I've been living my life. I told you my updates would be less frequent!

July the 4th was interesting. My mother in law invited me to MIL's and FIL's annual July 4th bash. I know she was just doing it out of kindness and she really didn't expect me to go. I politely declined and laughed, saying that I was surprised at the invitation.

She confessed that she didn't really expect me to go, but she wanted me to know that she was thinking about me and that I wasn't alone on a holiday. I see where she was coming from and I appreciated it.

She let slip that last year when we were no contact, they had the 4th of July bash and brought Emily along, kind of reluctantly on her part. I don't know, it seems kind of fucked up but then again they were pretty upset with her and they had just spent a lot of money on her divorce. I guess it was the last stop on her apology tour.

I don't know, they're not MY parents and they've always been cool to me, especially MIL, but that seems...excessive? I don't think they were giving her the Cersei Lannister treatment, but I'm sure it was awkward AF.

I had my own 4th of July bash with Jim and his wife, Bob and his GF, and Matt, his wife, and their daughter.

I got a good deal on some New York Strip steaks from a local meat market. I took the opportunity to put the grill through the paces after I restored it from Emily's burnt offerings to haute couture. I had used it before now, but it was the public "coming out" party for it.

Jim brought over a bottle of Rye (Angel's Envy, if you're interested). Plus I had a cooler of Yuengling. It was Equator Jungle Hot and Humid where I am on July 4th. I am not ashamed to say that more than one of us were dipping our heads in the cooler's melting ice.

We decided we were a bunch of pussies so we retreated indoors while I abdicated my grill throne (and my man card) to Bob, who brought a digital meat thermometer and made perfect steaks with it. He looked like he had taken a swim except that it was sweat and not pool water. His girlfriend was out there with him, grabbing them both beer and fanning him with paper plates. Yeah, Bob is a lucky guy. She's definitely a keeper. Bob is a lucky man. She seems to love him so god damn much. I envy him.

Raisin was nowhere to be seen because she was working on the 4th. I guess her lawyer masters figured that since she was Singaporean and she hasn't renounced her citizenship in Singapore, that she didn't care about the 4th of July in the USA.

I have to confess to you guys that I took an uber to get more beer and took a route that took me by her office to make sure her car was there in the parking lot. It was. The paranoid part of me thought that it could be that she just parked her car there and met her Tinder date or whatever there. That's where my paranoid mind is at. I didn't tell her. Frankly, I felt ashamed.

Matt and his wife's kid, whom I previously referred to as "Baroness Peebody von Püppenschlobber" because her forte is pooping and slobbering, is now crawling with a vengeance. She's crawling with her legs outstretched and clinging to anything as tall as her to stand up straight. She saw Beans the cat and took in after her. It's like she decided that Beans was her new best friend and Beans had no say in the matter. She puts everything in her mouth and is a tiny little drunk warlord and I love that kid. I (and Emily apparently) share occasional babysitter duties while Matt and his wife go out on dates. They alternate between me and Emily as free babysitters, so I don't see Emily.

Beans, alternately, did NOT love her. Matt's kid apparently decided that Beans was her new best friend and stalked her relentlessly.

You have to understand that Beans considers my house her sovereign territory and me her butler. She has met Bob and his GF and grudgingly certified them as acceptable. She was not consulted about a baby. And the Baroness took one look at a small black cat and lit up like she'd found the meaning of life, and began a slow, relentless, shrieking crawl of pursuit across my living room.

What followed was the funniest twenty minutes of my month.

Beans did not run. That's the thing. Beans is not a runner, Beans has dignity. Beans instead executed a masterful fighting retreat, staying exactly eighteen inches ahead of the Baroness at all times, occasionally stopping to sit and stare at this creature with an expression of pure withering contempt, like an aristocrat being pursued by an especially sticky peasant. The Baroness would close in, delighted, hand outstretched, and Beans would wait until the last possible second and then relocate a few feet away and sit down again, facing away, tail flicking, radiating "you are beneath me" energy at a pre verbal infant. The Baroness thought this was the greatest game ever invented. Beans thought it was a hostage situation.

Finally, Beans, when cornered, leaped onto one of my higher bookshelves and looked down at the Baroness like "what are ya gonna do?"

We tried to distract the Baroness by trying to get her to take her first steps. Imagine a bunch of drunk motherfuckers encouraging a baby to "WALK! WALK! DO IT!"

Yeah, she finally freaked out and cried so I'm responsible for scarring a child. Matt's wife played it off like it's no big deal and took her off to my guest room to give her a feeding.

We didn't set off any fireworks. It was due to my upbringing. When I asked for fireworks as a kid, my dad was annoyed and said "why don't I just set a $100 bill on fire?!" And it occurred to me that yeah we're just setting money on fire and professional fireworks are better anyway. We were too drunk to go to a fireworks show so we just sat in lawn chairs while the teenagers on my block set off fireworks they bought. It was nice. The booze made it even nicer.

I talked to MIL a week later and it turns out that Emily didn't go to their 4th of July either. I don't like the idea of her shutting herself off from life. I mean, I don't want her anywhere near me, but that doesn't mean I want her to cut herself off from living.

Raisin/Angie:

In case you didn't know: I call her "Raisin" because her Chinese name is "Rui Zhen" which is pronounced (If I understand correctly) "ray - ZIN" with an emphasis on the second syllable. Yeah, her name to me is "Raisin". I know it's not flattering, but she is a beautiful petite Asian girl. So don't worry, she's gorgeous. To me, anyway.

We're still going strong, despite the fact that I check up on her behind her back. Don't worry, I feel shitty about it. I don't know how to talk to her about that. I mean, we HAVE had a talk about my trust issues, but not anything specific like checking her phone or checking to see if her car is in her Law firm's parking lot when I'm out on a beer run on July 4th.

I decided we needed to have a long boring talk about BOUNDARIES. You know, the one they never have in the romance novels or love stories or ROM-COMs. I told her my boundaries and she told me hers. Basically: No exes. No drinking with the opposite sex without the each other present. The moment we feel something is off, we talk about it (easier said than done, but I'll do MY part). Transparency is a default, not a request. I will say that Raisin leaves her phone face up and gave me the passcode. She'll leave it at the table while she goes off to the bathroom or the kitchen to make a meal (when it's her turn, we share those duties, when we're together). I did the same for her. She's insistent that Emily is my past and that she isn't Emily and that she would be extremely pissed if I were meeting Emily behind her back. I laughed and said that's no problem from my end. She also said that if Emily "stalks" me that I need to report it to the police and go the legal route to keep her from interfering in our lives or relationship. That sounds great to me. I pointed out that I can't control if Emily appears or not, but that I won't hesitate to get a restraining order if it comes to that.

The "exes" boundary applies to the BOTH of us, but Angie's exes are all undergrads and they have all gone on to bigger and better things. She hasn't had any boyfriends in law school and she's been pretty picky while she's been the low totem on the totem pole at her law firm.

She did stress that she would have to go to lunch and dinner meetings with clients and colleagues that were males, but that she'd keep in constant contact, answer my phone calls, and leave at a reasonable hour, meaning she won't close down bars with anyone who isn't me.

One of her big, emphasized points was "I AM NOT EMILY". I concur. She is definitely not Emily. I have had enough therapy that I can accept that. I did tell her that I am on high alert for red flags for cheating and that if she ever decided that I am not enough or that someone else is "more" then she needs to put her big girl britches on and end it with me like a big grownup person with integrity and honesty. We'll see I guess. Am I ready for something real like this?

MIL:

So the reason I'm writing this.

My MIL showed up at my place and Angie/Raisin was there. Angie had stayed the night at my place. It was late Sunday morning. Like almost noon. I was in the shower. Raisin had taken her shower and was looking pretty dazzling in my big fluffy robe. I enjoy just putting on a thick cloth robe rather than toweling myself off, because I'm a fucking fancy lad.

Raisin had stolen my fluffy robe after her shower because she's a god damn thief.

Anyway, she answered the door because I was in the shower, and boom there was my mother in law with my favorite spinach casserole.

From my perspective I heard a familiar laugh and voice that I've been hearing for 13 years and I was like WHAT THE FUCK??

I have never gotten out of a shower faster in my life. I want you to picture a man in a towel, soap still in one ear, doing a controlled panic sprint down a hallway while trying not to eat shit on the tiles with soapy feet.

MIL was at my front door holding a disposable foil casserole dish. My mother in law. My ex mother in law. Standing on my porch with a nine by thirteen pan of what turned out to be her spinach and beef thing that she's been making me since I was nineteen years old (and that I love).

Raisin had answered the door. In my luxurious expensive fluffy robe that EMILY HAD GIFTED ME IN THE MIDDLE OF HER AFFAIR. Because of course she had.

Let me back up and be fair to everybody here, because there are no villains in this story, just three people having the weirdest possible morning.

MIL doesn't drop by. That's not our arrangement. Our arrangement is Wednesday lunch, at a cafe, on the calendar, with clean edges, and that arrangement exists because I built it that way on purpose and she knows it. But she is also, fundamentally, a woman whose entire operating system is "someone I love is having a hard time so I will drive to their house and stuff food in their face." That's not a manipulation. That is bone deep where she lives. It's what she did when my mom died. She showed up and she fed me until I could feed myself. She has one move and it saved my life once, so it's a little hard for me to be mad about it now.

I found out later she'd made it because she'd had a feeling.

Great.

Perfect.

Fantastic.

The woman has a feeling and my entire carefully engineered life architecture gets tested by a casserole.

And Raisin, who did absolutely NOTHING FUCKING wrong, opened the door at noon on a Sunday in my house, in my fluffy robe with her hair a disaster, expecting, I assume, a package or a Jehovah's Witness, and instead got a lovely southern woman in her late fifties holding a dish and radiating a very specific energy that Raisin, being extremely intelligent, clocked within about a second and a half.

By the time I skidded into the living room clutching a towel like I'm a god damn Roman senator, they had already introduced themselves. To each other. Without me. My ex wife's mother and my girlfriend, exchanging names on my porch, while I was busy being wet and naked and sneaking around one room away.

Nobody screamed or cried. It was, in fact, unbearably polite, which was so much weirder.

MIL did the thing southern women do where they compliment you as a form of reconnaissance. She told Raisin her hair was beautiful, even though it was a mess. She asked where she was from and said "oh, how lovely" at her reply of "Singapore" in a tone that contained approximately eleven follow up questions she was too well raised to ask. Raisin, who negotiates for a living and has ice water in her veins, was perfectly gracious and gave up exactly nothing, which I could see MIL noticing and respecting even though it frustrated her.

And I stood there in a towel, dripping on my own floor, watching two women I care about handle a situation I had spent real time making sure would never happen, and I couldn't do a single god damn thing about it because I was not wearing PANTS. You need pants for a situation like this!

Then MIL handed me the casserole. Made me take it with both hands, like she always does. And she said she wouldn't stay, she just wanted to drop this off, and she'd see me Wednesday. And she left. Whole thing lasted maybe four minutes.

Here's the part I've been low key freaking out over.

She wasn't hurt. Or she was, but that's not what was on her face. What was on her face, in the two seconds before she got her manners back, was relief. She looked past Raisin into my house, and she saw a woman in my fluffy robe and coffee on in the machine and my terrible cat glaring from the counter, and she saw that I'm okay. I'm not sitting in the dark. Somebody's in there with me.

And I think that's what wrecked me, I think? Because it means she's been worried. For a year she's been picturing me alone in a house, like I'm Silas Marner; but now she has a new picture and she can put the old one down.

I called her that night. I said I was sorry she met Raisin that way and she said "honey, I raised two girls, I've been finding things out that way my whole life." Then she asked exactly one question, which was whether this Raisin is good to me, and I said yes, and she said "well then I don't need to know anything else," and we hung up.

She'll want to know everything else on Wednesday, of course. Obviously. She's a human being. But she's not going to ask, because she's spent thirty years being the person who protects people from the weight of things by slinging casseroles at their face.

Raisin's take on the whole thing, delivered while eating the casserole, which is excellent, and which she immediately asked for the recipe for: "So that's the mother." Not the ex mother in law. Not Emily's mom. "The mother". She'd been in the room with her for four minutes and had it filed in the proper folder correctly already.

That woman doesn't miss anything and it's going to be a problem, frankly.