We all have those days, you know? The ones where we wake up on the wrong side of the bed for one reason or another. Mine are usually precipitated by a bad dream, which I fully realize I should not allow to ruin my day, but it sure does seem to put a damper on things. Yesterday was one of those days. I honestly don't even remember the dream itself; it had something to do with my ex, and my old life. The last few years have been fraught with upheaval and drama of one sort of another, and to be fair, I brought all of that on myself. As mentioned in previous posts, I married very young to the first boy who paid me any mind. To his credit, when we met I was a teenage girl with an addictive personality who could use a little direction, and... he enjoys directing. Fast-forward a few years, and I found myself in my early 30s, with a lot more common sense and a yearning to be my own person, unfettered by the passive-aggressive bindings of a control freak. Unfortunately, by that point I'd had two children with aforementioned freak and been bullied into buying a house nowhere near where I wanted to live.
Nowadays I'm happier than I've ever been. I live in a beautiful home five minutes from my family with the love of my life (a story for another post, oi vey), am searching for - and hopefully slowly finding - a direction in my career, and finally feel fully supported, loved, and encouraged. The thing is... there's this little niggling voice at the back of my mind telling me I fucked it all up.
I look around me at my family, friends, and work colleagues, and contrary to what the media tells me, I see nuclear families living their lives together. While I could never imagine going back to my old life, I continue to mourn every day for screwing up the one chance I had to give my children two parents who love each other, and live in one household together. I left when my youngest was just on the verge of turning two; I had such precious little time to "enjoy" the American Dream, such as it was.
Most days, parenting feels like little more than logistics; on the weeks I have the kids, I have to drive them 40 miles south to school, then 40 miles back up to work, then back down to pick them up after work, then back up to get home, lather, rinse, repeat. Then you add in all of the various activities for which their father signs them up, so some days we don't actually get home until almost 9pm. I'm exhausted. I'm sure the kids are exhausted, and I'm left feeling more than a little guilty that I made the choice to move our lives so far north. I still wonder if it was the right decision, but ultimately, if I'm being honest with myself, there really was no right decision under the circumstances.
I yearn to sit on the couch at the end of the day with the man I love, and look at the little human our love built, and be able to look at each other and say, "We did it! We got through another day of this together." But alas... it's just me, floundering about attempting to be a mother as best I can. I don't get to be part of "mother and father" anymore; I gave that up over three years ago, for better or worse. I don't think I realized it at the time, the magnitude of what I was leaving behind. Looking back, I wouldn't change a thing, but that doesn't make it any easier when I'm crushed under the knowledge that that notion, that dream, has fallen to nothing more than ashes in the breeze. And no matter how well you muddle through it, the reality of co-parenting isn't much more than attempts not to colossally disappoint that don't always come to fruition.
Ah! As if on cue, a text from the ex regarding tonight's endless cheerleading practice. Perhaps the universe is telling me to stop wallowing, so I'll climb up out of my self-contempt hole and join humanity for a while. Stretchy shorts wait for no man (or six-year-old girl).