Impressed

I'm impressed by so many things. By how three-year-olds can make friends in five seconds, just by virtue of sharing a table with someone. By how when I ask Lyra what she wants for dinner, she says "Mayonnaise." By how Ginger starts following me around the moment I get home, and I think it's awfully sweet until I open my bedroom door, sniff sniff... oh Ginger! and she looks at me so apologetically that I can't help but pat her on the head and trot off for paper towels and carpet cleaner.

By how I can drive a stick-shift and eat ice cream at the same time.

By how C and I are at Ikea buying him a bed, and after we load it into the car a million miles from the entrance he looks at me, looks at the empty cart and says wanna ride? (Hell yeah I do!) And we go veering off into the distance.

By how after all this time of looking for an apartment or a roommate I realize that I already have one.

I... guess this makes us a non-traditional parenting household. I'm impressed by this, too, but maybe a little uncertain because it's still early; we haven't had to deal with boyfriends or girlfriends or even just a drunk friend on the couch. We haven't had any problems.

Then again, maybe we're just evolving; maybe the dust finally settled on the first and hardest stage of our breakup. It's been almost two months now, not long but not brand-new. We have our own bedrooms. We've figured out the bank accounts, the schedules, the chores; we've delineated appropriate post-breakup behavior and how we'll deal with one of us inevitably dating someone else. Best of all, we're both right down the hall from our daughter at all times.

Maybe all of the precautions in the world wouldn't be enough... but what if they are? What if they could be? What if we can pull this off and parent our daughter together but not together?

There's one obvious problem with this situation.

We were mulling around the dining wares section of Ikea, killing time after we begged, pleaded, and failed to coax Lyra out of the playroom. I'm squinting at the place settings when it occurs to me that if we were both seeing someone we'd always have an instant dinner party and ooh, we could make that one Mexican soup I liked so much, the one with all the toppings... which would look so great in those blue bowls right there... and then I realize that this is madness, no I'm sure it is, but at the same time it seems like the pinnacle of emotional maturity, like a situation we should actually strive for. Dinner parties. With dates. Or something like that.

Or I'm, you know, delusional. But living together isn't a cop-out; there's no room for miscommunication and anything that would demand only greater maturity from myself and from C... well, it just can't be all that bad. Neither one of us is particularly jealous to begin with, and what's a little jealousy when the benefits - both of us getting to live full-time with our kid AND having a permanent movie-watching partner - so obviously outweigh the drawbacks?

Again, maybe I'm dreaming. I think we'll tread lightly into this vague and uncertain future.