Boobs + Food=

STRESS

Have you ever been so tense that a chiropractor adjustment made it worse?

After an expensive and harrowing legal battle, my husband and I won custody of 2 of his 5 children. The question everyone seems to ask is why only 2? Well the 2 older girls wanted to come live with their dad (the ex, or plaintiff, as my husband calls her, disagreed hence the trial). His son, the eldest didn't want to change schools in his Junior year (understandably) and the other 2 were too young to get a vote.

Our only option was to deploy the jack-booted social services workers and try to prove their mother incompetent. We decided against that route. As it was, during the trial, my husband ordered his attorney to stand down. So much for being the bastage she's painted him as for the last several years. But in the end, due to circumstances too mundane to discuss, we were awarded custody of the 2 eldest teenage girls 14 & 15. They are now 15 and 17 and I have the gray hairs to prove it.

Last night the 19 year old son graduated high school and the players were assembling, for the first time since the heady days of the trial and subsequent custody change, at Steak and Shake in Cleveland TN. As an aside, Steak and Shake: food as crappy as McDonald's at 3 times the price.

Hence, tension. As the most hated person in the room, I felt a bit uncomfortable. Flop-sweat uncomfortable if you get me. It's not that I've done anything wrong. I'm just trying to parent 5 kids and remain sane and happily married. But I am SHE who instituted boundaries and wondered aloud why it was OK that the kids were failing school. Ah well, I'm a big mouth to be sure.

So while I was bolstered by the presence of my very sweet in-laws and my wonderful husband, facing the plaintiff, her parents, and the kids gave me cotton mouth. See the kids knew there was something afoot. We've been on opposite sides of the game-board for so long that seeing us together must have seemed like some drug induced farce. Not that they know anything about drug induced farces, SpongeBob not withstanding.

I sat at the end of the long table on the black pleather banquette. I ignored the gaping wound in the pleather filled with long forgotten food detrius. I ignored the ice pick of tension between my shoulder blades and offered up the experience on the altar of doing the right thing. But I found myself sitting diagnonally across from the plaintiff's mother. Picture a cross between the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland and Queen Elizabeth, complete with the overbite.

As a Southern Woman, she's been schooled in the art of making pleasant conversation with your enemies. And boy howdy, does she ever consider me an enemy. She's quite convinced that I married my husband with the expressed purpose of stealing the children from her daughter in some malevolent undertaking. Little does she know, you don't have to steal what's given to you, and most of the time I dream of the day I can actually use the phone without having to order one of the kids off of it, and going to the freezer for ice cream finding an entire pristine container, rather than an icy encrusted teaspoon full. (I didn't eat all of it!)

It was so very clear she despised me. As she asked politely how I was doing. As she commented on how lovely our card was. So clear. And I just sat there! Pole-axed, grinning from ear to ear like an addled idiot. She never said anything untoward, but I got the feeling (mostly from the beady eyed stare leveled at me) that if she could shoot her tongue out of her mouth I'd be the cherry on her sundae, down the hatch in a nano-second. I smiled on.

See Yankee women aren't prepared for this kind of onslaught. I grew up in Philly. And while I'll avoid conflict with the best of them, inside there beats the heart of the hot blooded Northeast Philly girl who'd give you a look and sneer Whaddaya lookin' at? But in the face of such cold blooded courtesy I could do nothing more than nod and look vaguely ashamed of myself, damnit.

Interestingly, my husband and his ex-wife were trying valiantly to be the life of the party. Both playing court-jester to the queen and her consort who never once looked up from his burger and fries. I wondered vaguely why they ever divorced! Then I remembered, and was bemused.

His ex-wife was funny.

When my mother in law presented the son with his gift from her drug addicted mother (She's Tennessee Williams Southern), the ex did a really solid 2 minutes. It was, in case you were wondering, a silver plate necklace with a charm of a mortar board engraved with 2006. It was also intended for a woman. Great-Grandmother's reasoning? Perhaps now he'll take off the hideous macaramed hemp choker he's been wearing. We were all a bit perplexed by her reasoning. But as she would say, "All I need to feel better are my flannel pj's and my little white pill." Word.