A year on.

So today is exactly 1 year since my divorce.

That horrid day, which was much harder and more unpleasant than I thought it would be.

That day which affected me way more than I expected it to.

That day which I thought would mark the end. But it didn't. We have still not reached that end. I am not sure there is an end. It is a continuum. I have moved further along now and have a bit more distance and defensive boundaries, but there is no end, no closure. It does get better the further down the road I walk, but it will never stop or go away. I am not sure if/when we'll reach the next level. Where we can sit and have a cup of coffee and talk and both be ok. I hoped dearly we would have that, now I have resigned myself to the fact that I simply can not control that at all. I have accepted. I have moved on. he has made his choices.

That day.

That day where his true colours came out, and I saw how much hatred and derision he has for me. Where he changed completely and stopped pretending to be nice and to like me. Where only days before he had told me what a good person I was, that day I was berated and told how terrible I was, and how I had ruined his life and destroyed him.

That day.

Now a year later my children finally seem ok. They have seen, heard and experienced far too much. They have experienced rejection, hurt and terrible disappointment. They have cried, sulked, and withdrawn.

They blamed me at first, it seemed I had broken daddy because I made him go away. They seem to have seen now that daddy just is that way. Not because of me, or us, but because of him. They seem to understand that only he can control or direct that.

They seem to have given up on hoping for him to be ok though.

They have even given up on wanting us to get back together.

They no longer say they miss him, and they no longer express a wish to spend much time with him.

They have accepted life as we know it now.

So a year on not much has changed, but at the same time everything has changed.

We are still here and we are ok, and we do what it takes to make it work.

I think today is significant. Not because that was the day I ended our family, but because that day our new family was born. So just like I took the boys out to dinner last year and we toasted the 3 of us, I will do it again this year. We will celebrate it as something good because that day was for the greater good and that day marked the day we carried on. Because that's all you ever can do.