Posts tagged breakup
Showing UP for Sophia: Duets & Debuts

“Wow, he really hurt you, didn’t he?”

I looked at her puzzled, “John?”

“Have you dealt with it? Let it go?”

That was last week. Since then, I’ve dealt with it. But not without a little help from my friends — real and surreal. For days my activities revolved around crying my face off to music, one song in particular, paying close attention to the shit talk that arose as I listened, and breathing through the passages of pain.

I listened and wrote, forgetting facts about Covid-19 and wiping tears and snot from face to sleeve. I lost my appetite, wanting to feed myself answers instead. Why was I hurt? Why was I being led to find the answers in music? Why was I unable to stop listening to the song?

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Showing UP for Sophia: And Like That, She's Gone

I have work to do, but I can’t stop crying. I have to get it out first. I have to be with this. I have to feel it all. Even when my breath tightens, even when my legs can’t stop shaking, even when I have to pause typing for every word to cry. I have to understand why I feel like such a failure. I have to know to go forward. Deep down I already know what it is, I’ve just never named it. Only shamed and blamed it in others.

This is my mid-life crisis. This is where I see all of my shit. Where I face my shadows, the darker parts of myself that I don’t want you to know. So why am I telling you now? Because I’m done hiding.

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Showing UP for Sophia: Good Thing

I knew next to nothing about the fathers of my children. All three of them. Third times the charm? In the sense that I‘m certain I’ll never have another baby with a man I barely know? Absolutely. Not only because I’m 44, but because I’m over the concept that I need to be with the father to be there for our child. We are. We will be. I’m trusting that John and I will show up for Sophia in the ways she needs, since we weren’t showing up for each other, which was unfair to us all.

I’ve been here before. I know what usually happens... I get the kid and he and I hate each other, forever. As if that tactic worked with my first two children who have since confessed that I regularly crossed their boundaries by sharing too much, and rarely got consent from their fathers for making choices that concerned our children. Not this time.

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Showing UP for Sophia: Dear John,

Dear John,

Watching Marriage Story on New Year’s Eve was the ending I needed to witness in order to understand our own. Like Charlie and Nicole, we have history, we share a child, and we both want our child to be raised in an environment where she can thrive. While our similarities don’t stop there, the difference in how their ending started inspired me to follow suit. A mediator encouraged them to write a note of positivity to remember why they got married (together) in the first place. Here is mine:

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