dilys
It's not prying love.
I just don't know the answer to the question. I did 3 weeks ago. But now the Internet has kindly (and belatedly) informed me that my father is dead... I think all I can do is sit very still, let the dust settle, repack boxes at the back of my head that split open, just as soon as they'll let me. And then maybe I'll know stuff again.
I know I want a time machine. But beyond that... I don't know much anymore.
You don't read as broken love. You talk of your children like they are people. Small people, but real live people all the same. They haven't become a point in a debate. Or a weapon. Or an excuse. Or a pawn. They are tiny people that you want to protect and get through this as unscathed as possible, for their own sakes. That's what I hear in your words.
That doesn't read as a person who is broken, or going to break.
I don't ever talk about this. Aside from my mother, only my husband knows. Not even my sister does. But I know the exact moment my mother broke, and it was the very second when she joined my father in the rewriting history game.
Once she realised he was gone for good, and there was no point fighting anymore to hold a now defunct marriage together, she simply erased all the fighting to hold on that she had done. In the space of a ten minute conversation with me, it became that she had kicked him out. Not becuase of the "silly little girl" of the OW. But becuase she said she had caught him spying on me dressing and undressing in my bedroom, with him lurking at the door, eye to the crack where the hinges were. And that's why she kicked him out. except I was there when she and I clung to suitcase as he was leaving
In ten minutes we went from it being him abandoning us to poverty and distress, to her having had to heroically make us a single parent family, in poverty, in distress... for my sake. Becuase my father was an incestuous sexual predator in waiting.
We both knew she was lying. But I felt I had to go along with the lie, in spite of how obvious it was that it was a massive and ugly untruth. Becuase she was on the edge of a precipice and to call her out in such an enormous lie looked like it had too many huge horrible consequences.
And every time we were alone, for the next 20 years, she needed to repeat the lie, and have me go along with it. To keep up the reframe of her as a strong, single minded, marriage ending woman who was fighting for her kid's safety and well being. To maintain it as being "real" and not a godawful thing she had done to her child so she could get back at her sorry excuse of a history rewriting husband.
Most parents don't do that. Not even under the worst stresses and deepest pain. They don't break so fully and totally. I love my mother. I love my father. But he torpedoed her and it broke her, because she had a hidden flaw that she never knew she had until it became a weak spot too far. You have to take your victim as you find her, and he broke her. Becuase she was breakable.
There's no reason to think you will break. Not least cos, if you were going to... bearing in mind what you have been through... it would have happened by now. But here you are, still talking about your children as real, live humans with the right to their own feeling and wanting to help them with that. You are going to be OK. It won't be an easy road. And I don't doubt you'll be left with some scarring. But you are going to be OK. Which means you can carry your children to OK too.
I'm in the "slightly bent, chipped a little, has scar tissue, but is not broken" club too I think. Different route. Same destination. Keeping on, keeping on, cos ... we have children. And they are real live people, who need us to stay in one piece so nobody gets sucked into a multi generational cycle of repeated dysfunction by accident. It's not like anybody wants to be in this club. And none of us chose it.
But it beats the alternative.