A Long Hard Summer Of Acceptance (aka if only I had shares in Kleenex)

The main reason for the lack of blogging activity over the summer was due to sheer exhaustion.  Not physical, but mental and emotional.  I had lists of posts to write, but when it came to having the time to write after the boys were in bed, more often than not you could have mistaken me for a mannequin lying prone on my sofa - that's the state of stillness I have been perfecting night after night, watching trash TV.

Ex and New Girlfriend are still going strong (I guess 'New' is fairly inaccurate at this point in time, as they have now been together for 10+ months...let's just call her American Girlfriend instead...I am tempted to call her Girlfriend With A Mouthful of Big, Shiny Teeth, but that seems a little facetious verging on bitchy, so I won't).  Due to the fact that our long-term babysitter still works for us both, it was impossible to avoid being aware that AG is a constant fixture at Ex's house and was developing a close relationship with our sons.

And this I have really struggled with.

By all accounts she is lovely with the boys and, in the grander scheme of things, I knew I should be really grateful.  But understanding you should be grateful and actually being grateful are two very different states of being - the latter being a state of mind I was finding very difficult to achieve.

I want my boys to be happy.  I want them to be loved by a myriad of people in their lives.  Just not by her.  The thought of them sharing 'family' time with their new mum substitute - with her beginning to love them and them beginning to love her - absolutely crushed me.  Knowing that it shouldn't...  knowing I should just be grateful that the boys were happy and loved...knowing that it didn't take anything away from their love for me as their mother, didn't help a great deal, I have to be honest.

I was wracked with jealousy.  I never had any fault with her personally - it was just the situation that felt totally agonising.  I felt an overwhelming anger at no longer being the sole mother figure in my sons lives.  It was not something that I had ever anticipated when conceiving, carrying and giving birth to them...and in all the sleepless nights that subsequently followed.  All that hard, turn-my-life-upside work...all that selfless devotion and self-sacrifice...for my role to be ultimately shared?  It didn't seem fair.  It wasn't fair.  It was hard to look at it from the boys' point of view and acknowledge the benefits it was bringing to their lives, and so much easier to look at it from my point of view and feel so incensed that I just wanted to kill someone.  Not her necessarily.  Probably him, in all honesty.

How could he?  How could he do this to me? I would fume and fester over the injustice of it day after day, night after night. It seemed like such a betrayal.  I felt like such a fool.  And their togetherness (and happiness) highlighted and exacerbated my own loneliness to a degree that felt intolerable.  I was wretched and I was miserable and I was beyond any form of consolation - all because others were happy and moving on with their lives.

It didn't help matters that Ex and AG took the boys on holiday together to visit some of our old friends in Seattle.  Yet again the green-eyed monster reared its ugly head.  I tried to maintain a note of cheeriness and excitement in my voice when I spoke to the boys on the phone - but my envy towards their 'family' getaway, with our friends, was palpable.  And of course, there were the accompanying insecurities.  Do our friends like her more than they liked me?  Do they see Ex and AG together and think, 'Oh yes, they are so good together...much more suited than Ex and Nicola ever were.  And AG is so nice.  And pretty.  And young.  Not old or jaded or cynical at all.  It's so obvious why Ex is with her, rather than his unstable, drama-driven, aging wife...'

Friends would sympathise - but would also acknowledge that yes, AG is nice.  And she is great with the boys.  And the boys seem to have a great relationship with her.  And that's a good thing, it really is.  But all I could think was, well, that's easy for you to say - and I emphatically agree with you on a theoretical level - yet, I think you might have a completely different point of view if this was happening with YOUR children.

My thoughts and feelings on the matter ultimately reached a tipping point when the boys returned home. We were having a fairy innocuous conversation about girlfriends while I was driving them home after an afternoon at the park.  Johnny Drama was having a hard time deciding which girl in his class he should choose to be his girlfriend.  In the midst of discussing their various merits, Captain Underpants piped up, "I think I'd like AG to be my girlfriend.  She's kind, she's pretty, she plays with me, she's fun.  Yeah, I think AG will be my girlfriend, mum.  I love her."

How I managed to keep the car on the road while the knife was being driven so swiftly and cleanly through my heart is a true reflection of my superior driving abilities.

On the tip of my tongue was the instant rebuttal:  oh yeah?  well, I think your father would have something to say about that!

Instead I kept quiet for a minute, listening to JD enthusiastically concur with his brother, before saying, "that's nice sweetheart, I'm sure AG would be very happy to hear you say that".  The conversation continued with CU saying, "you know, AG is always there at Daddy's now Mum.  It's kinda like I have two mummies now, isn't it?  She's like my new mummy now, isn't she?  So I have two mums.  That's lucky, isn't it?  So, you're my mum - and she's also my mum.  Right Mum?"

How I managed to keep the tears from flowing at this point, due to the knife being twisted cruelly in my heart, is a testament to the rapid blinking technique I have perfected over the past 2 years.  It was on the tip of my tongue to shout, "NO, SHE IS NOT YOUR MUM!  I'M YOUR MUM!  I'M YOUR MUM!! YOU ONLY HAVE ONE MUM AND SHE IS CURRENTLY USING EVERY OUNCE OF CONCENTRATION NECESSARY NOT TO DRIVE OFF THE FUCKING ROAD...AND DON'T YOU EVER FORGET THAT!"  Of course I didn't say that, although my brain was screaming it relentlessly, and I couldn't bring myself to agree with him at that point either.  But what I did manage to say was, "well, of course it's great that you have all these people in your life who love you so much, CU - you are very lucky boys."

And once they were in bed, tucked up sound asleep, I sobbed and sobbed, feeling a mix of rage and self-pity.  They already think they have 2 mummies?  I felt robbed and achingly sad, as if I was on the rocky road to losing them forever to their new, happier, family.

I can see how easy it is for mothers in my position to wish to reek havoc and vengeance on their Ex's and their new partners.  Having to share the emotional devotion of your children in these circumstances goes against every primal, lioness instinct.  I had always aimed to be magnanimous, gracious and generous as our family shifted shape, but it felt beyond my capabilities to be this way.  Holding my dying first born son had been hard.  Having a second premature baby had been hard.  Going through the breakdown of a marriage away from my family and friends had been hard.  And hearing my son profess his love of AG and his acknowledgement of her playing a mothering role in his life was also hard.  Just as hard.  I felt sideswiped by emotion and struggled not to fall into a pit of depression and self-loathing over my inability to handle the situation with grace and acceptance.

As I said.  Not a fun summer.  Not a lot that I had the strength to blog about at the time.  My energy was directed towards a) not crying constantly and b) not following through with the urge to kill somebody (many days myself).

So it would have been easy, and incredibly satisfying, to hit back.  And believe me, I really wanted to.  It seemed the quickest and most efficient means of reducing my pain was to pass it on to my Ex and AG.  I just wanted the satisfaction of them appreciating what I was going through - and to impact their world to the degree that I felt my world was being impacted by theirs.

But I didn't.

Instead I invited AG to the boy's upcoming birthday parties and decided to face this situation head on - and to muster every ounce of artistic ability I possessed to maintain a veneer of grace, acceptance and generosity.  And to put my sons - who I love unconditionally with every single fiber of my being - 100% first.

I also decided to stop participating in the competition I had created between myself and AG.  Realising that I was not in competition with her - in age, looks, personality, even over the boys' feelings towards us - fundamentally shifted my perception on our situation.  I came to realise that the only person stopping me from being lonely and sad and stuck was me.  And until I moved on and faced my biggest fear head on - that AG is potentially the second mother in this family - that I would remain forever stuck and bitter and lonely.

Not that the parties were easy, mind.  I faced them both with the requisite smile, talked to AG briefly, introduced her to all the other parents...laughed and smiled in all the right places while I quietly died inside.  Then I got into my car - as the boys departed with Ex and AG - and cried my bloody eyes out.  For hours.  But I did it and I lived.  And it really did make the boys happy.  And - dare I say it - I quite like AG.  She's nothing like me at all.  She's really very nice.  She appears to be very respectful of me and for that I am truly grateful.  It could be worse.  She could be worse.  I need to count my blessings and make a continued effort to knock my competitive, jealous tendencies into touch where she is concerned - and try to focus my attention on being the best mum that I can be right now.

Luckily for me, the boys and I are the closest we have ever been.  While I do still struggle with being a single mum, on many levels, being able to single-handedly parent the boys on a daily basis is becoming easier.  I take comfort in the fact that I must be doing something right, because otherwise I am sure Captain Underpants would not have stated so emphatically the other day, "But I don't want to have to leave home to go to college Mum!  Do I have to go?  I just want to be able to live with you FOREVER!"

Oh my sweet, sweet boys.  Oh how I love you.  (But you're still leaving home at 18, if I have anything to do with it...it will be for your own good, honest.)