A Mothers Legacy

I’ve been debating for weeks if I should write about everything that has been going on in my life lately. On one hand, I am a writer, and putting the pen to the page or my tired fingertips to the black keys on a keyboard has always been my way of copeing in hard times. But on the other, I am a very private person and to wave something as intimate and as personal as this is extremely difficult. I feel the need to though, because in my solitude I am allowed to hide and make excuses for the events and for my own inability to articulate it. Here however, I am accountable, and one voice. Here, here is where I might be able to see some change.

I know that in todays modern age the word Divorce does not hold the same negative and shameful conitiation it once did. It’s an everyday occurance. People get married two or three times in their lifetime. My mother did. My father. My grandmother. It is rare to find a marriage that lasts. Regardless of the statistics I never expected to find myself on this road, yet here I am filling for child support at the local Social Service office and scheduling consultations with lawyers to draw up custody papers.

How did I get here?

I don’t remember taking that right off the freeway, and crossing the bridge. I’ve burned so many of those bridges that I know there is no way from me to get back to the road I was on. And I don’t think I have enough tread on my tires to make it through the road ahead. It’s just not something I’m prepared for.

And it’s hard because I am so very angry. Knowning the things I know and hearing the things I’ve been told about the amount of disrespect I’ve been shown in the last two months makes me sick to my stomach. It shames me and embarasses me. But at the end of the day I realize I have the good in him, our daugther.

But I can accept my blame in this. The truth of the matter is I should have known better. I knew exactly what kind of a man my husband was when I married him depsite his attempts to change and be better. I should have known better.

And years from now when my daughter asks me about her father I won’t demonize him, I won’t bad mouth him, and I won’t explain to her the whole truth, about how easily he walked away from the both of us. I’ll simply hand her the box of letter he wrote me while in basic, and the album of photos from her first six months, and the entries he made in her baby book and tell her, “he loved you very much.”

Its what I wish my mother would have done for me.