the olive green of life had turned to ash

I'm sitting on the big red couch at house on Wellesley street where the girls I'm babysitting - Katherine (6) and Sara (4) - have just gotten in the tub having finished one of the more elaborate princess games I've ever seen, involving sword fights, bubbles, and some broccoli that was left over from dinner. This is such a departure from evenings with Alexander, and I'm relieved to say it involves far less poop.
As little as I'm being payed for this, it hardly feels like a job. When I came in today the girls had both glitter in their hair and Sara was covered in face paint; they'd just gotten home from a fair and were on the floor of their playroom (I just love the idea of a playroom) with their souvenir es spread out before them like Halloween candy - vast sea of bright plastic so colorful that I could understand at that moment why we have to be warned not to put it in our mouths for fear of choking. We've spent the afternoon playing with bubbles and their elaborate costume collection, and eventually they settled down to watch some blues clues (by the way, Katherine has just gotten out of the tub and scampered into the living room to present me with a purple Japanese parasol that she claims she forgot to show me earlier. I think I love these girls). I made them dinner of the leftovers in the fridge - beet salad with grapefruit and avocado, roasted chicken, steamed broccoli and couscous (yah, kinda bougie, I know, but I did say Wellesley street in Santa Monica though, so you should've guessed what you were in for), and they had half a cupcake each for dessert - Sara had half a red velvet one that I split with her (fabulous icing, rich cream cheese with the right amount of bite, but the base cake was lacking that warm suggestion of mild, over-sweet chocolate that identifies it as red velvet), and Katherine had half a fluffernutter cupcake which I didn't taste but I may or may not have licked the marshmallow fluff off her cupcake wrapper.

Still feeling impossibly detached in ways I don't know how to ameliorate. I don't know how to get through the day without Jessica as my always touchstone, and without Kate to mirror in me the parts of myself that I'm too polite to show anybody else (which is probably a good decision, given the level of snootiness the two of us achieve in one another's company rivals the French. All of them. Combined.) I miss that. I feel like I'm going out of my way to be likable, like I'm suffering a minor crisis in "what you think of me" hell. I had a dream last night that I was on a camping trip with Cami and Lisa and Kelly from Mirman, and these random girls from club soccer, and all of them were just taunting and teasing but not even in an active way, but the behind the back cruelty of young girls who know how to tear each other town. I woke up with the same kind of panic I felt in elementary school: what will I do for these next few years while I'm so disliked by these people. How am I gonna survive this?
The facts that I told myself in that dream are a lie - I'm not disliked by my new OA community or my family, or by Clint and Raj and Shaun and Bill, but I'm noticing the lack of close, close companionship that comes from having the kinds of friendships in Boston I never believed I would. Jessica is the kind of friend I always saw other people having and never believed I was likable enough to have, and the relationship I have with Kate now is one I always envied when I saw it between other sisters. And the Boston program women...I never imagined I'd be able to make random phone calls to women I considered friends and just chat and touch base with them, or go to their houses for dinner, and I did these things with them. I'm feeling a really deep loss of those things, and the fear that I won't be able to find them again, that this here will be different, that maybe I will be more unlikable here, or that OA folks here will see through my facade and see me for who I really am - the anxious dork who tries far too hard to be clever. Juuuuust in fear. Not in the solution at all, don't know how to escape it.

***

Just took the girls out of their bath and they did an odd thing: Sarah got in pretty much child's pose on the bath mat and asked me to lay her towel on top of her, which I did. Then Katherine got out, and lay over her sister's back and told me to put my towel on top of her. They stayed that way in a large white lump and talked to each other about how warm it was in there. Then Katherine got up with her towel around her shoulders and lumped herself next to Sara, and Sara got up and crawled on top of Katherine's back where they stayed for another minute or so kind of cooing at each other (it sounded like "warmwarmwarmiewarmwarmwarm". Maybe I don't spend much time with kids, but I've never seen siblings do this. It was actually really sweet and apparently something they do every night after the bath, just...keep each other warm for the first minute or so out of the tub.
Maybe this is weird, but it kinda put me in gratitude....kinda restored my faith in families, and I've needed that.