“I don’t want to be at your home, I want you home with us.” came his reply.
He’s almost 14 now. The year he turned 10, along with his sister who’s birthday they share, was the year I approached their mother in the kitchen, in an almost surreal, detached state of disbelieve, doubt and denial, and said that we needed to talk.
“I’m not going back there.” I flatly stated, reflex-driven. Followed with an inner-thought spoken out loud as “That needs to be clear.” Then, a moment afterward, the realization flowed through me in a consuming wave of the chilling awareness that this young man, this sweet-souled child with a wounded heart, had yet to fully accept the changes that’d taken place more than 3 years prior.
“It’s been 3 and a half years,” I stated, feeling a mix of frustration and a need to defend my stance. I was still processing the insight as to his feelings and struggles.
“Well you’re not divorced now, and I won’t stop thinking you might re-marry until you’re actually divorced.” I know that by re-marry he meant reconcile, but my focus was less on that small vocabulary blunder than the statement on the whole and what it represents to him.
I don’t believe that any wish or desire on his part that I be back in the house relates to his feeling that his mom and I “belong together”, that we worked, that we had a connection, that we had a love that was ingrained and unbreakable. In fact, I know full well why he wants me back. His life there is likely grueling, with the buffer having been removed, that being me, he has little or no balance or acceptance. And I’m aware of this because I’m speaking from experience.
It’s so difficult to try to remember and recognize how it feels to be 13. He said just the other day "Why couldn't you have waited until we graduated?" My parents divorced at about the time of my graduation. And it came as a huge relief when it finally came about. Those final years of my parents' marriage were a nightmare for me. So, a good deal of why I “couldn't have waited until they graduated” was because I knew that the crash course we were on would put them in the same situation I was at 17, or perhaps worse.
As I write this and I replay the day in my head, paying more attention to what I didn't connect to in the moment, it's clear that he is really struggling to live in that house, with her, as she is. This is including the level of hysteria she exhibited just the other day when he sent me 42 text messages in a panic over her emotional breakdown response to divorce related emails. My God, I left because of this and now he’s front and center and watching his mom go fetal.
He absolutely has a right to a sense of abandonment, and it kills me that he is in this situation. In fact, when we talked the other evening after the 42 text messages, I told him just that. That I was so sorry he was in this situation and I never expected or imagined it would be this way. When she tells those kids that things will be ok, which they will, they should be able to believe her. I I doubt they do.
I have to step back from this all for a moment to capture that this entry began after a difficult night, and I was given some advice that I should try to just let him talk and show empathy instead of discounting or dismissing his feelings (Thank you, Jen!). I wrote up until here last night before falling asleep. A weekly email newsletter about parenting was waiting for me in my inbox this morning. The title was “It’s Tough to be Eight (or Four, or Twelve)” and it even began with “It is easy for parents to forget what it's like to be a kid. It's easy to forget what it's like being small, or feeling as if no part of your life is up to you.”
I love it when the universe either conspires to put enough signs in front of me all at once, or I just wake-the-fuck-up and start to see the connections on my own. This felt like one of those moments.
Tonight, he was with me again. I worked to tease out some of the topics raised last night without success, but a few small moments of trust and feelings did surface. And the whole of the evening sans a 20min mountain drive with my daughter singing out loud more than she’s ever done before, the rest of the time was with him, and it was a joy. It started a bit tense, with the usual attitude, but my focus on listening and asking a few pointed questions enabled him to recognize that he was being heard. Even if the topics were not all about surviving divorce or dealing with a depressive personality in a parent, the fact that he had me laughing as he eagerly told me stories about cow eye dissections in science class or other abstract bits of chaos that flow naturally amongst 7th grade boys in middle school, well, it gave me a chance to provide some much-needed recognition for his 13-year-old point of view. And to remind him that even if I'm not living with his mom, I'm not living without them being my family and an integral part of my life.