Bonding under a lightning-filled sky

Last night, Katie and I were at a blues concert at a local farmers market. Just as the evening's performance was wrapping up, I noticed an awesome lightning display beginning to light up the sky to the east.

It had been a hot day, reaching 102. Rain isn't that common between May and September in the Central Valley, so I hadn't even paid attention to the forecast for the evening. Usually one word -- hot -- covers it. But this was something special.

As we drove toward home, Katie talked to me from her car seat in the back, telling me how lightning scares her. "Oh, this won't do," I thought. "No child of mine should be scared of lightning."

I love weather, the wilder, the better. I just happen to live in a place that doesn't get that much of it. To paraphrase White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, I couldn't let a perfectly good lightning storm go to waste.

I detoured. Instead of driving home, we went to the far eastern edge of the Clovis East High School campus, parking so the car pointed toward the orchards and foothills, which seemed to be center stage for God's pyrotechnic light show.

I parked, turned off the car and all the lights, and let Katie snuggle in my lap. We sat there watching for about 20 minutes. The view, unobstructed by houses or street lights, was gorgeous, between alternating forky streaks that appeared to go all the way to the ground and bursts that lit up the entire cloudy sky.

When we drove home, Shayna, my 12-year-old step-daughter, met us in the front yard. I told her where we had been: "Take me," she pleaded. So after stopping in to say hi to the other household moms and the 15-year-old, me, Shayna and Katie got back in the Prius and headed back to our storm-watching vantage point.

(Alyssa, the 15-year old didn't want to go -- once I told her she couldn't carry on her cell-phone conversation during the excursion, she elected to stay in the air-conditioned house instead. Her loss, I think).

Things were really rolling now, with thunder, gusting winds and spitting rains joining the light show. There we sat in the dark, stormy night.

I don't always get my moody 12-year-old, who wears tight peg-legged jeans and insists on encircling her beautiful hazel eyes with smoky rings of black eyeliner. But for a while last night, I think we got each other. We sat together, enjoying a brilliant display, uninterrupted by anything, just sharing a moment.

"Will you always remember this?" I whispered to Katie, the 6-year-old on my lap. "I will," she replied.

Me too.

Getting through a hard day

How do you acknowledge an anniversary for a marriage that is breaking apart? The divorce isn't final yet, but the marriage is definitely over. I've felt a melancholy mood brewing for days as this date has grown nearer.

Today would have been our seventh anniversary since our marriage in 2002. Perhaps adding to the weight of this for me is that this is the longest any of my marriages have lasted. But it didn't.

I could wallow in this. But what good would that do? I've had enough of wallowing this year. I'm ready to put the sadness behind me and focus on what's going right in my life.

My therapist recommended a couple of ways to handle this date. One might be to collect mementos of the marriage, bundle them together and then either bury it or burn it, as a symbol of the end of the relationship.

But I still see the most precious mementos of our relationship almost every day: My two teen-age stepdaughters and the 5-year-old daughter my husband and I had together, whom we share custody of.

So instead of celebrating an anniversary, I'm going out to dinner with my girls tonight -- and the older girls' mom, "Nona," who recently moved in and became the newest member of our family household -- and we are celebrating a family-versary, honoring the date when we made our vows to each other as a family, in front of our extended family and friends.

I'm divorcing a husband, not a family

A couple of weeks ago, before I went on vacation, I quietly slipped a big piece of personal news into my last blog entry. My husband of almost seven years and I are divorcing.

I've been down this road before, but a big difference is that we had a child together while we were married. I've also been a part of his older children's lives for the past 10 years. As soon as we started talking in January about splitting, I knew that I didn't want my association with the older children -- a sophomore in college, a sophomore in high school and a seventh-grader -- to end.

So in an effort to keep the bigger family unit as intact as possible, I'm travelling down a path that, as far as I can tell, not very many soon-to-be-ex-wives pursue. The mother of my older kids, which would make her my ex's first wife, has moved into the house where me, my 5-year-old daughter and my mother live. We are still not very long into this arrangement, but so far it seems to be working out well for us.

This should stabilize things for all of us some, enabling the kids who are still at home to continue growing up in the house we moved into five years ago. And now Katie will get to be with her sisters every day, instead of just part of every week.

Obviously, this wouldn't work for everyone. But I've always had a pretty good relationship with "Nona." And from watching her example these past 10 years, I've learned how important it is to do what's best, in the bigger scheme of things, for the family.

It's a new adventure, one I'm sure will bring about some bumps along the way. But family takes many forms. This will be my story about trying to keep a family together in a nontraditional way through a difficult time.