Another week going by. And this week is Hanukah, which means that Buttercup is at her mother's house all week. (No worries- we had the first week of december as makeup time already.) I have to say it was lovely to have Buttercup here for 7 full days, and now to have her gone for 9. As much as I love the kid, life is simpler when she is away for a stretch of time.
And during this time, I have decided to be a bit thorny still. I called the orthodontic office today to find out about the payment plan for the work. Only to find out that as voldemort is the one who signed the contract with them, by law they cannot release information to anyone else, even the King, about the financial situation of this patient. After calming my anger, I asked a few more questions. Voldemort can tell them to release this information to another party, but has not done so, yet. Payments start in january. And the office does not care who pays the bills, just that someone does.
I of course, jumped to the conclusion that voldemort, having sole access to the cost of this extensive treatment, would play it her way well by simply telling us how much to pay each month, keeping the true expense to herself, and letting us unknowingly pay more. (She has not done this yet, but I'd just as soon see monkeys fly out of my butt that put it past her) I sent her a calm, simple email stating that she needed to stop by the office to inform them to release this information to the King as well. And look at that, Buttercup has an appointment friday! I told her I'd be coming along for that as well (won't it be great to spend all that time together again!) and wouldn't that be a perfect time to adjust the billing situation?!
Of course, should she decide not to release this financial info to us, we all know the simplest recourse. No payments coming from our end of the game field.
Every rose has it's thorn, baby.
In the past when we have stepped away from ambivalence in general and taken her to a Unitarian church, wanted to celebrate Easter with her, and in the early days of their separation, when the King wanted to bring a Christmas tree into their house, we have been threatened, persecuted, yelled at, and berated for going against Buttercup's Jewish learnings. These incidents have of course made me angry and feel the sting of unfairness rather strongly. But still, the King and I continue to accept all the Hebrew school time, the bat mitzvah practicing, the numerous holidays, the friday and saturday shabbat time. All with the idea that 1- we do not want to mess with Buttercup's head any more than necessary, and 2- she must be learning something of value about their culture, their heritage, their religious life from all this schooling. And that is valuable.
So, you might concur that I was rightly surprised to learn that yesterday at hebrew school Buttercup and her class watched a movie. Something educational about jewish culture, right? No, no it was a Ben Stiller movie called Keeping the Faith. My first thought was that they spent their time, time that she could have been with us, and getting her large amount of homework done, watching a hollywood movie! What!?
Then I took the time to look up what this movie was. I have not seen it, but the wikipedia page is pretty detailed. First of all, it's PG-13. Yes, we let Buttercup watch PG-13 movies, but it's usually stuff like Harry Potter, and the sex scenes are minimal. It seems kind of outrageous that this teacher would show a romantic comedy drama movie to 11 year olds. It's a movie about adult relationships. Something that Buttercup does not yet understand, nor have the maturity to try and create herself.
Secondly, the theme of the movie is about a Rabbi falling in love with his old school friend, who is NOT Jewish. It seems that the crux of their relationship problems is this difference in religion. Now, the King and I as non Jews want to impress upon Buttercup that she does not have to marry someone jewish if she does not want to. But in the orthodox jewish tradition this is not acceptable, as so prettily depicted by Ben Stiller and Jenna Elfman. Apparently, by the end of the film the girl decides to convert so the two can happily be together. Again reinforcing the idea that to be happy and fall in love (something every young girl dreams of and fantasizes about) Jews must stick together and remain within their religious belief and cultural system.
I guess I just feel kind of shocked. Or disappointed. This idea of cultural isolation and religious solidarity is what keeps us so separate and looking at our different religous neighbors as enemies rather than friends we can learn from. It's one thing to teach a child culture and religion and the value of their heritage. But it's entirely another to teach that their way is the only way to be happy. I realize this is what most religions preach, but I still feel surprised at such archaic ideas.
Then again, the King and voldemort were of differing religions, and look how well that turned out. Here's hoping that Buttercup will have the personal strength to make her own decisions about religion and who she loves as she gets older. And do it better than her parents did.
Yesterday, as I was enjoying the last minutes of quiet before the kids got home, I was thinking that having Buttercup around for the past 6 days has been really nice. And after the first few days of adjustment, voldy ceased interrupting. We hadn't heard from her in 3 days! (with Buttercup here that is a huge amount of time to not hear from her!!)
And wouldn't you know it at 3:15 I got a call from voldemort. I was not up for answering it, so let it go to voicemail. I promptly listened to the message. Voldemort informed me that she had received a call from Buttercup during the day and had picked up the boxes of fruit that Buttercup had sold for her band fundraiser. She had all this fruit in her car and was wondering if she could pick Buttercup up after school. She said she wanted Buttercup to take ownership and responsibility for her work and that she would "drive Buttercup around to the various households" to deliver the goods. As Buttercup is not returning to her mother's house until Thursday, the fruit shouldn't really wait that long to be delivered.
This made my heart sink. I was unsure what to do. My gut feeling was that NO she could not interfere in our afternoon and take Buttercup away to deliver fruit. It was inappropriate for her to do that. And I did not WANT her to do it. But I was left in the awkward and scary position of having to tell her that. And knew that by ME being the one to tell her, her wrath at my "controllingness" and power could easily be unleashed. I called the King briefly for backup. He agreed that it not the best choice for voldemort to have the afternoon with Buttercup, and that she was probably just trying to get more time. But he had to get back to work, and I had to make a choice about how to deal with this.
I called her back. She answered and to her credit was trying to be polite and pleasant. I asked her to explain again what she wanted to do. And then I paused.
And said no.
I tried to kindly say that I knew it would be hard to hear, but that it was not going to work for us today to have her take Buttercup away for the afternoon. I thanked her for picking up the fruit, acknowledged that it was great that she wanted to help, agreed that it should not wait until thursday, and I suggested that she drop the fruit by our house for Buttercup to "take ownership of."
Her demeanor quickly deteriorated. Though she was clearly angry, she did seem to be forcing herself to be as friendly as she could. She insisted that Buttercup had asked her to help her distribute the fruit, but if I wanted to handle it differently then fine. She told me to have Buttercup call her when she got home from school to let her know if the child wanted to do something different. She quickly attempted some sort of "I hope you have a good day" goodbye and hung up.
It seemed she thought she and Buttercup had a plan to deliver the fruit and that I was ruining their time together, and would be disappointing the child, if I insisted that it was our day with Buttercup. As I thought about this after I hung up the phone I had a sick feeling of trying to talk to Buttercup about it. I obviously do not know what was said between them at the time of the fruit pickup. Perhaps Buttercup said -Hey mom can we deliver the fruit this afternoon together?- perhaps she said -Hey mom can YOU deliver the fruit for me this afternoon?- Perhaps voldemort said -Hey kid let's deliver the fruit this afternoon together. And Buttercup said whatever.- I sure don't know. But I do know that when Buttercup gets home to our house she will tell me that she doesn't care a stitch about delivering the fruit with her mother. And perhaps about delivering the fruit at all. And I did not want to make her choose who to deliver some goddamn fruit with. You'd think as adults we could at least figure that much out!
So, I called voldemort back. She did not answer. I left her a message saying that I did not want to put Buttercup in the middle of making that choice (especially over such a little thing) and suggested that she just drop the fruit by and we would deal with it. I also said if she really wanted me to let Buttercup decide I would, but I did not think that was the best choice to make.
I felt empowered. Scared but empowered. I felt like I held my boundary well. I felt like I was taking a huge risk by saying NO, and that by doing so voldemort would hate me even more for "taking her daughter away." And probably regret that she had even called ME in the first place (note that she did call me, not the King about this! Good step, I guess) But in the end, I felt unharmed by what what happened. And I think Buttercup did too.
When Buttercup got home I told her that I would be happy to help her distribute the fruit after dinner, perhaps the King would too. And if not, tomorrow after school. Or she could head up to her mom's house and ask for her help. Either way was fine with me. I could see she was searching me for how I felt on the matter, and trying to do the right thing. I tried to make it as little pressure as possible. As she was reluctant to head back out into the cold at that moment we agreed that after dinner would be the time. So later, she and the King went up to voldemort's house and dealt with the fruit.
You won't be surprised at this, but the reality was that there was one box for voldy and pettigrew. One box for one of the neighbors. One box for one of Buttercup's teachers. And one box for someone on the other side of town, that yes, we would have to drive to. So this whole thing was over 2 boxes of fruit that could have been delivered yesterday.
I understand that voldy misses her daughter. I understand that she probably feels she needs her more these days since she lost her baby. I understand that life is hard and full of suffering and sadness. I understand. But I won't play these grade school games with her anymore. I am proud of holding my boundaries and not letting myself give up my needs so voldemort can have hers met. I am proud of standing my ground and leaving the scene of the battle unharmed by the fruit.
Since day 1 of my involvement with the King and his ex wife baggage, I have said the schedule for Buttercup should be one week with the King, one week with voldemort. Period. Sure you can alternate a few major holidays, but other than that, give the kid a chance to be at each household for at least a week. Which gives each parent (and now all the parents) a chance to be involved in ALL aspects of the kid's life. It also give each parent EQUAL time, and EQUAL opportunity to miss time based on Buttercup's weekly activities. Meaning, if the kid has hebrew school wednesday and sunday, then we are not the only ones giving up time for her to participate in this. If she is in ski club on thursdays then they are not the only ones giving up time for her to go to this. It seems more balanced this way.
The King did not push for this early on, when they were still in the midst of thinking they could work this co-parenting thing out without lawyers. By the time they dug up their respective lawyers and things took a turn for the worse, they had already come to agreement about many things, and were not about to change those things and start over reworking the schedule with the week on/week off idea. When we went back to court in 2007 the King was for this kind of schedule, but voldemort would have none of it. She insisted on having every friday and saturday for their religious holy days and claimed that the King was not a good enough (jewish) father to allow him to have either of these days on a regular basis. She told the court this very thing, and demanded to have every friday and saturday, without exception. This demand obviously made considering an alternating week schedule impossible.
Throughout the years we have occasionally repeated the idea of this schedule and the reasons why it might prove more stress-free for ALL of us, and provide Buttercup with a more stable life. Always the idea has been rejected and/or ignored.
Until november.
In the Novermber Peace time, the King again brought up this schedule idea which could have Buttercup with us for one full week, and with her mother the following full week. He suggested that this might lesson some of Buttercup's deep seated stress. In that conversation, voldemort apparently, for the first time on record, considered the possibility. The King reported back to me that she agreed she would think more about it and that it was a possible way to have the schedule.
This is all well and good, but considering the possibility is not a suggestion to try it. But then. Just a few days ago Buttercup, out of the blue, recounted that her mother had asked her if she would be interested in the alternating week schedule. She was vague on how the conversation went. She said she had been super tired one night when voldy broached the topic. And she did not say whether she thought it was a good or bad idea. I held in my shock and glee and simply told her to think about it and perhaps see how she felt when January rolled around (as for the last 5 weeks of this year we have a schedule almost of week/week).
Yet, life is full of irony isn't it. While I feel that ultimately a change in schedule to one where Buttercup has a longer time with each family, complete balance in amount of time with each, and an equal opportunity for all parents to be involved would benefit us all greatly. I have very little hope or faith that we could get to that place easily. I think of how this battle over one makeup day has ensued, how different our life views are, how manipulative and calculating voldemort has been in the past, and how we presently have no means of conflict resolution at all. And I wonder how the negotiating of this new schedule would proceed.
It could take another year of negotiating. And there is no guarantee that we could even do it successfully or respectfully. At this point it just doesn't seem like a path I think it wise to go down. Not that anyone is actually suggesting a change, but if someone did, I'm just not sure I could go there. Ain't that just the funniest thing?
