It's All In the Perspective

I was a single mother of 4 children for 7 years. Most of those years my ex-husband was deceased and I was singularly responsible for our kids. To borrow the phrase "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times." It was very tough in some respects and absolutely freeing in others. I look back on those times with a sense of awe and wonder.

I had felt originally felt sorry for myself, that I could not provide monetarily or sometimes physically what I had deemed fair to my kids. I had envisioned a very different life for them and was extremely disappointed when the dream went unfulfilled. Ask my kids, they will tell you how many times I have peed on our parade because things didn't work out the way I had planned. For them, they were just happy to be loved by both of their parents. Their father loved them deeply and they were all the more hurt when he was no longer around, but always felt his love all the way from heaven.

They had suffered during the divorce many reckless and hurtful comments about both their mom and their dad. They had dealt with adults playing Monday morning quarterbacks in a life that didn't belong to them. Some friends and family alike decided they had the right, nay, the obligation to banter around blame and recrimination in front of our kids. My children being small at the time soaked it all like the sponges they were and harbored it all inside for a very long time. Their father and I had our own difficulties in making sense of the mess we were in, without others giving out commentary and bad advice that we neither wanted or needed. It seems ridiculous to me NOW.

That's the thing about time and maturity. What used to give us great pain and anguish eventually gets sorted out and discarded with the trash where it belongs. Hindsight is not only 20/20 it comes with a circular file that allows us to clear out the debris. My kids suffered with all the judgement people could dish out. It wasn't useful, helpful or kind. It was only a way for people to get away with saying hateful things they would normally just have to keep to themselves. To us now it's almost comical looking back. We have talked about things they have carried around for years in protection of either their father or myself. They thought by letting the cat out of the bag they would inflict more pain, more hurt, more animosity towards a time in all our lives we would all just as soon forget. We have no rugs in our house. By that I mean, my kids and I made an active decision together as a family to be open and honest even if it inflicts momentary pain. The idea was to put our crap all out there so we could sift through it decide ourselves what needed keeping, what needed throwing out and what we needed to be occasionally reminded of, just in case the lesson hadn't quite stuck. It's brutal in my household at times. The kids get to tell me when they think I am wrong. It totally stinks as a parent to hear your kids call you out on a big mistake and have to apologize in front of them. Luckily for me, they are forgiving and we all learn something in the process. Our lives as a family are bigger than my being "the Mom" instructing, preaching, cajoling and dictating. It is a group effort to help and protect all of us from big, life altering mistakes. We talk about my depression during the divorce and Danny's death. We talk about their father's alcoholism and the ramifications of it. We talk about family history of wrong behavior, mental illness and failings. We do it because knowledge is power. It's also humility and empathy. It provides us with tools to look at things with new eyes.

I never need to sit down and explain how I haven't been perfect to my kids. They already know all of my faults and can list them alphabetically and in order of importance. As a single mother I had no partner to deflect my bad behavior or hide my wrong doings. I was the only one to look up to and look at, and they did, all the time. I am happy with that in the end. I wasn't crazy about it when they were young and felt every inch of the microscope I was under. Now, I see how it changed our family dynamic and how we accept and love each other truly without condition because we know everything about us.

I had watched other two parent families when I was single and coveted the life they had. They were Mom, Dad and kids in a lovely well kept home and a well behaved dog lounging on the front porch. It was all very Norman Rockwell for me and my heart ached for that for me and the kids. I felt so sad I couldn't bring their father back in whatever situation, divorced or not, and I was pedaling as fast as I could, but could not provide the near perfect life I had witnessed in others.
I felt that guilt until the "perfect" family suffered a divorce and we watched them disintegrate right before our eyes. I spoke politely to both of them, giving them their space, but made sure my kindness extended equally to both sides. I watched them suffer as we had in the separating of lives and alteration of their universe. My kids did so with kind smiles and sympathetic eyes. We had been there. We really did feel every bit of their pain.

My kids and I have our perspective spectacles on all the time, ever aware that kindness and decency are the only things that should come out of our mouths. No one knows what goes on in any marriage they are not a participant in. So in the end, nice matters. It matters so much it becomes the only thing that matters. Some may see it as diplomacy, but in reality it is decency for the remaining victims. One of my favorite shows is up for grabs in the media. Betty hooked me up to Jon & Kate + 8. I watched the show as a way to reminisce about how it was for me taking care of my 4 darlings who were so close in age. I liked the realness I felt from the kids. The melt downs were my favorite because I would spend days planning something only for one of my kids to skip their nap and fall spectacularly apart.
They seem to be dragging around their own bag of hammers. Every channel has some tidbit of gossip about the couple with 8 kids. It's all fun and games until this destroys one or more of their kids. And make no mistake it absolutely could. My heart goes out to all of them. I will remain neutral forever because they will all suffer because of the media hype on things that only they know for sure. It's heart breaking to me that there seems to be such blood thirsty hunger for details of a young family's demise. I see bits of similarity only in the respect that although we weren't reality stars but in the end we had suffered our own witch hunt, smaller scale, just as hateful.

One day this family suffering public humiliation will have their own perspective and look at others suffering and hopefully will have kind eyes because of their experience. As sad as it is that the hard way seems to produce the most, best perspective, at least it's not in vain. That is what I am most grateful for today. I huff and puff because of my pleurisy and painful ribs remembering that it is in the end only a good lesson to be learned and not nearly as difficult as the ones I had to learn a long time ago.