I didn’t meet your biological mother until well after we’d married. Before then, I wrote her an email thanking her for bringing you into the world and for doing her very best to get you into adulthood so that I could have you as my husband and one day father of my children. I built a relationship with her because I loved you, and in loving you I gained a family unlike my own. I needed that diversity. I needed that support. Without them, I could not have understood the way you were in that moment… that season of your (our) life. I researched decades beyond your birth to give our children roots to look back upon; to trace their fingers along the names and maps and know their DNA made marks upon the soil there.
I found your daughter. I looked into her eyes and saw you there. I wrote more letters… to courthouses, judges, lawyers… and then I reached out to the first woman you called Wife. She is now one of my dearest friends. We share survivor stories, parenting struggles, children with the same genetics and mental curiosities and beautiful minds and daughters with your eye shape and your mothers lips.
Your stepmother and I have our differences in opinions about you. We’ve clashed regarding my choices and beliefs on my body and our marriage that ultimately led to our baby. But what she’s always been good at is being there for her children and now our children. She makes every effort to be available. She asks about their schedules and goes to their practices and performances and has them over. I will never deny your family time with our children, because they are their family too.
When their family, who was my family AND my support to lean into for 11+ long years, actively includes me in their visits or gatherings where our children are present - I will be there. I refuse to indulge anyone in conversation about you unless it is directly regarding our children. Your life and mine are no longer made of the same threads anymore and you made sure to sever every last strand on your way out the door and into the fabric of her life. If your family wants to discuss you and your choices, as I’ve told them before, that is a discussion they need to have with you. I’ve said things like, “that’s nice for him,” and “good for her” and my stomach twists in knots and my tongue swells in my mouth and I am reminded that they are her parents now too. I shrink back and observe and take in these moments for our children. I bite my tongue and take all the pictures and remember all the stories.
I am our children’s memory keeper, the documenter, the historian and photographer. I am our children’s warm embrace, their whisperer of “I love you big… you are SO smart and SO creative and SO funny and SO loved.” I am their mother, once your lover and wife. I will never not be family to your own family because I am the umbilical that keeps you tethered to them through our children. No matter what season you’re in with your family, I will continue to document and archive all the moments I didn’t keep our children from them.
Have your tantrums, say what you must, but it only serves as a reminder to myself and one day to our children of how you are and what I removed us from. Being so hateful, so angry is no way to live. There is zero logical reason to self sabotage your own ability to just be content and happy with what you have versus what you could have. Nobody is perfect, especially not myself, and I learned the hard way that sometimes you have to sever a limb to save the tree… but that doesn’t mean the limb never existed.
