Parenting After Divorce (AND during marriage!)

Today I read an Opinion piece in the New York Times, and it’s so good, I think it deserves a spot in my blog for ya’ll to read. This article is just about parenting after divorce, but gives some insight into How NOT to Get Divorced. I particularly encourage all those who have an iron grip on what they believe their “rights” are with custody. You might be cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Scars

Barely visible now, but it sure hurt when I got it at 12…

**I owe the idea for this blog post to another “quintessential mom” I had the privilege of talking to this past week. Thanks for giving me new things to think about ;).

I got thinking about scars a few days ago. I have a few…There’s one on my right shin that I got sticking up for my little sister–the boys who had thrown her bike into the ditch pushed me in on top of it when I went in after it, cutting my shin on the fender. Another one on my right thigh is from a dog bite when I was 7 or 8. I have the faintest ever scar on my left arm, up high, from a smallpox vaccine I got when I was a baby, before my family moved to the Philippines where my dad was stationed in the Air Force. Smallpox is a live vaccine; I got one pock as a result of that. I always thought it looked kind of like a flower.

This one, from a mandolin slicer, is just a faint line with stitch marks now.

I have scars from bug bites that I had bad allergic reactions to, and a scar on my face from a staph infection that developed in what I thought was just a monster zit. It ended up having to be cut open and drained repeatedly for over a week. My hands are a map of scars, from things like cat scratches, or scrapes you get in the course of living life. And my stomach is a ridiculous mess of stretch marks–scars I got from having my first pregnancy be with twins at 22.

My twins ended up with permanent scars themselves–the older one had surgery on his skull at 6 months to open up the prematurely fused growth plate on the back right side of his head. That’s quite the scar, going from ear to ear, in a bit of an S-shape. His younger twin brother had surgery on his spine at 17; that’s a helluva scar, running from the base of his neck, almost to his waist.

Scars from surgery, as well as horizontal scars/stretchmarks that evidence the underlying issue surgery corrected.

My twins’ scars will NEVER go away, unlike some of mine. I was in a car accident at 15, and split my forehead open in a couple of places. You’d never tell by looking at me at this point, though, because as I grew, those scars grew with me, and are now somewhere up above my hairline. The passage of time Healed me of those scars, like it’s faded some of my other scars.

But these that I’ve mentioned are just physical scars. There are other types of scars that last a lot longer–emotional scars. The loss of dear ones can permanently scar those left behind. Anything that cuts into our souls and hearts can, and often does, leave a scar that may never fade.

The beanie and all this hippy hair hides my son’s ear to ear skull scar.

It’s September again. I hate September, and it’s because of the emotional scars I’ve incurred through about 15 years worth of Septembers. Hard, painful, life-changing things seem to happen in September for me, scarring me physically AND emotionally.

Saturday morning I opened up Instagram, and the first post on my feed was about the LOTOJA race. LOTOJA is a 3 state, 206 mile, one day bike race, that starts in Logan, Utah, runs through Idaho, and ends in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Fifteen years ago, in September, I rode that ride with 4 of my best friends. It was the culmination of a year’s worth of training, and it was one of the best days of my life, even while it was crazy hard. And the next day, my biking was over, and my sanity went into a tailspin. It was the beginning of the end of my marriage; I was divorced by the end of March 2005.

You can read other of my blog posts to find out how my divorce went for me. Suffice it to say, the emotional scars are still with me. Even after all these years, those pains are still very real, very raw–hardly healed at all, it seems. Every year when the LOTOJA comes around again, I am reminded of that scar. The bruise is still there; it still hurts to touch. That was one of the really crucial things I learned in law school working with victims of domestic abuse–the physical pains, the physical scars, they healed faster than the mental and emotional ones. Those ones linger; they stick with the victims. The hurts are deep, and the scars are permanent.

I participate in a free legal clinic at CAPSA, our local domestic violence shelter. I consulted with a woman at my last clinic who reminded me how little so much of my emotional scarring has healed. Her divorce is scarcely final; mine was final 14 years, 5 months ago. Mine still hurts like hell. So I cried with her. Big, ugly painful tears. Maybe someday those emotional scars will have grown up, out of sight, like some of my physical scars have.

I can only hope.