It's amazing. In a courtroom, reasonable doubt can get you off for murder, but a divorce makes you feel like a bad person.

Thursday, Nov. 14, 2002-2:43 am
This is when it's the hardest. In the early hours of the morning, lying in bed and watching the clock go from one number to the next, When my eyes are heavy, When I know tomorrow will be a fatigued day. I try to fall asleep, but if I do I wake up with my heart pounding in my chest.

I can't shake off the remenants of the image of one or both of my kids when cry and look afraid and tell me that they miss 'daddy'. Though they see him several times a week, they are very young and they don't have any comparison or intellectual skills to rationalize this. They just "miss daddy'". It does not happen often but when it does, it is heartbreaking.

This entire thing has broken my heart. Sometimes they will say things that kids of a divorced family sometimes say.

"I wish I lived with daddy". "I wish I could have a Mommy and a Daddy together".

"I wish I was 2 people"

..In my lowest moments when I am tired and stressed,I fear that I am failing as a mother, yet in my heart I know it is not true. But when I hear the question "why did daddy have to move out?"

"I miss him."

"I wish we could all be together."

"Whay did he DO that was so bad that he had to leave?"

When my daughter said,

"But Mommy , you are still sad anyway, so what good did it do to have daddy leave?"

NOTHING anyone else said could be as painful.

I say to them, "I know," because to say more than that would give them some false hope, something to clutch onto and would only cause more pain in the end...

I just keep hearing the kids' little voices, not accusing, not begging, but sadly not accepting - not yet - but beginning to realize the finality of things, and feeling the pain.

I will help them through it as best I can. All I can say is "Yes, honey, I know".

I have played out all my metaphors about monogamous birds vs. other birds."There are some that mate and care for the babies, but then go to separate nests to live. There are some that live together forever."

I have used up all the mileage on the allegory of "you always know that you have the sun and the moon, but you cant see them both at the same time. They are always there, they always come around,one at a time, evry single day. You can't have both at once.. just like your parents".

(If only someone had fed me that heart warming story when I was in the 6th grade and my mom found my dad's girlfriend's panties in the back seat of the car. Another story! )

Society places so much responsibility on a parent for the outcome of a child, and rightly so. Yet, society also diminishes the importance of the role of a "mom", who gave up a "real career" to sit on a park bench and discuss Huggies vs Pampers.

It is compounded by the judgements of others, who assume that I divorced the kids' dad because I was bored, or because I wanted to find myself, or because he squeezed the toothpaste in the middle and left the toilet seat up.... (Can we talk???).... People unconsciously hold an attitude that if you failed at a marriage, you are a selfish and a person with poor judgement.

I was an idealist. I was a romantic.I thought I would never get divorced no matter what, because I had children. Maybe I didn't do my homework on our compatibility. The biological clock was ticking, with only a few years before it's final chime when I met him at 37 years old. I think I wanted him to be the right person so badly that I ignored some red flags that I can see in retrospect. We were destined never to like each other as much as we did in those first few months. He had always been controlling, looking back on it. He seemed confident and determined to have things his way. In a world where personal power is so aggrandized and honored, it was an appallong loss of control for him to get involved with a woman, especially a woman that did not need him. I owned my house, I was more financially self sufficient tha he was, I had a lucrative high profile fitness job that, to his dismay, showcased my body in front of all the people that belonged to the elite country club in town. He was subconsciously developing a resentment for me all along, but neither of us knew it. He tried t change me, he provoked me, and I misread that provocation as "intensity". Intensity felt like love.

I truly wanted to make it last forever.

But it didn't.

I remember the hallucinatory coldness of his hateful words , like a sword drawn that impaled me. Those words, harsher than a fist would have been, killed any love I had for him. I remember retreating like a tranquilized zombie when he would just "opt out" of sanity. Where there once had been a good man, remained only an abstraction. His behavior became more and more deplorable.

After the children came, no matter how bad it was,I wanted to make it work, but it was doomed. There are women who were never married, yet have been around more than a drum in a dryer, jumped into bed with every person that would have them, had abortions, been in drug rehabs, and committed a robbery, .. But THAT person's relationship "track record" bears less scorn from society than mine.

In my rare moments of self-doubt, I buy into that , and cringe at the path I ended up on when I got divorced with young kids. dad.

..."You were so smug, so SURE", my brain says - the tiny piece of it that is usually locked up, and hates me - " YOU waited until you were THIRTY-NINE , to have kids. You thought you would be a smarter, better parent than all those others. You went ahead and had two kids. You looked at all your friends who had kids 10 years before and felt SO superior , like you knew some sort of life secret that would never be revealed to them. YOU smirked inwardly when some of those marriages fell apart, and congratulated yourself on being a strong, independent woman who had lived a full adult life and could take care of HERSELF and will now take on a role as Mother of the Year. Well, how does it feel to fail anyway? Hmmm? Not so smug anymore, are you? Oh, and a bonus - you get to cause pain to the people you will love most for the rest of your life: Your children. And society thinks you are a big loser. Oh, geez... Will ya look at the time. You should really be getting to sleep. Good luck with that. "

That's why I got up at this hour to write. I

I still believe I did the right thing to get a divorce. I still believe, however painful, I did it for them. I did not do it for my own relief. In fact, it becomes clearer to me every day . I tried every thing humanly possible to stay married to my kids dad. I tried to help him find work, I tried to get him to get along better with my family. We went to counseling. , I tried to be a martyr, I tried to be nicer, I tried to ignore him. He tried living downstairs. I thought of working full time and having him be a house-husband.

The final blow was the question 'Did daddy give mommy an owie?' after a rage attack that included throwing a cup on the floor. My 2 year old baby girl saw this. What kind of role model would this be?

In the end, it seemed better for the kids to not be exposed to all the anger and the fighting.

Several times, when he did not want me to take the kids to my parent's for dinner, he commanded me to not leave the house. As I tried to leave, he called the police . The kids were witness to several frightening scenes. The police informed him each time that I have every right to take the kids out to dinner. But in the mean time, they were terrified and saw me crying.

This was not an environment that was healthy for a 1 and a 2 year old.

It was so much harder to split up and make it as a divorced mother than I ever thought possible, but I am doing it.

Sometimes, when I am alone with my thoughts , when darkness and quiet predominates the house, after they are long asleep, it all comes back and haunts me.

It's getting a little harder to hold it all in sometimes. I want to cry. But I can't. I have no one to talk to about this. I could call an old friend from California, but it is not an entertaining topic for discussion. People would rather that I keep it to myself. They don't want to hear a self indulgent discussion about this.

I have absolutely no doubt that I'll be fine. Right now I'm just tired and sleep deprived . I couldn't take watching at the clock anymore, so I am up and writing this. It's helped , as it has me before. And now, with a little sleep, I'll be OK.

Soon. . Definitely by the time someone reads this. So no worrying.

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