You know what I should be doing now, I should be icing my daughters cake. Well, finishing icing it as I did the initial layer last night but she wants a rainbow colored layer cake sooooooo the white icing had to set for me to do the color layer.
What I’m doing instead of getting dressed and making the cake is standing in my towel writing this. Why? Because my brain is in a million different places, I woke up to my third child’s 5th birthday alone! ALONE! Alone, because the kids are with their dad in his house, because it’s his weekend and they chose to spend it with him and I will get them at lunch time so that I can spend half of her birthday with her. This is the 3rd time this has happened! Was it how I thought the birthdays of my children would ever go? No, but it’s how this years birthdays have gone!
Literally over a year ago I asked for a divorce, it took almost 7 months to get to the attorney table to sign for the divorce and about 8 months for it to become finalized. Thankfully, along the way the girls dad and I have been able to be mature adults about things and not argue over the details. I do truly feel blessed for that fact! At first because we were getting along fine we didn’t even follow the child arrangements to the exact plan we signed. Then it got confusing who’s weekend we were on and how to deal with upcoming holidays. So we said okay lets do as the plan states to keep things a bit straighter.
Well, aside from birthdays since we let the older two kids decide how they wanted to handle their birthday weekends the littlest wanted to do the same. This year technically I’m supposed to have the kids for their birthdays, but everyone one of them fell on a weekend that “should have been dad’s”. Now there is an explanation that if holidays fall on weekends the kids stay with whoever is supposed to have them for the holiday. Okay, fine, cool, whatever…………but we let the other two decide so here we were letting the 4 year old decide too. So here I am sad I didn’t get to wake up and tell my baby girl happy birthday first, I didn’t get her morning snuggles. She’s chosen for me to come join them for lunch at her dads then all the girls will come home with me for presents and we will go out to dinner. The older two kids said dinner was girls only time, but not baby bear she wants dad to come too. So today, we set aside the “plan” and we will have lunch and dinner together so she can have her day how she wants to.
I know things will get easier and I will have to get on and talk more about things that happened in between this post and the last one I wrote, but I needed to get this down. I know that I chose right, I did the right thing for myself and my girls! This first year of divorce won’t break me! I will grow and I will fight for my girls and myself! We all know it’s okay and I’m showing them that while things didn’t work with their dad divorce doesn’t have to be ugly and horrible and we don’t need to fight and make everyone’s life miserable because we decided not to stay together. The divorce was finalized in June, so we are only 5 months into finding our “new normal” and these upcoming holidays will be our first run at finding things that work for us. We will make new traditions, we can hold on to old ones, we will learn and we will grow and we will remember at the end of the day we have each others backs! The kids still have two very loving parents and so far both parents have been putting the kids and their feelings at the top of the list! This is and always has been my top priority, putting my kids at the top of the list! It always will be and that’s why our 2021 is ending differently then the years in the past, but it’s okay!
If your struggling in your marriage and are “staying for the kids” know that they will pick up on this and sense things aren’t right! I will do a post about this in the future, but I want to end this saying don’t stick around to try and keep the family together if it’s creating a bad environment for yourself or the kids. I laugh at the saying “if momma ain’t happy ain’t no body happy,” but it’s so true and the kids can sense this even little ones. So do what’s right for all of you! It will get better and you can do it!
