Summer and Weekend Visits

Divorce sucks in more ways than one. It sucks because when two people get married they have thoughts of happily ever after and getting old and grey and sitting on the porch in rocking chairs happily cradling grandchildren. At least one of them usually does anyways. The problem is that it is too easy to get married. You don't even have to spend a lot of money, if you don't want to. Getting divorced is much more complicated and expensive. Divorce is the shattering of dreams,home, family. Unfortunately, sometimes it is necessary. When you get married for the wrong reasons or to the wrong person. The worst part is for the children. Even when things are bad at home it's hard for the kids. When my mother left my stepfather, she left the only father I had ever known. Things were bad at home. My stepfather was abusive, to me and my mother. But it was my family and all that I knew. When I first saw her with another man, I hated him intensely. I never gave him a chance. Everything that happened became his fault. He was responsible for it all. It shouldn't have been a surprise to me when I became the stepparent, that I was suddenly to blame for the breakup of my stepchildren's parents although it happened years before I came into the picture. I was responsible for all of their unhappiness and I was the enemy. I was the reason their lives were miserable, their parents still fought over which holidays were theirs for visits, and for anything else bad that happened. And since of course I had children, my children became the devil spawn and also responsible for their unhappiness. As time has passed, we have grown closer as a family or more like a patchwork quilt family, but a family none the less. My love for them grows deeper everyday. I feel their pain, their anger, their frustration of being in the middle, because I am in the middle as well. I am in the middle in between their mother, their father, and the ideal family they want to have and feel they have been cheated from. Sometimes I am the only safe sounding board they have and sometimes it is safer to be angry at me then their own parents. I don't know if they will ever fully understand or appreciate the unique relationship or love that I have for them but I will always be there. I know my place. I told them in the very beginning that I will be what they need me to be. That I realize that they already have a mother and that I will never try to assume that role. Even if I don't always agree with her choices or actions those are my thoughts alone and never to be shared because I respect her role in their lives. Because just in being a mother alone we share a bond. We have all been forced into this madness and we are all a great big dysfunctional family.