Sometimes I listen to the radio in the morning commute. Usually, I try to download some podcasts of RFI so that I can provide my children with incidental exposure to French that is not just me speaking it, but lately I’ve felt paralyzed, slow, stupid, and heavy, and everything is a huge and Sisyphean weight to lift, so I’ve defaulted first into the local NPR affiliate and then into the local “alternative rock” station, which plays thirty-year-old songs that the 25 to 35 set likes, like “Psycho Killer,” which I heard this morning. Ironically, the song sent a stream of (only slightly mispronounced) French into the car, which was fun, although it left me wondering what it is I’m teaching these kids (the bridge lyrics, for those of you who do not remember this song, which is to say those of you who have not listened to the radio since before 1977, are):

Ce que j’ai fait ce soir-là
Ce qu’elle a dit ce soir-là’
Réalisant mon espoir
Je me lance vers la gloire… OK

I mean, I suppose there’s something glorious about being a psycho killer. And David Byrne does a good job with the manic eye roll in the video (linked above). But mostly, it’s just a weird little song that’s catchy and somehow became one of the most-covered songs of all time, not least because (and I think this explains the popularity of Simple Minds too, to some extent) it has really very few words.

But mostly the song makes me think of K. It makes me think of K. for the obvious and prosaic reason that K. really likes this song and really likes the Talking Heads; in fact, in 2004, when we were first dating, I remember him telling me that if he ever had kids he wanted them to listen to the Talking Heads all the time because that music would be great for children. K. had a reverence for the Talking Heads — in fact, he has a reverence for all the music he likes — that I just don’t get; it’s more like idolatry than appreciation, as if these people in this band have somehow acceded to a higher plane of being through their music. Which, maybe, they have.

So, although I have been listening to the Talking Heads (not avidly, but I do own a copy of Sand in the Vaseline) since well before I met K. — since, in fact, K. was about ten years old, and I was a seventeen-year-old member of the hippie food co-op whose boyfriend liked to blast “Burning Down the House” while we refilled the bulk food — I now forever associate them with him. The association is all the more ironic because the English lyrics of the song contain the line, “you start a conversation you can’t even finish it,” which strikes me as an accurate and relatively compassionate characterization of K.’s approach to our marriage.

There are other parallels, too. Psychosis is debatable, but this is what is true: when I talk to K., I feel as though I am immediately sucked through the looking glass into Crazy World, and instead of being populated by a lovably cantankerous Red Queen and some hapless pawns, it’s Population One. Crazy World very much resembles our own world, but it is just slightly distorted, some things blown so far out of proportion as to be unrecognizable and others just so much that they present an entirely different slant on this.

For example, last Wednesday we met up with K.’s aunt and uncle, who live here in town. They have been great about hanging out with me and the kids and are a lot of fun. Unfortunately, their two days off are Wednesday and Sunday, which are the days K. agreed to spend (some) time with the kids, and equally unfortunately, they are not morning people, so we can only see them if K. cancels.

We’ve seen them four or five times, on Wednesdays, in as many months. And there’s at least one Weds. where he canceled and we didn’t see them.

But anyway, his aunt mentioned to me that they had seen him and that he’d said that when he wasn’t at work, he was with the kids.

Obviously, this is a gross exaggeration. It may be true for me, for the most part: I am with the kids in the morning until I go to work, and I’m with them when I leave work and all night. When K. comes over, I typically leave for a few hours, help with bedtime/nurse Thing Two, etc.

It is not true for K. He works at 3:30 in the afternoon and generally gets off after midnight, or sometimes much later; it happens, as those of you who’ve worked in the restaurant business know, that he gets off early. He has Sunday nights off both the kids and the job; he often has Wednesday nights off too, though he’s slated to “parent” while I go out (but it often happens that I don’t go out or that I come back so early that it’s barely even his “night.” And that’s not counting the cancellations, which happened at least twice in the past three weeks (that either Weds. or Sun. was canceled). But I can see why he thinks that, why he believes it is true. He is scheduled to spend some time with the kids on each of the days he has off (although, going forward, he will have an additional day all to himself). Therefore, he is with the kids whenever he’s not at work. He is either at Point A (the bar) or Point B (my house). It doesn’t matter that they’re only partial days or that he cancels or that he’s late or that he leaves and I am the one that has to be here, and it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t consider it his responsibility to make up the time if he cancels his parenting time, but my responsibility to deal with it. He’s “with the kids.” Whenever. All the time.

Similarly, he doesn’t think the passing out (which he was doing again when he was here Sunday) while with the kids is a problem and he doesn’t think they need worrying about and he doesn’t know what’s going on with them. He has a very limited view of their lives. Some people in my position would take it upon themselves to try to cajole/exhort/inform him, but I am not doing that. Partially because I don’t have the energy, and partially because it strikes me as a really bad idea to take responsibility for K.’s participation now in the same way that I did when we were married.

So I don’t. I have my meetings with him, we talk about scheduling. He pays his child support. He more or less usually more or less shows up. I let him live his life. I live mine. I don’t try to find out what he’s doing and I don’t volunteer (oh, the scintillating details! The nights spent exhaustedly doing some of the dishes and then passing out with the sink still full! The fruitless efforts to convince myself to swap spit with Friend of an Old Friend, who is charming and sweet but counterindicated for all kinds of reasons, not least that his teeth are kind of yucky!) how I spend my time. And I know this is the way it has to be; I don’t wish for more, even, from K. for myself. My heart knows the difference between grieving for what I lost and trying to re-create it with what is now available.

But I am aware, every time we have one of these superficial non-conversations, every time I try to volunteer information about the kids and he sits passively or I ask him for thoughts about them and he has none (which is every time I ask), every time I take that detour into Crazy World where The Truth is that K. is actually an attentive dad who does everything it takes to raise children, I am aware of how much depth is missing. I feel some regret about this. I feel I should be trying harder to form some kind of co-parenting partnership with K. so that we can at least be united in that.

But we are not. And perhaps we won’t be.

I will try again, of course. Try to make it clear that these kids miss fathering. Try to make it clear that it’s on him. But right now I can’t talk to him at all. And there’s one very concrete reason why amid all the chimeras of reasons that flit in and out, obcuring the lay of the land in this world or any other: we have a hearing tomorrow. Regarding the name change, the one where I try to change the order of Thing One’s names so that he has K.’s last name as a middle name and my last name as his legal last name. And I am terrified.

I am terrified because K. threatens to “never forgive me.” I am terrified because my experience of the world is that right does not always triumph. I am terrified because, in many ways, I know that I cannot make this bigger than it is, and yet for me, for a variety of reasons that have to do with my beliefs about how is best and most ethical and most productive to be in the world, with my beliefs about the values I hold and what I want to show my kids about how the world works, this name change is important. It is the last hanging issue that can be closed; it is the last gauntlet of this six-month process. And it is a way to give peace. To give my son peace and freedom from discomfort and difference (from his sister and me) and uneasy questions, and a way to give me that peace as well. A way to resolve. A way to configure our family as it is, not as one might wish it could be. And a way to affirm that we, the three of us, can be a family without a male head of household.

On Friday, it will have been exactly six months since K. told me he wanted to get divorced (for the first time). It will be almost six weeks since the divorce was final. And I hope that it will also be time to close the book on the last issue. I hope, so much, that it will be time for me to breathe a sigh of relief and pick up the work of this life with an eye to longer-range, more constructive plans.

But first I have to get through tomorrow morning’s hearing. So if you have any thoughts to spare between 8 and 10-ish Pacific, think of us. Think of me.