Did you love him?

You don’t have to be a parent of a verbal child for very long to constantly be prepared for questions you can’t really prepare for. “Why did *insert second grade kid’s name here* tease me?” “Will you the this book to me?” (Which wouldn’t be a hard question to answer if the question didn’t actually mean “Will you read the same 20 pages of the same book that you’ve read to me every night for the past month?”) “What’s for dinner?” (It’s a hard question for some people, ok?!) “What are we doing this morning? This afternoon? Tonight? Right now?” “When we die, do we go back inside a big mama?” “Why is your belly so round and so soft?” “Why did you and daddy get a divorce?” “What did you fight about?” “What if you find a boyfriend and you really love him but we hate him?” (This one is actually pretty simple to answer. ️) “Did you feel butterflies in your tummy when you loved daddy?” "Why did you marry Daddy?" "Did you love him?" Oof. When I was at the end of my marriage, we spent a few months in couples therapy. In hindsight, the marriage was already over, but I was preparing myself to look my children in the eyes and answer with a wholehearted and honest “yes” if they one day asked me if we did everything we could. For that reason, and for everything I learned through those sessions, I am glad I did it. The question I might spend the next ten or twenty years preparing for is “If you had known how hard it would be, would you still have left?” If I had known that my hopes for blended family Thanksgiving dinners would not come true, would I have left? If I had known I would have no influence, no say, no control, and very little knowledge of how my children spend 30% of their time with their dad, would I have been able to scoop them up and walk away? If I had known I'd be spending a great deal of my maternal energy on playing detective, of trying to solve behavior puzzles with a giant missing piece, would I have been able to walk away? If I had known I wouldn’t receive the financial or emotional or physical support we needed, would I still have left? If I had known that I would struggle with the word “co-parent”, let alone “friend” to describe my ex-husband, would I have asked for the divorce? If I had known I wouldn’t be the one reassuring a struggling single parent that “it’s possible to have a better co-parent relationship than it is marriage”, but rather be that struggling single parent myself, would I have been able to say “Enough is enough”? If I had known I would go out on date after date with men ranging from full on creep status to nice but incompatible, and begin to lose hope that I might meet someone, would I have been able to stand up and tell myself “you deserve better”? If I had known that I'd take months or years off of dating, because the idea of being that vulnerable with someone again, this time with young kids involved, was terrifying, would I have been able to dream of more? If I had known I wouldn’t be able to hide my own flaws or their dads flaws from them any longer, would I still have left? If I had known I’d spend their first overnight away from my home, two years after the divorce, sobbing on the floor, would I have left? If I’d known it would take years to get things settled, and even then it might not have felt that way, would I have started out on this solo journey? If I had known I’d be answering heartbreaking question after heartbreaking question, would I still have done it? If I’d known I’d spend the vast majority our time together driving us to and from school, work, therapy appointments, the dentist, buying new shoes and new snow pants, and only have one full day a month with none of those things to just be together, would I have given up my life as a stay at home mom? If I had known that I’d have to say “no” to most of the field trips, to most of the toys, to most of the vacations, would I have been able to say “no more” at the very end? If I’d known that all of our hearts would shatter, and that I’d spend years putting them back together, would I still be the one to say “this heartbreak needs to happen?” I don’t know. The answer is, I don’t know if I would have left. But. But, I like to believe that I still would have, and I’m glad I don’t have to choice to go back in time and warn myself of what is to come. Because if I have to answer the question, “if I had known, would I still have done it?” I have to put myself back into the shoes I was wearing over three years ago, when every choice I was making were choices made out of fear. And I needed to cling to the belief that we could be a happy, co-parenting, nesting, blended family, on the other side of everything. I wasn’t ready to face the fact that the very reasons we couldn’t stay married were the ones that made it impossible for us to co-parent in the dreamy way I was imagining. I think the real question is, and maybe the one I don’t have to prepare for is, “do you regret it?” No. A million times no. Our hearts were shattered, and we have spent nights crying, and asking hard questions, and sobbing on the floor, and yet still, it was the right choice. Baby girl, I don't regret it. I ache for your pain, and for my pain, but I am filled with hope and wonder and joy knowing that you will dream impossible dreams growing up, ones you wouldn't have dreamed had I stayed. I may have been making the choice blind to the reality of what our future might be, but it was still the right one. I followed Truth for us. It's impossible to regret the truth. The cliche "the truth sets you free" is one for a reason...And how could I regret freedom? ReplyForward