Rebuilding Rob

This post was written on Saturday, December 28, 2024

What a week it was!

I had kid 1 and kid 2 for the week of Christmas just now, just the way that I had planned when I had my visitation agreement for kid 2 written up nearly 5 years ago.

Under my visitation agreement with both X1 and X2, we had agreed to split the kids holiday breaks from school. For the Christmas/New Year’s break. I would each boy for one week. I had the agreement in place originally with X one, obviously. So when X2 and I split up, I made sure to have it set up the same way and also so that I would get both boys on the same week each year. Otherwise, I would’ve alternated weeks with them, and they would never see each other during the holidays.

The thing with me and X1 is that we’ve always been a little bit more laid-back with the visitation, because of the distance. There have been several years where she just let me go ahead and take a kid 1 for the actual Christmas holiday. Last year, kid 1 and X1 made the trip up to Michigan just before Christmas. They drove home on Christmas Eve, which was kind of unusual. So they left and then I had a kid two for the week after Christmas.

If that all sounds a little convoluted, my overall point is that trying to get both kids at the same time, even though we had it written up in the respective visitation orders, still proved to be very difficult.

But not this year.

I feel like it was especially important for me to have a particularly great Christmas with both boys. Kid 117. He’ll be 18 in March. And while I’m sure I will see him again at Christmas time in the future, he’s won’t be under any legal application to spend this particular week or that particular week with me.

As for kid 2,he’s 9, he’ll be turning 10 next summer. He’s going to be getting to that age, if he’s not already there, where he won’t believe in Santa anymore. So I wanted to make this year, particularly magical for him as well.

On top of all this, we had our regular day-to-day life stuff: Ken one going through some clashes with X one as he’s growing older and seeking out more independence. Then of course, there his mother’s yelling health. I know kid 1 especially wanted to be here to see her this year.

It’s strange, because the night that kid one got here, he was acting different. He was dressed like he was the second coming of Eminem and practically bragging about skipping school. I remember Phred looking at me as he left the room and she said “he’s changed”

By the next day, though, he dropped his teenage ego, and was just acting like himself. It was a pretty cool transformation to see. I hope that X one is able to see this herself as well.

And I don’t want all of this to sound like it was all about kid 1. It was important that I see him, especially with the attention that have been growing between him and his mom. But the fact is, I do see kid too every other weekend; in addition to having dinner with him once a week. Kid he was simply around more. He sees a lot more of what my day-to-day life is like and he interacts much more frequently with his grandma, his aunt, his uncle and his cousins than kid 1 is able to.

And I don’t think kid 2 felt left out at all. If anything, I tried to defer certain day-to-day things to him like “hey, show kid 1 how we do this”

I spent yesterday, Friday, driving from Michigan to Charleston, West Virginia, where kid one and I were going to meet up with X1 for “the exchange“. Kid 2 rode with us, as I had him for the day still as well. Kid wants cousin, who also was in town, seeing his family, row down with us so that he could spend a few days in South Carolina with his cousin and his aunt.

Return of the holiday hangover

When kid 2 goes home on a regular dad weekend, there’s always a little bit of a “back to reality “transition”. And I think for all of us, as a holiday season winds down, there is that transition to real life” whether we have kids or not.

But I have both kid one and kid two here for the Christmas holiday get something not unlike a lunar eclipse. It doesn’t happen very often and we try to make it as big as we possibly can.

The next few days are gonna be tough for Old Man Rob. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t feel complete unless I have both my boys with me. So while I am happy to catch my breath and let my guard down a little bit, maybe even slip out of Dad Mode temporarily, there is going to be a tremendous void both in the house and in my heart. every time I see kid one, we both promise to be sure to talk more often. I want to say this this time and actually mean it. And I had some very important heart-to-heart, “man-to-man“ conversations. These are the kind of conversations are quite frankly I knew we were going to becoming one day. Conversations about life, love, relationships, his mother, my relationship with her, how things went south with us.

We talked about relationships in general. I was trying to warn him to keep his guard up with his current girlfriend. I reminded him that his mother and I were together for 15 years in a relationship and did a one day. I also reminded him that when I met two, I thought it was a chance to “get love right” that lasted for seven years in that relationship also abruptly ended in one day.

So now it’s time to get the house cleaned up. Time to prepare to go back in the teacher mode. Time to deal with “the many loves of Rob” once again. While I was on the road yesterday. (Friday) I’ve got a call that mother got sent back to the hospital. I went to visit her for a few hours today and she seemed very disoriented at at times. It’s almost as if her brain is grabbing selected fragments of memories and thinking that some of that stuff happened today.

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts

• Sunday is borrowed time
• Teacher Armor and the Saturday Clearing
• The Extra Day: A Ten-Year Memory
• Of Training Wheels and Christmas Lights
• Charity Starts at Home (And I’m Back in My Childhood One)

The article “So This Was Christmas” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.