Custody

Waiting for The Ex to bring all of my children's stuff back. They are moving back this weekend. Our custody agreement is that I have the children full time during the school year and he has every other weekend, and then during the summer, he has them full time and I get every other weekend. It's been a good summer for me, because I needed some time to breathe, to think, to work on me. I haven't had this much time alone since before I got married. I forgot what it was like to only clean up my mess, to be able to just run out of the house at 11:30 at night to get a Coke, to be able to sit around and eat nothing but pepperoni and cheese spread on the sofa whilst watching TV. But at the same time, I've had moments of extreme loneliness, missing my babies so much that my arms literally ached from emptiness and I couldn't do much more than lay around and cry. It was at those precise moments that I was able to see into the world of those divorced parents who never have their kids more than every other weekend, and I was able to truly see how some of them slide into that ugly world of depression and alcoholism, or other dysfunctional coping behaviors like totally disconnecting from their children. All in all, I'm ready to get my kids back. I'm ready to put them back on a schedule, I'm ready to get the school year started, and I'm ready to begin the deprogramming that I know I'll need to do after them spending the summer with their dad.

The Ex and I did not have a long and protracted custody battle, thank God, because I don't think you can come across anything that is more harmful to children in the middle of a divorce. Other than those one or two ugly nights when The Ex was drunk and feeling even more confident than most psychopaths do, the custody agreement went pretty smoothly, and only improved after I moved out. I've come to the realization that our marriage had no boundaries, because of all of the stupid shit that went on, and I've had to take the steps to set boundaries, which has not been pretty for me, and probably even less pretty for him. I've had to establish that during the summer, I will not be his babysitter. Make your plans to go out and drink around when the children will be with you, or arrange for a babysitter. Don't tell me that you've got some work thing to do and then post pictures of yourself on facebook doing shots at a bar. Because my girlfriend, who is still your facebook friend, will do what girlfriends do for one another, especially when they've been friends since fourth grade. She will screen shot that shit when I ask her to and email it to me, where it will then go in the "Just in Case" file folder, which is short for "Just in Case I Decide That I Want Full Custody All the Time Because You Are Not Doing What You As A Parent Are Supposed To Be Doing" file folder. Also, don't call me all in a panic because you've got some meeting you've got to be at at 8:00 in the morning and daycare doesn't open til seven, and oh yeah, the meeting is three hours away and your parents won't babysit. How about you do what the fuck most women have been doing for the past 30 years and explain to your boss that you'll just have to be late for the meeting?  Don't arrange, oops, I mean manipulate, for your girlfriend to be at your house when I drop the children off, knowing that I'm probably going to fly into a complete rage-panic attack combination because you aren't following the recommendations of the child psychologist. And then blame ME because I didn't want to work around said girlfriend's schedule.

I'm glad there is a girlfriend in the picture, because that poor woman is taking some of the heat off of me. By heat, I mean focus. I don't even care that the girlfriend materialized about two weeks after I told him I wanted a divorce, and some of my friends and family, when hearing about this, kind of very politely and with the whitest of kid gloves, suggested that maybe she was in the picture before I told him this. I had decided years ago that I really didn't give a fuck if he cheated. I would have written a permission slip for that had I been asked. That's how sick of his ass I was and probably a good indicator of how far gone the marriage really was. So the girlfriend is a welcome diversion for me, although, I did get kind of panicky in my head the month I moved out and went and got tested for that alphabet disease, because maybe he had been screwing around the whole time and I didn't want to be that dumb ass ex-wife who ended up having a Lifetime moving made about her years later.  I kind of hope that this woman is the love of his life, because there is supposed to be that someone for all of us, and maybe she is that person for him. If she's not, I hope that she hangs in there long enough for him to lose interest in me, and that she doesn't waste too many years of her life on someone who is that much of a dickhead. In the meanwhile, though, I do take great joy in pulling her pic up on facebook and discussing with my girlfriends and mom how odd it is that she looks so much like my stepmother and what the fuck is wrong with her hair in that one pic?

I have a girlfriend at work who went through a divorce in the past few years and she has started calling her ex "The Sperm Donor". She has suggested that I do the same, but I can't. Even with all of what's happened in the last six months, the last six years, even that is too far gone for me. It just seems so disrespectful to fatherhood in general, and although The Ex was a shitty husband, he is a slightly better father. So I'm not going to downgrade him to a sperm donor. I've settled on "The Starter Husband", which seems pretty good to me, although, "Alpha and Omega" was in the running - the first and the last. But I'm not going to set myself up for that self-fulfilling prophecy. We'll see. I'm holding out some weak hope that I might one day find "The Finisher Husband".