It's been a long week with me not feeling well until today. 

Lying around on the sofa, and on two evenings going to bed before Mark got home from work, which is something I have never done, so it was a bit odd. 

I have been terribly behind on everything. 

On cooking,
on cleaning,
on decorating for Easter,
on washing the dog.

I've kept up with work and that is about it.

One evening we watched a movie with Adam Scott, because we both like Adam Scott, and there was nothing better to rent.  The movie, also featured Richard Jenkins, also a favorite.  A.C.O.D.   is a small movie with a great cast and the topic is "adult children of divorce".  It is a fine little dramedy, which I sobbed through and felt gutted by for two days after watching. 

It wasn't the movie, it wasn't that good a film. It was the topic of course, and the character, which was nicely defined and developed, as a problem solver and peacemaker. Mark, who has parents that amicably divorced in his 20's, when his father came out, looked at me like I was insane. 
He is used to looking at me that way, but I am sure it gets old.  You have plenty of your own issues, bub, is what I thought, but didn't say.  
Later that very day a friend wrote a lovely post about the neighbor woman that provided a certain amount of comfort and sense of place after his own parent's divorce when he was nine.  He had recently reconnected with the family.  There is no doubt in my mind that his grief over his traumatic childhood makes him the knockout father he is today, but still. 
In the movie, a researcher was writing a book about the effect of divorce on children.  She said "children growing up in the 70's were the least parented generation ever." which resonated strongly with me.  I think the social value shifts that had everyone thinking in a Maslow frame of personal needs, profoundly informed that new style of parenting, or lack of parenting that so many of my peers grew up with, coupled with single parent households and adults focused on their relationships with other adults, lovers, second families, created what my friend Teacher Marta likes to call "a generation of pissed off latchkey kids!". 
At the very least I think it informs all the attachment parenting and babywearing you see in progressive circles these days.  
I had a long thing in my head to write.
A long, meandering thing that sounded good bouncing around in my mind for two days, but today I feel a bit better, so I put out Easter decorations with my kids, instead. 
Another writerly acquaintance asked a question about yearning. 
About meaning. 
I spent my whole life consumed with the notion of meaning, wishing, hoping and yes, yearning for it. 
I let go of that notion when I said yes to being a parent.  Parenting my child, making sure a hole in his life would never open up and swallow him, that he knew every moment that he was loved unconditionally and that we could and would never leave him, that no one, no one in the whole world would ever mean as much as he means, that became meaning.  There are good and bad days.  There are days when lying on the sofa seems like the most rational thing to do, but there are never days when I lose that sense of meaning in my life.