a return to a vague normalcy

The first week felt like one of those surreal weeks where you are suspended in time and you never know when to eat or sleep or cry.

The second week feels, well, kind of normal. I've been eating and sleeping normally. Jeff and I are tiptoeing back towards each other. It is dawning on us that we need each other to get through it. I can't say I don't feel any anger, but the anger is dissipated with love and therefore we will survive, something I couldn't have said a week ago.

Some surreal things that are still happening:
1. Walking around the JCC looking for a lost water bottle. Who were those people who thought that they could afford to send their kids to all of those camps? Mira and Eli felt strange because they were walking around their camp as free birds. I felt like I was visiting with a person (me!) I used to feel some fondness for but now I realize is a stranger to me.
2. Cobbling together two dollars and fifty cents to take Orly swimming with us. Orly! Rich offered to pay but all he had was twenties.
I'm realizing that there is this whole other expense in life that I never paid attention to. It's me paying for Orly's swimming, or giving Mel $5, or lending Tia an egg. Its not tzedakah, its more I guess, friendliness, or good neighborliness or something. Whatever, its strange, and I know that somehow we get it back and that we have to, if we're going to live in this community, participate in it, but I can't believe I never noticed it before.
3. Going to Neveh Shalom and getting everything discounted for us. Really moving to the other side of giving, which is receiving. That's the side we live on now.
4. Coincidentally Mira decided yesterday to empty all of our tzedakah boxes into one big bag. A giant bag of money sitting on the dining room table. I don't know what it means exactly, but there's some symbolism here.
5. I've stopped wanting my mother.
6. It may be my imagination, but the kids seemed to have stopped asking for stuff all of the time. Is it really that simple? Stop buying stuff and they'll stop asking for it? They haven't asked to go out for a meal, or to see Harry Potter. They did not even glance towards the snack bar at the pool yesterday. I'm sure there's something I'm not seeing but, I think this may be, gasp, good for them.
7. I'm feeling much more tuned into their needs now that I know I can't assuage their feelings with material things. Its all about my attention. That's what they want, more than anything else that's what they want, and I'm trying to give it to them as generously as I possibly can.
8. I'm walking by the phone less with the intention of picking it up to call Mom. Not like normal (I still do it way more times than you would think after she's been dead for nearly 12 years), but less times than last week.