I saw Will today. He looks good. Softer. I caught him glance at me sidelong and I wondered what he was thinking. Will gave Marc a bag to put in the trunk of my car. It is going to stay there, unopened. Marc relayed that his dad didn’t have room for whatever is in the bag, and I feel sad that Will is living in a travel trailer.
Things will get better for both of us. Right now, there is a lot of waiting. I keep telling myself to be patient, but I wish I could snap my fingers and make what will be the future become the present.
I thought about how difficult switching parents must be for the boys. I wondered if they sensed the finality, and I wondered if they were okay with it, right now, at that moment they removed their bags from my car and transferred them to his truck.
My thoughts went back to my parents’ divorce. My sister and I didn’t have to see our parents together after they separated because I was old enough to drive us back and forth. I remembered standing in the hall of the courthouse, thinking someone was going to ask me to testify on behalf of one or the other, and I thought about how angry with them I felt for having to think about choosing. I don’t want my boys to have to choose.
There are aspects of Will and my relationship that I wish the boys never witnessed and never felt – like our fighting, my crying and the tense family time playing Uno. Why couldn’t we ever have fun? Why was it always so damn hard?
When things get too much to bear, I force myself to envision the future in as much as it pertains to Will. We will learn to parent apart while remaining consistently together in the discipline and care of our children. We’ll attend the boys’ graduations from high school and college. We will eat dinner at our boys’ homes together (if they’ll have us). We’ll attend the births of our grandbabies. He and I will wait together in one room to see the red little darling pass through on the way to the nursery. We will spoil those grandkids and go to their birthday parties, kindergarten graduations, see their first new cars. We’ll do all that stuff together, kind of.
Right now, that future is far away. Right now, there is a lot of waiting. I keep telling myself to be patient, but I wish I could snap my fingers and make what will be the future become the present. But if I did that, then I would miss all of this. And this, painful as it is, is a necessary evil.
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