Yesterday we all felt so good from our day that we went out to dinner to celebrate. I picked the Cheesecake Factory, because it is the best of the chain, kid-friendly restaurants: you can actually fool yourself into believing that you are in a real restaurant. You can get a pretty nice glass of wine, beautiful salads, and there is really nothing tacky to detract or distract.<\/p>\n
What detracted for me was the smoothness. The simplicity of us. The family as a foursome; a non-special-needs foursome. How easy, how strangely easy. For while I was filled with a lovely, creamy happiness and sense of accomplishment from my first day on the job, basking in the nachas of Ben’s (mostly) great first day, proud of Max for going on an 11 1\/2 mile bike ride on his last day of freedom, and happy for Ned having attracted the notice of one of his heroes<\/a> (this is a terrible run-on sentence that I would never allow my students to create), …<\/p>\n …I thought of Nat.<\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes it feels suddenly like we are pretending we don’t have a fifth person as a part of us. That there is just no way to feel complete, for it to be supremely perfect, because even when I’m not thinking about him, I’m suddenly thinking about him. I’m afraid of my happiness because it makes me feel disloyal sometimes, when I realize that I am no longer sad about Nat. <\/p>\n I guess I just miss him, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to deal with the moments when I’ve realized that I wasn’t thinking about him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday we all felt so good from our day that we went out to dinner to celebrate. I picked the Cheesecake Factory, because it is the best of the chain, kid-friendly restaurants: you can actually fool yourself into believing that you are in a real restaurant. You can get a pretty nice glass of wine, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-6N","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}