Tuesdays with Chip

While sitting on my laptop this morning, near the lamps that were on when I came downstairs at 6:43am, the 15-minute reminder popped up on my phone for “Tuesdays with Chip.” I watch the reminder on my laptop screen tick down…”Tuesdays with Chip in 13 minutes”… “Tuesdays with Chip in 9 minutes”…”Tuesdays with Chip in 4 minutes”…”Tuesdays with Chip now.” If mornings are the hardest, Tuesday mornings are the hardest of the hardest.

The concept of “Tuesdays with Chip” started years ago. My kids’ dad and I decided on a “bird’s nest” approach to co-parenting, in which the kids stay put in the marital home and the grown-ups come and go. Every Monday and Wednesday, Steve picked them up from school, fed them dinner and brought them back to the house around 7:30/8:00 for bedtime. He would come in the house and put them to bed, and I would return around 9:00, after they were asleep. Monday and Wednesday afternoon/evenings while he had them at the house, I was out by myself, with friends or with Chip (the same went for every other weekend when Steve had them). As disruptive as it was for us (mostly me, since I remained in the marital home), it worked well. The best part was that our kids got to see us behave like grown-ups around each other as we co-parented, despite all the intense feelings we had about each other during our period of separation and divorce that could easily have had us acting like toddlers.

Tuesdays were always hard for me when I was dating Chip since they were wedged between two days of having a good dose of him. So one Tuesday, I called him in the early morning and said I was calling for no real reason other than to say “hi” and to wish him a “Happy Tuesday.” After the call, I entered a reminder in my phone to go off each Tuesday morning at 7:05 (with a 15-minute reminder) so I would always remember to call him (if it's not written down, it may not happen!). While we chatted on Tuesday mornings over the years, I soaked up the sound of his voice, hanging on every sound wave since I knew that that was all I would have of him that day.

After we moved in together in December of 2016, “Happy Tuesday” would be the first thing I would say to him that day. At one point, I forgot (after snoozing and then stopping the reminder because the timing wasn’t right to say it) and he said it to me. From that point on, it became a competition to see who could say it first on Tuesday mornings (it led to some earlier than usual wake-ups on Tuesdays…long before my reminder would go off!). Sometimes we’d be on our phones lying in bed together, checking Twitter, etc. in the early morning and one of us would text it to each other (We’d often keep texting back and forth sweet nothings for a bit even though we were right there next to each other). On days that one of us would forget to say/text it in those early hours, likely because we had worries or heavy thoughts on our mind, the other one was always there to back up the other in doing so. When we both completely forgot on super-busy mornings (mornings that I snoozed/stopped the reminder because the timing didn’t seem right to say it…maybe Chip wasn’t feeling well…or maybe I was finishing up a work report that was due by 9am and I didn’t want to just say it without meaning it), one of us would inevitably remember later in the day and would text it to the other.

While I was writing this blog post, my daughter Calli found me crying and came over to hug me. I started explaining about “happy Tuesdays” and how hard Tuesdays were for me now. She asked, “Why don’t you just erase the reminder?” I told her I wasn’t ready to be without the daily reminder of that sweet piece of the life we shared. She smiled knowingly, and gave me another big hug.

Happy Tuesday, Chip.