Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm Read Online Free PDF Page B

Wonderful and I have both attended something called the SMILE Program, an evening workshop mandatory in Michigan for divorcing couples with children. SMILE stands for Start Making It Livable for Everyone.
    “Anger, disappointment, hurt, grief and
a desire for revenge
[italics mine] are some normal reactions to separation and divorce,” the handbook states.
    I want to be this mother that SMILE holds out as the ideal: the one who adapts and copes and puts the needs of her children first. I don’t feel like this mother, though, and I sure don’t feel normal, either. I feel small and mean and dark and out of control.
    The boys leave with their father right after our scorched-earth dinner, on foot, with Will even skipping and looking up at him and smiling. In their absence, I try to meditate, or pray, or accomplish some combination of both, but all I manage to do is brood.
    Our farmhouse has been torn apart by the remodeling project, but the builder is gone now, because I don’t have the money to pay him to put it back together again. We were going to have a master suite with a new bedroom, a new tiled bathroom, a walk-in closet, and a balcony. Now there’s just an unfinished staircase, a bedroom with no trim or furniture, and a bathroom with no plumbing.
    The big, open rooms don’t keep things inside themselves anymore; and as I sit here in my flowered chair, eyes closed, shouldersthat keep insisting on tensing themselves up to my earlobes, the house sounds different.
    Our Father, who art in heaven
, I think, trying out this prayer as a kind of mantra,
please let my sons stay whole
.
    But the dogs pant, the well pump clicks off and then back on, and I even hear the bumblebees outside, pollinating away as if everything were on schedule, and I can’t focus. Because nothing is on schedule for me when the boys aren’t here, and even sound behaves differently without their constant voices around to fill up the space.
    It’s been two months since my front-lawn bonfire and the grass has since grown back, green as ever. The idea that the hurt I feel over the end of my marriage can be healed just as quickly is tantalizing. Even if a lot of what I read—like this, for example—only mystifies me:
    “Before I had studied Zen, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.”
    I think on this and try my made-up mantra again
—Our Father, who art in heaven, please let my sons stay whole
—but it’s impossible to appreciate the solitude when all I feel is the loneliness. An emotion that seems to have no theological, geographical, or sociological boundaries. The SMILE handbook addresses it, the Bible addresses it, and so does my growing collection of Zen lit.
    According to the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, there isn’t just one kind of loneliness; there are actually
six
different kinds, and a self-diagnosis reveals that I suffer from all of them. I want toomuch, feel too much, expect rescue, lack discipline, assign blame, and, most of all, I brood. And it’s kind of good to know that an emotion that feels uncontrollable is documented so rationally.
    It’s still dark outside when I’m reading about all of this; I’ve gotten up at dawn, because without the boys here, sleep is impossible. I make coffee, get dressed, and take refuge in the barn.
    Here is the one place where I do still feel normal. The smell of new hay, and the presence of big, warm bodies expecting me, and the sound of my horses’ grassy, even breath is the only thing that calms. I feed Major and Pepper their grain as the sun comes up, and I listen to them chew.
    When they’re both finished eating I give them a brush-down, comb burrs out of their tails, pick compacted dirt and pebbles out of their hooves, and then turn them out into the pasture.
    They trot over into