News of a pending divorce

When I asked how her day went, my 10 year-old daughter, Clara, said she had a little trouble at recess.

“Yeah,” I said. “What happened?”

“Well,” she began. “We were playing house, and I’m the mother, and this boy is the father, and we have two kids. Sounds good. Right? Except I’ve decided that it’s not going to work, so I told him today that I wanted a divorce.”

I was driving when she said this to me, so I pulled the car over to capture her language as precisely as possible.

“So now what?” I asked.

“Tomorrow I need to tell the kids, and that won’t be easy. Then I’ll have to tell them that they need to take on more responsibilities because it’s just going to be the three of us.”

“Will that be hard?” I asked.

“Very.”

A couple hours later, Elysha asked Clara how the boy took the news of the divorce, and Clara reported that he was fine.

“Anything else?” I asked, feverishly typing into Evernote as I spoke.

“Nope,” she said. “But can we go now? I want to see the kitties.”

I don’t remember every recess I enjoyed when I was a child, but I am fairly certain that none of them were anything like the recesses that my daughter enjoys these days.

At least I think she enjoys them. They sounds incredibly stressful to me.