly falling down. But you pick yourself up and slowly wobble-walk your way around the rink on cheap rental skates, balancing yourself on the wooden wall until you get a little better, a little braver. Eventually, it will lead to the exhilaration of being able to gracefully skate around the rink with only infrequent falls. The trick -- which really isn't a trick at all -- is to just keep getting up and trying.

In the Rearview Mirror of Life, It's Always Easy to Spot the Asshole

I spent the holidays with my daughter visiting family in Wisconsin. My brother and his family -- who live in Los Angeles like me -- were also visiting. We spent Christmas evening with my father, my sister, her boyfriend, and her adult sons -- the home where I grew up filled to capacity with a big talkative group eager to reconnect at a holiday, instead of a funeral or some other sad event.  

During this visit, I spent a lot of time with my sister-in-law preparing meals and helping organize the daily activities of four loud, but happy kids. I get to see my brother and his family a lot in LA, but rarely do our Wisconsin trips overlap as they did this year. My brother's wife -- a lovely, warm person who grew up in a foreign country with a relatively low divorce rate -- was friendly and gracious with everyone, even the troubled members of my extended family. Genuinely interested in each one, she made every one feel special and included, because she thinks of *my* family as part of *her* family, which is, of course, the way it should be when you get married. 

I was struck by the stark difference in attitude toward my family between my brother's wife and my ex. When I was married, I took no pleasure in going home for a visit accompanied by my ex, and would sometimes visit my family alone or just me and the kid. It was easier to go without him. He was such a judgmental asshole about my family, I would spend much of the trip with an annoying knot in my stomach from the constant mid-level anxiety surging through my body. 

With the clarity of hindsight, now I can see how my ex *never* embraced my family as a new, larger part of his family. He always seemed to think of my family as "not enough" -- not educated enough, not sophisticated enough, not socially graceful enough. Gallingly, he seemed to take the most troubled members of my family and unfairly compare them to the most successful and well adjusted members of his family, conveniently forgetting that he too has some f*cked-up ones.

Like a roommate in a snit who puts masking tape on the floor to divide a shared bedroom, my ex was always careful to draw a line between what he thought of as his and what he thought of as mine. It's hard to be part of a union, when one of you is always marking his territory. If that's what I wanted in marriage, I would have just gotten a dog. At least the dog would have been happy to see me every day.