2016. 2016 will not be the year I envisioned. 2016 will be a year of accepting what I cannot accept. 2016 will be the year my daughter and I enter a brave new world. A world we did not choose. A world we would not choose. After 2 years of trying to work on and improve our marriage after his infidelity, my husband surprised me on January 11th with divorce papers.
After an initial few days of shock, and maybe a bit of screaming, yelling, and threatening. I decided it was time to accept that this was happening. If this was going to happen I had to make it the best possible for my daughter and I. Therein lay the challenges. I want to be with my daughter 100% of the time. I am willing to work with my husband to repair our relationship and be with her 100%, both of us. But he is not willing to do that. So how do I become ok with less than (potentially only 50%) of her life, and not by my choice? That’s my emotional struggle. That is where my anger comes from. I am a good mom, I don’t deserve to have my daughter taken away from me without my choice, yet I am.
Another challenge I am faced with is my feelings towards my husband, my daughter’s father. Having been together almost 20 years, since we were 15 years old, there are lots of feelings. I obviously once loved, respected, and cared for him very much. Yet here is this man I knew, choosing to leave me and take my daughter from me. Making a choice…. He could choose to do the opposite, yet he won’t. Instantly, all those positive feelings are gone. A good person would not choose to give up half of their child’s life. A good person would not choose to take a child away from their mother for half of their life. Yet he is making that choice, so now I am faced with the fact that someone I no longer respect or think is a good person will be a sole influence on my daughter for half of her life. Yet I have no legal reason to stop him from being with her 50% of the time. I’m pretty sure, “I think he’s a jerk and don’t want my daughter around jerks,” doesn’t hold up in court.
Yet, despite all of this, I move forward. A step at a time, day by day, I am entering a new world. What keeps me going is my daughter, my friends, and my family. They all tell me that they have missed me. Missed the happy, fun person I was before the decline of my marriage. I realize that my daughter must miss that too. So as I am forced to enter this new world I must be brave. I need to be brave for her, to show her my strength and character. If I am to be a stronger influence than the negativity in her life I need to choose that. I will make the right choice, for her. I will choose to be brave and strong, to be forgiving and caring. I will show her that even if people make the wrong choice, and those choices hurt her, she can be brave too.