Break ups in Stuff

A few days without writing and I feel like I have several things to write about. I’ll start with good news and then move onto all the sadness in my house right now.

The composting toilet is my new favorite thing ever. I didn’t really like the way it was flushing originally, but then I conferred with the manufacturer and brought back the contractor to tweak a few things and now it’s really perfect. It seems almost 100% like a normal toilet except there’s no water in the bowl. There’s a curve to the pipe leading out of the bowl so you can’t see anything, unlike the outdoor toilet. The flush mechanism pumps out a small amount of very foamy environmentally safe chemicals that keep everything clean and smelling nice. And absolutely no water is used and nothing is flushed into a sewer.

I think I’m already actively working on a plan to replace the toilet that the kids share. And then after that we’ll replace the guest toilet on the first floor.

A week ago Olsen came home with a furious look on her face. She’s the angry one in the family and sometimes I’d rather not have anything to do with her when she’s raging. I mean, I know I couldn’t be like that when she was a kid, but now that she’s an adult I feel justified in just holding up an arm and saying, “Let’s talk about this when you’ve calmed down.”

I was anticipating a night like that but instead she told me that she’d broken up with her boyfriend, and then proceeded to cry on my shoulder for the rest of the night. I liked her boyfriend more than any of her previous boyfriends, but I was also not optimistic it would last. I don’t think Olsen has anything close to a settling-down type personality right now and that’s not a bad thing, but I expect her too go through several more boyfriends before I’d accept that it’s something serious.

We talked and cried together and acted like it was the end of the world, because that’s how Olsen wanted to play it. I was sufficiently consolatory. I didn’t say things like, “You’ll find someone else and forget about him,” because even though I know that’s the truth, I knew it wasn’t a helpful thing to say at the moment.

That was Friday. On Monday I got home from work to a dark house. Olsen wasn’t around, which didn’t surprise me. Mercer had texted me that he was going to a friend’s house to play video games. But Harry was nowhere to be found. As I walked inside wondering where she was, Megan came running over and said that Harry was crying herself into a frenzy on her couch.

The second break-up in my family in three days. Harry has a very different approach to relationships and I seemed to get the feeling that she thought for sure she would marry her boyfriend and spend her whole life with him. I’m 90% certain she lost her virginity to him, and I imagine that made it feel even more special to her.

I also admit I really liked her boyfriend. He was quiet and polite and very willing to help. He seemed submissive and sensitive and I suspect on some other couch in Boston he was also crying his eyes out at that moment.

Megan played mom until I got there and then called me aside and said she really didn’t know how to handle situations like this with kids. I responded that there is no right way. You just kind of figure it out when the situations happen.

On Wednesday Megan, Olsen, and Harry went out for ice cream and to commiserate about how much love sucks. I thought it was cute when Megan made the offer to do that, and I think the girls appreciated having an adult that wasn’t me to talk to.

When they got home, Megan texted, “That was stressful for me, even though it went well. Come smoke with me?”

So I went and we smoked together. It mostly left me sick to my stomach.