Thursday, January 28, 2016

It's Called Being A Grown Up.

The other week a friend of mine shared a video on Facebook. The video chronicles a couple that got divorced, and then both parents remarried. This couple put their child first, and the video is celebrating the new step parents.

I cried like a little baby during pretty much the entire six minute video.




I haven't talked much about what happened here in Laramie after I moved here. Briony moved in with me pretty much right after I got here. She was not in a good place when I got here, and though I made things better for her, she still was not happy living here. Just over a year after I moved here, she moved to Wales to live with her birth mum's parents. She has struggled there as well, but our relationship is better than it ever has been. We are planning vacations together and she's going to be coming to visit this summer. I can honestly say she's one of my two best friends. We share everything, and that's not something every mother can say about their relationship with their daughter. I miss her like crazy, but we are in communication a couple of times a week, and that makes it manageable, at least.

That first year Cale came over for dinner once a week. He and Briony continued to have a close relationship, and it made my heart happy to come home from work and find them hanging out together, in an unplanned visit. I think they probably got along better than they would have if they lived together, because they weren't constantly getting on each others nerves.

The week after Briony moved to Wales, Nid cut me off from Cale. I had made him mad by speaking my mind, not rudely, I was just honest for the first time since he'd moved. People asked my why I was so supportive of Nid after he left, and this is why. I knew that if I upset him he'd cut me off. And he did. It was his choice to let me continue to have a relationship with the children when he moved. Legally, I had no rights. But he wanted me to continue to be their mom, and assisted me by taking them to and from the airport so that I could have them for school breaks in Virginia before I moved here. Then I said one honest thing, and that was the straw that broke my relationship with my son.

Aside from occasionally passing Cale at the park with his friends, and the soccer games I was able to make it to, I have not seen Cale in nearly two years. And my heart breaks every day with the loss. Briony has been gone the same time, but at least I can have a relationship with her. All because Nid and his wife are too insecure to share our son with me.

Am I a perfect parent? Certainly not! I'm hurt by what they have done to me. But the person that is hurt the most is Cale. He is given whatever he wants, and left to come and go. That sounds like a great childhood, but what he's missing out on is real love. He is missing out on having a parent that cares enough to make him to his schoolwork so that he can get scholarships to college, instead of getting Ds and Fs. I have continued to buy him presents and cards, I regularly write him notes, and I put money in a savings account for him. I hope to one day give these to him, so that he knows that regardless of what he has been told about me, if anything, that he is never far from my thoughts.

I haven't wanted to air my "dirty laundry" in public before, but I didn't do anything wrong. Do I want to hang out with and socialize with Nid and Carissa? No. But I am a grown up and I could do it. For the sake of the children. It wouldn't even be that hard, since I have learned over the years, that we are all better off for the way things happened.