ALL IN THE FAMILY(S)

I am a single mother.  I have four children and two separate families.  My  family 1 consists of my my three older children(boy 1, boy 2 and boy 3), (me) and my ex partner(cheating ***hole).

My second family consists of boy 3(you met him in family 1), (me) and my (persistent princess).

In family 1, I am a carefree mother, who spent time with her children as they grew up.  I attended school functions and went on school trips.  I raced my three boys in the park and I never let them win because they needed to learn how to be tough and to know that life isn’t always fair. My house was always clean and dinner was always ready on time.

I had a somewhat normal relationship with (cheating ***hole, who was then referred to as  my best friend). I knew what my future held and I made plans with(cheating ***hole) about growing old with him and still being in love.  We took road trips and and life was exciting.  There was lots of laughter and love in this family.

In family 2, I am a working mother  with little time with my kids.  I am always late for school functions and I have not volunteered to go on a school trip in over six years.  I can’t stay home to raise my kids, it would be a bad financial decision.

I have no life partner and my future is up in the air.  I don’t have a concrete future plan and I don’t have a man around the house to paint, put blinds up or put gas in my car.   I am seeing a new man, but I am unsure what we mean to each other.  It is hard to define.  We like each other,but I am fearful that he will turn out to be like (cheating ***hole) who at the moment has taught me not to believe in relationships and in love.

SPOILER ALERT: THE MAN CAVED AND I DID NOT! Are you confused?  You can read about who caved right here or you can get caught up on this story, right here.

My four children, are having totally different experiences.   They certainly have complete opposite childhood stories to tell their own children.

My son who sits in both family 1 and family 2,  lives a double life.  He was able to experience what it was like growing up with both his parents in the home, having a relationship with all his siblings, watching his siblings move out and then watching his family smash apart, like an egg falling to the ground, and all you can do is mutter to yourself knowing, this *hit is going to be a hassle to clean up. He has watched his parents be at odds with each other and watched his father change into this person that is indescribable.

You would think that he has the best of both worlds, being able to experience and have strong relationships with his siblings and his parents.  The thing is, I think he is worse off than the other children who have grown up and are growing up in both families.  He has the memories of what a two parent family was like, the great memories, the laughter, the trips and the love.  Then he gets to see, both his parents struggle with their identities as they try to rebuild their lives  separately.

He is now the man of the house in family 2.  He keeps track of where I am going, who I am going with and gets a little bossy at times. Sometimes, I feel like I am answering my father and I am prone to lie so I don’t get in trouble with him.

“I am going to the library with my friend. I will be home by curfew.”  I don’t think he believes me all the time.  He will text me, if I don’t come home when I say I will come home .  When I get his text, I know that I better respond right away and remember where I told him I was going, in order to keep my story straight.  He even waits up for me.  I always fail at sneaking in, he always catches me and gives me this look before he goes to bed.

“The most difficult part of dating as a single parent is deciding how much risk your own child’s heart is worth” – Dan Pearce

My (persistent princess) is a single child, being raised by a single mother and a distant and inconsistent father.  She gets to be dropped off to daycare providers five days a week, so I can work.  I have co-parented with private and public daycare centres her entire life.  There has been more people who have assisted me in raising, educating, loving and caring for her when compared to her older siblings.

My (persistent princess) doesn’t get all of me, all the time because financially I am not able to be a stay at home mother.  I am raising her on an income that is drastically different than the one I raised her older siblings on.  Times are tight and money is scarce.  Things are certainly different in terms of what she is able to have, when compared to what her siblings were able to have.  Things are more expensive and the list of what is available to purchase now is exhaustive.

Getting the (cheating ***hole) to financially support her and be there for her has tired me out.  I used to take it upon myself to arrange his access visits.  I no longer feel it is my responsibility to encourage a man who was fully capable of being a father in the past, to be one now.  It is is loss and he is sowing his own seeds of despair.

Boys 1 and 2 do not need me as much as they used to anymore.  Soon they will delight me with weddings, children and celebrations.  It feels really awkward thinking of how wonderful it will be to hold one of grandchildren or watch boy 1 and boy 2 fall in love.

Sometimes, I wish I could go back in time and and do things differently for them.  Maybe I would offer them more independence like I do to persistent princess and boy 3 and maybe I wouldn’t spoil them so much as I did when they were kids.  I did the best I could with what I had and as they travel on their own paths, I hope they have learned from the mistakes of their earliest teachers (me) and (cheating ***hole).

I have experienced both the empty nest syndrome and the joys of watching milestones, sometimes on the same day.  There are days, when the memories of the old days come flooding back to me.  Three little boys running around the house, cars, trucks and bikes carelessly left in the backyard.  My (cheating ***hole), helping me to raise three boys and trying his best to make them into a better man than he was.

Then there are the days, when (persistent princess)’s voice travels through our little apartment and her laughter is so boastful and happy.  Then I see a picture that boy 3 has taken of himself and persistent princess and it warms my heart to see that somehow they are able to stay close and protect each other.  Then, I know I wouldn’t change anything because I love family 1 and family 2 with all I have.

You never know, maybe I will start family 3…

“I’ve remembered that most of life is about small, essential connections, so unobtrusive, so elastic, that you scarcely realize they’re actually holding you together. The big ones-the great, grand emotional bonds-those are the ones that break, the ones that fail you, the ones that give way and send you careening toward the foot of the bleak and jagged canyon. It’s the tough, gnarled, unadorned ties that really do bind, that never let you fall all the way down into darkness.”  – Sharon Shinn

 

Life Is Like A Blog…..

It’s 6am in the morning and I have been contemplating since last night what I should write for my first assignment for Blogging 101.  The first assignment was to tell my story about why I am blogging and to introduce myself to the Blogging 101 community.  I had already done that on two occasions.

I started blogging in September 2013 when my relationship ended.  I was very angry and I wanted the world to know how I felt.  I wanted my ex to come across my blog one day and see how much he had hurt me.  Maybe he would care. I introduced myself as a newly separated black woman with an ex who had done the unthinkable.  He was unfaithful.

I took some time off from writing and blogging as I made a very lame attempt of trying to get this man back in my life.  I really missed him.  I was stuck in the past with the wonderful memories we had.  I just wanted my old life back as quickly as I had lost it.

Then I woke up and asked myself why I was trying so hard to get someone to love me again.  It just didn’t seem fair to me.  So, after four months of almost losing my dignity, I came back to WordPress and reread my first initial blog entries.

I could not believe what I had read.  I was that bitter jilted ex lover, you hear about in books, in movies and on television.   I did not want to be this person.  I was not this person. I continued reading and the more I read, the more those old feelings came back to me.  Rejection, humiliation, devastation and pain.  I no longer wanted to feel like that.

I wasn’t sure if I should leave my old blogs out there for the world to see.  I spoke with a friend about what I had written in September 2013 and what he thought I should do with those blogs.    He told me, that those stories were part of this journey, part of my healing and part of of my growth.  He told me to leave them up, as they were, unedited and raw.  I agreed.

So I left my first stories that were thrown into blogsphere exactly where they had fallen.   As I began to recreate myself on WordPress(I no longer wanted to be identified as the jilted ex lover), my stories were funnier, had more depth and emotion(good ones).  I did not want to be connected to how I felt back in September 2013.  I am no longer that person.  It’s my ex’s fault he lost a good woman and he will have to live with that decision for the rest of his life.  I decided that I would not delete my initial blogs, I would make them private, just for me and for whomever, I chose to share my story with.

Maybe they will make it into my book that I want to publish.  Maybe they will forever stay private.  Who knows at this point.  Time will tell.  I am not done healing yet.  They say if you can tell your story without crying, then you know you are healed.  I don’t cry anymore.  However, I still feel that knot in my stomach when I think about him, about us and about the plans we had made.

So what began as a personal diary has now become a lifelong dream.  I want to be a published author.  I want t o inspire people. I want my “voice” to be heard.

So, keep reading I am not done yet.

 

DISPOSABLE RELATIONSHIPS

We live in a disposable society.  Everything can be replaced for the next big thing, something shinier, something newer and something better.  Now when something breaks we replace it.  It’s that simple. We break our cell phones, we just get a new one.  We get a new car, because we want to drive something newer and better. Our homes are not big enough, so we get something bigger.  Our jobs don’t pay enough, so we move on.

The grass is always greener on the other side.  People don’t believe in forever love anymore.  People don’t want to work at anything.  It seems our society has gotten lazy, if it takes effort then it isn’t worth it.  It seems to be the norm that relationships don’t last very long anymore.

When we see an older couple still together, we are in awe.  We want to know what is their secret of weathering the storm.  There are no secrets.  Things were different, if it broke you fixed it and you made due.  There was no money to hire and lawyer.  There was no starting over on your own.  They fought it out, stayed silent for a few days and fixed what broke.  It was that simple. People stuck together and they learned to fall back in love again.  They stayed committed.

People don’t want to work at anything that meant something important to them at one point in their lives.  Love, commitment and loyalty are words that anyone can say, but a few can do.  We are surrounded and bombarded by broken relationships and the easy task of walking away.

People and relationships should not be disposable.  Life is not easy, relationships are not simple and love is hard work.  But, we dispose of our relationships and the people in it too easily.  We maybe a disposable society today, but I guarantee you, we will become a society filled with people with regret.

Regretting the chances we didn’t take, the relationships we threw away and the things we could have fixed but didn’t.

 

 

 

Let Me Introduce Myself

I met my ex when I was twenty-five years old through a mutual friend who thought that we would be the perfect couple. I don’t know if we were the perfect couple, but we were perfect for each other for the time we shared.

From the moment we met we were inseparable. We grew up together and most of our life experiences and mistakes were a team effort. I always knew that no matter what was happening outside the walls of our home, there was always a soft place I could fall back on. Him.

When I think about the last year and how our relationship ended by a text message the pain of it still remains. I believed that I deserved a little more respect than what he tossed me. When we met we both had nothing and we built a life, a family and careers together. I hoped with all I had, that the man I had met and spent close to two decades with, would show me something other than a text that he was in love with some twenty-eight year old stripper.

My ex is the biggest coward ever. He had no balls and no guts to face me. It will be a year in July that our relationship officially ended. He has never apologized(except one lame email where he said sorry but never said what he was sorry for) for cheating or walking away from his family. He has never faced me or treated me like the woman he used to profess his love for. He has treated me like a stranger he hates and at times I have done the same.

Sometimes, I do regret that I ever dated him and spent so much of my life with him. I am in my forties and left to raise our children on our own. He not only discarded me like I did not matter, but he has treated our children the same way. Currently, he is evading paying his child support payments because he feels that I should not have a “red cent” from him.

If I knew then what I know now, I may have decided against being in a relationship with him. The good memories are slowly fading. Just today, I was thinking about one of the tattoo’s he has on his body and I could not remember where it was located.

I hate that all I have left is the memories of how spineless and evil he has become. Really, all I want is for my heart to heal and for me to move on with my life. I don’t want to hate him, but he makes it so hard to feel any other way.

 

 

Riding The Bitter Bus

I haven’t spoken to him in fifty days! It has been the longest that we have gone without contacting each other since we met in 1997.

The idea of texting him came into my head when one of the men I am conversing with asked me to be honest with him.  I don’t know how we came to the conversation, but he said, “I want you to be honest with me.  If he came back apologetic and was willing to work on the relationship.  Would you take him back?  No BS.”

I believe in honesty especially if you’re trying to develop a friendship of some sorts with people.  “Yes, I would.” I responded.  “But I don’t talk to him because of this reason.  Because he is no good for me.”

Then this sweet man said, “Then why are you not working on it? He will come back.  They always do.  I don’t even really know you, but I can tell you that they always come back.  Don’t kid yourself.”

I held my cell phone in my hand and thought about what this man had just said to me.  Could he be right?  Would he come back to me and my family would be back to together?  But at what cost? Could I trust him again?

I did not sleep well that night.  That morning, I spoke with another friend and told him about my conversation the night before.  He agreed and said my ex would be back.  We texted back and forth about how I could potentially test the waters while protecting my heart.  We decided that I could open the door of communication, by checking up to see how he was and to tell him the kids really missed him.

It took him hours to respond.  He said he wanted to see them.  It had been over fifty days since he saw our daughter.  This has been his new pattern ever since he started dating his new girlfriend.  The conversation was pleasant enough. Then out of the blue, he tells me he plans to move away and accused me of not giving him access to the kids.  Remember, he is a liar and a (cheating ***hole).  

It seemed nothing has changed with him.  Still the same old drama and ability to deflect his own shameful infidelity onto the person who he harmed.  I used to yearn for him to explain why he was the one who was so angry at our breakup when it was him who cheated, lied and destroyed our family. I was not sure what I was looking for in this explanation from him.  Maybe I wanted to know that he felt guilty for what he had done.

The wish for my (cheating ***hole) to understand and comprehend his behaviours and impact on people who love him is fruitless.  It is a complete waste of my time to argue or engage in anything he has to offer me at this time.  It is like the man, I fell in love with has died and has been replaced with a complete stranger that I want nothing to do with.

Over the last few days, he has been on my mind.  I feel sorry for him.  I feel sorry that he is wasting his life being angry at himself.  It is not me or anything that I have done that he is mad at.  I have come to the conclusion that he does realize what he has done and how much it has hurt someone else.

He has to face himself in the mirror everyday.  He has to live with the thoughts that he is not the great, wonderful and caring person that he wants to portray.  He is a bitter man and if he does not have it in him to forgive his transgressions he will forever live in agony.  It is up to him to make amends with himself in order to make amends with me and our children.  I feel so very sorry for him that this is how he will move forward into his middle age.

He is still the same.  I tried.  He is just not ready to change.