Mediate Michigan

After my divorce, when my ex-husband and his new wife were expecting their first child together, my mother casually suggested one day, during one of her yearly Christmas visits to New York: “maybe you could be a big, extended family? And you could even spend the holidays together?”

Wait! What? Did she actually say that? Easy for her to say, I thought. The man who was my “father” had disappeared way before I was born, and my mother never gotten married afterward or even lived with a man, thus had never divorced one. She met with her lovers or boyfriends discreetly, on the side. We lived in my grandparents’ house and they fought constantly. So let her nurture those sick fantasies if she wished, but not for me!

All divorces–especially when you have been together a long time and you have children–are painful, each in its own exquisitely tormenting way. In our case, there was another woman, who eventually became the mother of my ex-husband’s children, and thus my daughters’ “step-mother,” in divorce parlance, although it’s an expression none of us ever used. So I wasn’t envisioning sitting down at a holiday dinner with them–there was just too much baggage.

via Catherine Texier: Thanksgiving All In The Family.