I need some perspective because the guilt is starting to eat me alive.
My ex-husband and I have been divorced for 4 years. We have two boys (14 and 11). The divorce itself was incredibly amicable we split everything 50/50 without any arguments, I kept the marital home, and he eventually bought his own place. Honestly, our parenting and our general relationship improved massively after we split. We realised we had just run our course and were making each other miserable with constant arguing never in agreement with one another, always wanting to one up eachother but we managed to remain good friends.
Fast forward to last September. The boys were staying at his house and had gone to sleep. He called me at about 11pm and asked if I wanted to come over and watch a film it was "our" favourite film, and he said he was feeling nostalgic. I went over, one drink led to another and we ended up having sex. I snuck out before the kids woke up. We discussed it and said oh it was just one time thing and joked ‘for old times sake’
Since September, this has become a regular thing. Almost every week, we’ve been sneaking around, sleeping together, and even going on secret "dates" when the kids are occupied or at my parents or his parents, or parties just any excuse for us to see eachother.
The turning point happened recently: he told me he loves me and that he never actually stopped loving me.
Now I am panicking. The kids know we are friends, but they have no idea about this. I feel incredibly guilty and like this is deeply unfair to them if it all goes wrong again if we chose to rekindle which wouod just confuse them. We divorced for a reason we used to argue constantly and it felt totally broken. I have no idea how to navigate this or if I'm being completely unfair to our boys by entertaining this.
At Easter we took the boys on holiday, we didn’t share a room because we didn’t want to confuse our children but most nights we did spend together anyway. He will be taking the boys on holiday just him but he wants me to join even tho everything is already been booked I can join later etc but I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I’m not sure any of this is. We are already sneaking around.
I have said to him we can wait 7 years till our youngest goes to university/reaches adulthood. It’ll be less complicated for our children for us to try again if they’re adults or so I think.
AIBU for letting this carry on, or is there a chance we could make it work or would it be too complicated ? I feel like a bad mother at the moment. Maybe we shouldn’t have divorced. I’ve been on dates here and there but nothing compares.