My daughter will be graduating from fourth grade soon. At the school celebration, they will be showing a slide show with photos of each student – birth to present day. Looking for photos to submit was an exercise in torture.
When I look at old photos of my ex husband, I feel….angry, betrayed, but mostly sad. Family vacations, parties, sporting events, photos of the ex holding the kids when they were babies. Very difficult to not think ‘lies, all lies’. When did he start wanting to be removed from the family? From the very beginning? Or did it happen somewhere along the way? I wanted to send him some of those happy photos from days past and say – remember when we were happy? Or at least you pretended to be?
The kids and I looked at those old photos and reminisced about the good ol' days. ‘That's when we went to Disney!’ ‘What was that dog's name?’ (We have had more than our share of dogs over the years.) ‘You looked so young there, Mommy!’ (Thank God, they left off the ‘what happened to you?’ comment).
When my kids look at those old photos, do they feel sad because their family is different than what it used to be? I don’t know, I didn’t ask them. They didn’t seem to be sad. They seemed to be thrilled to look at themselves as babies with chocolate cake smeared on their faces at their first birthday parties. I’m not a child of divorce so I have no idea what they’re thinking and feeling. They seem okay so I try to keep my bitterness under control. But at the graduation ceremony I will do what I typically do, start counting the kids on stage who have a divorced family. In their small school, it’s just a handful of kids (although the number grows every year).
The kids and I chose the photos for the slide show and put the memories away for now. I’m a little afraid of how I will feel the next time I pull them out. I’m worried that I will still feel the bitterness and betrayal. But I’m even more scared to look at photos of him and think and feel nothing.
**Note to self – don’t write a post when it’s a certain time of month. Slipping into the melancholy is way too easy.
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