More than ever before, I’m called to write. It’s clearly my way of releasing, of sorting. Sometimes life sucks you in like a vacuum and you find yourself circulating and spinning in a bowl full of dust and debris only to be emptied out into a trashcan and left to clean yourself off and find your way out. I suppose writing is the dusting off and the actual work – the therapy, the attention to self, the reclaimed awareness, and all the work that goes with stepping through the stages of grief are the climb out.

I remember when Hooper was a baby, a mere 4 months old, and we decided to take him to Maui. And it remember it being somewhat miserable. A different set of four walls. All these years later and no set of rose colored classes can alter my memory of it. Our first born, our world rocked, and with it an unforgiving state of adjusting. And re-adjusting. Because man, don’t the struggles seem to change as soon as you get the hang of it? It’s like ordinary life but in a fast forwarded version.

I digress.

I grew up going to Maui. There was the year my parents took us on a joint trip with my aunt and uncle; pictures of all 4 cousins in our Hawaiian dresses, strings of shell necklaces that hung below our belly buttons and already wilting flowers behind our ears. There was the year we went with both grandmas and I can remember one wearing a shiny silver sun visor and the other, an obnoxious gold. Paired with glasses you thought only came with cataract surgery and I can remember my super-self-conscious high-school-aged self wanting to walk 10 steps ahead. There was the summer, in our early 20s, just my sister and I went. We got a taste for the nightlife and I wore lipstick and we took pictures of ourselves dressed up.

When Willy and I started a family, it became an annual thing. We’d join my parents and we had our routine of beach in the morning, naps in the afternoon followed by pool time and a glass of wine right as the local AA group formed a circle on the grass just in front of our condo. Sometimes the irony makes me giggle. Sometimes it makes me cry.

Willy had moved out just days before we left, after much coaxing; a torturous few months of emotional turmoil that I presently label the hardest days of my life. Oh what a whirlwind the previous few months had been. Or maybe it was years.

And so this year we were one member unexpectedly short. The empty seat on the plane, tangible evidence. A routine broken by two less hands hands; one less body and a sudden inability to be in two places at once. The older boys whining about having to stay in while Sonny napped. I tried setting my lawn chair halfway between the pool and the condo; true symbolism of a mom turned stretch Armstrong… which is quite literally no-mans-land because I was unable to save a drowning kid and unable to hear a crying toddler. But there I sat, for a false sense of security and an offering of the false message that I and I alone could do it all. An attempt at shielding them from the inconvenience divorce has brought to their life. I would have been better off with a whistle and a monitor and perhaps two of those long darth vader swords like they use at the airport to direct traffic.

Stretch Armstrong, an analogy of my life these days.

This trip was filled with so much hurt and pain and release and hope and countless brain cells hard at work trying to sort it all out. A collection of pieces I didn’t know how to fit together. A puzzle I’m sure I’ll always struggle to finish. Van started sucking his thumb again, something he hadn’t done since his infamous days of “handhat” when he was a toddler. But there were also nights spent in the water as the sun went down, memories of turtles swimming up next to us. Popsicles most nights and POG juice with dinner. Sand in our beds and sun-kissed shoulders. One on one dates with mom and communal dinners. Crabs that were caught and pain – even just small amounts – that were let go.

The needed space, the needed warmth, the needed nostalgia. Time needed with my parents, my boys; my immediate village. None of it took the pain away and I took NyQuil most nights to sleep but there is something to be said to grieve in paradise, surrounded and held up by the people who brought you into this life and the little people you live for.