Reconciliation?

My mom and step-dad have been working on their divorce agreement for over two years. They were weeks away from finalizing the deal. I couldn't wait for the whole damn business to be over and done with.

But then... plot twist! Surprise developments! My step-dad decided that he'd had enough of his new girlfriend. He told my mom that he wanted to put the divorce process on hold, because maybe now he wants to stay married to her.

Santa Maria!

When he told me, I didn't know what to feel first. Happy because they might get back together? Upset because we all had to go through so much pain and then he went and changed his mind? Confused because I don't yet know if this development will make things better or worse?

My mom, of course, has similar mixed emotions, multiplied by a factor of 100. But the bottom line for her, after having had a few weeks to digest the news, is that she's happy. His desire to return to her is flattering, at the very least. He's going to have to do some fancy footwork if he ever wants to move back in with her, but he seems willing to try.

How do I feel about it? So far it seems to be making them both happy, so I'm happy. Tentatively happy, pending God knows what might happen next.

They have always been an odd couple. For every nice thing I've ever heard my mother say about my step-dad, she's tabled twenty complaints. Yet, she insists that she loves him, and thinks the world of him.

For his part, my step-dad has proved to be very difficult to live with. In the past, and I'm guessing this will have to change, he expected my mom to do every speck of housekeeping, including the traditional husbands' jobs of taking out the trash and yardwork. He's also an untidy, disorganized person. When my parents lived together, every spare inch of the house was covered with his stuff. Papers, bags, unopened mail, discarded socks, used plates, etc. My mom would clean up, and within hours the mess would grow back, like mushrooms spontaneously springing up after rain.

He seems to be constitutionally incapable of overcoming this problem. His brain just isn't wired to catagorize and control the physical world. I do believe that this is the case, that he's not just being a selfish jerk. He's both brilliant and eccentric, like one of those absent-minded professors who win the Nobel prize in chemistry and then go out in public with their pants on backwards.

My mother is wired for tidiness. A place for everything and everything in its place. Of course his messiness drives her crazy.

Another thing they differ on is public perception. My mom spends a lot of her time worrying about What Other People Think. My step-dad just does his thing, his eccentric, sometimes embarrassing thing, without a care in the world. For example, Scene: My parents enter a restaurant. There are no empty, cleared tables, so they sit down at one that still has plates on it from the previous diners. My step-dad begins to eat leftover french fries off one of the plates. My mom wishes she could put her head inside her purse and crawl under the table.

(He's also been known to lick his finger and press it against the surface of a dirty restaurant table to gather cake crumbs, then lick his finger to eat the crumbs. Judge if you must. )

These are some of the reasons why I'm not jumping for joy. How much have they each changed? How much room for adaptation is there as they rediscover their lost love? That remains to be seen. Certainly there are many ways in which they may still irritate each other. So. We'll see.