Life can take your breath away. Sometimes your breath is taken away by life.
Like a blunt thud in my midsection, the news that my ex-husband and his second wife are having in vitro-enhanced twins delivered quite the winded blow. I did not expect this news nor did I expect the waves of shock rippling through me.
I suspect the initial feeling was a sense of loss. Loss for a life we should have had, loss that I will not bear any more children. Loss that they have the life I expected to have and at times think I should have. A girl and boy, of course, with due date of Valentine's Day (as if it had been fucking scripted!).
Underneath all that, lay more pain. A loss more primal, more profound, so much so, it defied description, initially.
Anne Boleyn chose death over betraying her daughter's rite to rule. According to my history lessons, Henry would have simply divorced her, thereby making the future iconic Queen Elizabeth a bastard and ineligible to wear the crown. Plucky Anne refused and chose death to offer her daughter some security. And her daughter became one of history's strongest monarchs.
A male lion looking to take over a pride will first kill the offspring of the current "king," to eradicate any heirs, any future challengers.
In the Bible, Rebekah and her younger son Jacob conspired and succeeded in snatching eldest son Esau's birthright from the dying father.
My ex-husband is nearing 50 and is a shitty father to the child he has. His wife seems just as ugly and hateful. It is painfully obvious that she dislikes my son. I assumed it was jealousy. After some five years of attempting to conceive and given their ages--I just assumed (gladly) that our son would be the only one.
These two are not the type to create inclusion. I was glad my boy wouldn't have to compete with in-house siblings and all that drama. His father barely attends any of our son's functions, refused to take him to his after-school activities and again, I rejoiced that my son didn't have step siblings to compare himself to and see how his father treats them. I also reveled that my son would inherit a good chunk of change from his father. I could provide my son with stability and a good core; his father would provide him with a good financial start in life. That's all gone.
Just like some Medieval drama, I feel as if my son's future has been threatened. His birthright stolen.
I feel as if it was all for naught. That I failed to protect my son. That my actions have hurt his future.
How is he going to feel when his stepmother yells at him for looking at the twins the wrong way? Or how bad will it cut when he sees daddy making time for the twins' baseball game and J can look back and remember how dad never went to his because they were "too far away"?
I can't even patch the wounds from the divorce, from all the animosity, from living with a stressed-out mother and all her crazies. And now more.
Everyone keeps saying to me, "what comes around, goes around." I'm not quite sure what he did to deserve the custom-built million-dollar home, the kiss-ass wife, the promotion, the built-in community---the easy ride.
So what does that mean? What the hell did I do to deserve the struggles and darkness and continual disappointments? On top of that, my son's beginning to have problems that I don't know how to handle.
It all just hurts.
@L'uragana
Posts
