As a girl, I would always dream of finding my fairytale prince and being whisked away to our huge castle where we would live happily and have a bazillion kids. Part of falling in love is the excitement of building a future with the person who makes your heart race and your soul sing. It’s easy to live with your head in the clouds, but marriage isn’t always unicorns and cotton candy dreams. 
It’s hard work and it’s not for the faint of heart. In order to combine two lives, there have to be open lines of communication and the willingness to roll up your sleeves when there are bumps in the road. Not every marriage survives and that’s ok. I tried my hardest to keep my marriage safe and whole, but in the end, nothing I could do could stop it from ending.
My parent’s marriage broke up when I was 8 and I vowed never to get divorced. What I didn’t realize as a child is that sometimes things are just not meant to be. Some hurts can’t be forgiven or, for that matter, forgotten. Sometimes, no matter how hard two people try to make things work or love each other, things can’t be put back together. I learned this the hard way.
The thing is that sometimes life needs to be put into perspective. It’s easy to live a half-life, where you just move along each day not really happy but not miserable either.
But don’t we all deserve to live our truths and be happy? Not just kind of happy, but truly happy?
Once the unhappiness in a marriage starts to seep out it begins to trickle down to the kids, and we owe it to our kids to put their happiness first.
I feel like I have been on a quest to find happiness for a long time, and that just as I’m about to obtain it happiness slips from my grasp. It’s easy to put a smile on your face and pretend to be happy, but it takes courage to forge ahead and do what it takes to find your own peace. However, the reality is that when I think back on the day I got married it makes my chest hurt. What I see when I look back to that day is a girl in love who had big dreams for the future and it is a hard thing to realize that those dreams are now just dust in the wind.
It’s not about giving up, because for the longest time I forged ahead remaining stoic that I wouldn’t be a quitter, that I would try hard to keep things moving smoothly, and that I wouldn’t pull the plug on my family. Sometimes the harder you try to keep things glued together, the faster they fall apart. I didn’t let people know how truly sad I felt because that would mean there was a problem in my marriage. It wasn’t until recently when my marriage crumbled around me that I finally turned to my family and friends for support. The only thing that truly got me through the last few months was my tribe of friends and family because when people say “It takes a village” it’s true.
It’s taken many months for my kids and I to navigate our new family structure. There have been plenty of days when all three of us were in tears. It was hard to look at their little faces and see the confusion in their eyes, but as I see them growing and laughing I know that all of our growing pains weren’t for nothing. We all grieved the loss of our “normal” family dynamic. I did the best I could for them during days that all I wanted to do was hide in bed. But I knew that this wasn’t the time to wallow in self-pity. I knew that I needed to show them that even though everything in their universe may feel chaotic, our lives together were the same.
I kept our routines and lives as normal as possible. It took time but as each new day passed, each of us breathed a little easier. When I look at them now, their happiness shows me that they will be fine. I know that one day their confusion will turn to understanding and they will realize my extreme love for them and the links that I will go to keep them safe and happy.
I grieved the end of my marriage, I grieved the loss of the person who I was closest to and the person who had the ability to hurt me most, and I grieved most of all how this would affect my children because they are the gentle reminder of what was once a promise of eternity. Now is the time where I must protect them the most because the last thing I want them to lose at their young ages is their innocence. I want them to still believe in happy endings, and that even though some roads can diverge tremendously from their original path they will still find happiness on the other side.
