We moved a lot when I was a kid. The instant the realtor opened the front door to a potential house, my siblings and I (the bottom four of six) would plow past her and run around the place like crazy. No formalities, no adult bull shit conversation, we would just run into every single room, placing dibs on our new potential bedrooms.“This one’s mine!!!”

“Oh yeah, well, mine’s got a bigger closet!”

It was first come first serve when it came to the bedrooms. You find it, you keep it. The four of us were inseperable.

Sometimes, maybe because I had so many little siblings, I feel like Benjamin is my little brother. Like when he sticks his finger far, far, far up his nose until I shriek in disgust, then pulls it out and does it again to earn another shriek.

And it doesn’t help that he calls me by my first name. I am “mommy” most of the time but every once in a while an “Alaina” slips in there.

Goes a little something like this:

“Mommy, mommy, maaaaammmmmeeeeee!!!!!, Alaina, Alaina, Mommmmmmeeeeeeeeee!.”

I first heard him call me Alaina last winter long after I had moved in with my mother and left my ex-husband. The Alaina calling made perfect sense. After all, my mom was “mom” and I was “Alaina.” My brother, my mom and I immediately instituted a no “Alaina” rule and everyone started calling me “mommy.” I even started calling myself “mommy.” It was eerie. Clearly Benjamin was an unusual and special boy with an unusual and special beginning. He was surrounded by a dynamic extended family, but that’s a story for another time.

Back to the woods.

My mom’s place is 15 minutes from my hometown, her driveway is a steep hill and the house is nestled on the edge of the most magnificent forest in the middle of no where. The physical circumstances were just one of the forces beyond my control driving me to discover myself. There was also my newborn, my isolation, my humbling new job as a secretary and then there were … the raccoons.

My first night there I was busy unpacking. I was lonely already. I started thinking about my divorce, about leaving my husband…and just when the my throat got thick, I saw them.

The racoons. Their beady black eyes were piercing at me through the glass doors. But they just kept on scarfing down the cat food. Scarf. Scarf. So gross and so big.

I screamed and jumped back. The lump in my throat disappeared. There was no time for wallowing – I was living in the fricking woods!

“Grab the BB gun,” my mom yelled from her bedroom. What? I screamed. No way. No way this is not happening to me. But it was.

By the end of the year I could light a fire in six minutes, drag tree limbs out of the forest, haul trash up the dark steep driveway in the middle of winter and hike with Benjamin on my back – all without a flinch. And then I found an amazing job in the city – or was somehow lucky enough to land it – I could afford to completely support Benjamin.

On moving day a friend of mine found a dead racoon in a path. It had been buried by the wild dogs that killed it. Yes, there were wild dogs too. He was standing there in horror.

Then I surprised myself.

Without thinking I grabbed a shovel, a garbage bag and got to work. The body was stiff. Dead. Just like my time out there in the woods. It was over. I had paid my dues and kharma was about to pay me back.

If you read my blog regularly you hear a lot about now … but there’s an entire chapter missing – and that was the first year. It took time, a lot of optimism and quite a few dead raccoons for me to get to where I am now – mentally and financially. Divorce and single parenting is not easy. There’s a good chance you may lose your mind temporarily. The key is pulling out…and sucking it up along the way. Because there are no instant miracles.

When I walked back up from burying the raccoon in the woods the guys had all gathered, they were just staring in disbelief. I was a mom on a mission – to get back to the city, my career and my freedom – and a dead raccoon was nothing.

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