Mom, Mom, Mum, Mummy, Mummy, Mom

 If there is one thing I will never stop doing, it’s telling my kids that I love them. No matter how much they drive me insane, with their fighting with each other and arguing with me, they are still my reason, my strength, my life.

The depth of my love for them is what makes it so hard to understand how some people can so easily stop fighting for their children. I’m certainly not the world’s greatest mom, as I sit here hiding from them in my room, but they would have the shirt off my back if they needed it.

My son’s biological father was not a bad person, but he got caught up in a lot of very bad things. He split as soon as I told him I was pregnant, and never had the chance to meet his beautiful son before he killed himself with a heroin overdose in 2011. His mother has tried to be present over the past year, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to be the daughter she seems to want me to be. After twelve years of silence, it still came down to me to make some kind of a relationship work. My son is almost 13 years old, so I am leaving this to him. It’s up to him if he wants to have a relationship with the people who chose to ignore his existence for so long.

I know from experience with my own father, sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you try. Sometimes people are so hung up on the past, it’s impossible for them to live in the now. I wiped my slate clean on April 14, 2012. My past matters, but it’s in the past. I’m done looking back.

My ex-husband is Dad to both my children. I know he loved them, even if sometimes he showed it poorly. He doesn’t fight for them either. I would certainly give him the chance to prove he could handle being in their lives, but he doesn’t try. In fact, he has been running from the fight for fourteen months. I never saw that coming when I left. I thought he was a fighter, when in reality he is the exact opposite. Sure, it wouldn’t be easy, and we would have to deal with each other, but nothing worth anything is ever easy!

After all is said and done, they are the reason I get out of bed in the morning. They make me smile and laugh. They push every one of my buttons over and over and over. But, no matter how hard it gets, we have each other and they know they can count on me. If they grow up happy, I will know I have done a good job.