Imagine running a hundred miles in MY shoes

Imagine being a single mom with two kids trying to make it all happen. It doesn't matter what version of "single mom" you are, you know the struggle. There's simply not enough of you, as one parent, to go around to make all of the necessary ends meet. You can't be at home to supervise one with friends while the other needs to be at an appointment. You can't get them both to work when they start at the same time. You can't get the to/from school while also having to commute to/from work. You can't be in the 7 places you're needed at once. And that's just the driving. You will always find the capacity to carry the emotional weight without ever having the capacity to carry all that weight. You'll find all the ways to protect and support them even though you can't get out of bed in the morning. If you've been there, you don't have to imagine it. If you haven't, kudos to you and your stellar spouse or actually engaged coparent! Imagine it for me anyway. 

Now imagine being the single mom whose child had two hospitalizations in the last year, one for a mental health crisis and one for major back surgery. Try to imagine, if you will, the sheer number of phone calls to the insurance companies, the intakes, the care team, the paperwork, the pre and post appointments, the family therapy sessions, the hospital visits/stays, the medication management, aftercare. And that's just the logistics! 

Imagine that you've carried those burdens alone alone alone because their father lives 1000 miles away in Colorado, where they lived as a family for a mere 6 months. Imagine the guilt you felt when he wouldn't consider any other arrangement than he was staying in the giant, expensive cabin in the mountains, kids and wife be damned. I didn't have any choice, I moved them back home. And the guilt consumed me.

Imagine feeling responsible for the degradation of a relationship that was already almost nothing. So when he gave me 24 hours' notice that he had no other plan than to stay at my new, unattached to him residence, how could I say no? He wanted to see his kids and how else was that going to happen. How quickly I was usurped in my new life. But the guilt was strong.

Imagine FOUR YEARS later when he wouldn't reconsider the support he was providing that was less than 1/3 what a court would order. Again, I felt I had little choice but to disrupt the delicate (im)balance we had come to. Imagine, after all of this, still feeling responsible for him, his feelings, his relationship with his kids, his own parents!, his financial strain, all the broken pieces. As a compromise, I agreed to let him keep that massive cabin in the woods, four bedrooms, 2 acres of land, all the peace and calm, the hundreds of thousands in equity. We'd equalize it later, after the kids would no longer visit to lessen the disruption and staunch some more guilt. Imagine leaving all that stability on the table over guilt. That's how bad it was.

Now imagine, you find out he's moved his brand new, didn't know she even existed girlfriend into the house. 7 months before he told you. And imagine he didn't tell you until AFTER you found out about it on the internet. Then imagine he admits she's not paying rent, while also excusing that he can't afford to reimburse you the thousands of dollars he owes you for those two hospitalizations and other court-ordered, shared expenses for the kids. Now imagine he tells you that he also still can't afford to stay anywhere when he visits the kids at your house unless you let him stay at your house. Girlfriend back in Colorado be damned, I guess. Tugging at that guilt that's so deeply imbedded, he says he could camp or sleep in his car.  Maybe he would. I wouldn't know. I've always given what I was asked for.

Now imagine that after all of this disruption and betrayal you find that they're traveling and have been, once a month so far since the first of the year, across state lines to run. Now imagine she's not going to be working anymore in three weeks (maybe she's got something else lined up, but boy she talks a lot about her "partner" being established and owns a house and how great that is for her and all her travel plans that don't leave a lot of space for work while out of the other side of her mouth talks about how she couldn't afford to do these things before but, don't look now....they're doing it). Go ahead and make your own assumptions about how that's happening. Clearly I have.

Step away from the money for a minute and imagine the time spent traveling to Utah, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, with future trips planned and announced to the world. Imagine he spent even half of those trips driving to see his kids, rebuilding the relationship that slowly eroded over the years and then blew up with this recent news. But that's not what's happening. Instead, he's borrowing money to meet his financial obligations, making mortgage payments on a house I still own late, jeopardizing the house and the equity he swore he wanted to maintain and protect "for the kids." 

Imagine finding all of this information and watching their life unfold in the public eye through self-serving interviews, social media brags, and an absolute lack of consideration for how it might look to anyone who once consider this man family. My 16 year old is pretty good with the internet... Imagine the stories he must be telling people about why he doesn't ever see his kids, why his oldest no longer speaks to him. Imagine the stories he must be telling this girl about his financial circumstances such that she thinks he's going to take care of her while he doesn't even properly take care of his own responsibilities, his own children. 

Imagine doing all this and keeping your mouth firmly shut because no one likes how uncomfortable it is to call bullshit. Well, fuck that. I call bullshit. If thought my boyfriend could financially support me but can't, I'd want to know. If I lent someone thousands of dollars to resolve their debts and then spent the next several weekends in a row traveling (which costs money in case you're not reading between the lines), I'd want to know. If a person who is parading around as some selfless, generous human to the new (uneducated) people in his life, but fails to show up for his family, refuses to communicate until he's threatened or needs something, prioritizes nothing but what he thinks feels good to him regardless of how it feels to others, I'd. Want. To. Know. And if someone is broken and fading and living at the absolute edges of her capacity as a result of all of this just absolute unfairness....I'd want to know why. Because she's probably not her best self now, but there's probably a story.

Come run a 100 miles in my shoes and see what flying solo when it's hard is really like.