bonding.

Brevity this time, I hope.

My family isn't all that close. We care, but we're not the types to spend every weekend talking or staying in touch. There are intimacy issues, I guess. Emotions are awkward between us. Does it stem from my folks' divorce? Maybe. Don't know. Don't feel like talking about that. LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU.

(oddly, those intimacy issues don't extend beyond the family for reasons that aren't clear to me)

But dammit, it made it that much harder when I broke the news to my mom tonight. We talked for a long time, mostly calm talk about the realities and details of it. How to prep the kids. Where I'm moving. We talked about the Blagojevich trial (they live in Illinois) and her failure to have a screening colonoscopy at age 63 to which she said LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU.

No, not really. But she did steadfastly refuse to do it.

And then the conversation inevitably ended, and it became clear that I'm still her baby boy and she hurts for me. We didn't quite break on the phone, but it was horribly painful to hear her say "I'm going to have a good cry now." Too much emotion for me to handle.

Too much, because it's all sitting there in the back of my head. The pain, the guilt, the feeling of failure, the embarrassment of starting over, the fear of the future, the fear of the unknown, the worry for my kids, the worry for me. Even the worry for my soon-to-be-ex. I don't want to deal with it. I want to skip ahead to when I think the worst is past and everybody is doing just fine.