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Because of this site, our paths regularly cross those of others
who are striving--or struggling--to parent cooperatively after a
divorce or other break-up. We like to share as many of their stories
as possible because there are about as many different ways to navigate
successful co-parenting as there are families traveling along this
journey.
Here's a story from a single co-parenting mom about coming to
terms with the "other woman" in her son's life. This story is
cross-posted with permission from her blog, The Mama Spot:
My son loves me. I know he does, because he says "Mama" so
many times each day that I have seriously considered changing my own
name to "Sally" much like my own mother did. OK. Well, that's not
exactly proof. When I picked him up after he spent a week away in
Charleston with his father's family, the first thing he said after,
"Mama!" was "That's the prettiest smile you've ever smiled," as he
touched my cheek. And, besides, whenever I tell him how much I love
him, he claims to love me back. That boy loves his Mama.
So, you can imagine my being taken aback when just over a year
ago, as we were wrapping up our bedtime prayers with the list of
everyone queued up for blessings, my son, who loves *me*, started
claiming blessings for his stepmom, his stepsister and his stepbrother.
Huh? Me thinks to myself, "Uh..your Daddy ain't married." But,
instead, I ask, just for confirmation, "Now, um...Remind me. Who's
your stepmother?" And, he says her
name. This other woman in his life. Seriously, the words, "Do you
love her?" almost escaped from my lips. But, I played it cool.
My co-parent (or Baby Daddy, as we sometimes call each other
affectionately and politically incorrectly), his girlfriend and her
children had been living together for about six months when this little
glitch in my program occurred. And, please understand that it had
happened just weeks after I had been set up by my son's father in a
most uncomfortable way. One afternoon, as we were making a kid
exchange at Waffle House (classy, not; but convenient), he tells me
that his girlfriend's daughter, has something to ask me. And, right
there, cornered in a giant Waffle House parking lot, pinned between
Hassan, my beloved Nissan Sentra, and her
Acura, I find myself having to face...well, look down at...a nervous
10-year-old, too uncomfortable to even look up from the ground, asking
me if she could come to my son's house, since he always comes to hers.
Whoa. I look helplessly at that man who fathered my child, think to
myself, "Does her Mama know she's asking me this?", and say, "Of
course, I'll talk to your mother, and we'll figure out a good day."
It was probably a month or two later when I invited her to go to a
play with us and to spend the night on December 23rd. You can imagine
the email exchange between her mother and me. Well, maybe you can't,
because it was full of nothing but gratitude. She was thankful that I
had thought about her daughter, and I was thankful to be able to have
connected with a woman who was spending a whole lot of quality time
with my child. We both were ecstatic about the complete absence of the
drama that most of us accept as a given in situations like this.
And, over the course of this year, we have become partners in many
ways. There are bumps...less about us than about them and how their
journey together will affect all of our children. But, even after a
recent "disruption in communication" between the two of them, I found
myself reaching out just to say that I care about our kids...and, "I
hope you are well." And, I found her reaching back.
Here's the thing. If it hadn't been for our children deciding
that they were family, we would not have stepped into this awkward
space of cobbled-together familial titles like bonus mom and
myson'sfather'sgirlfriend'sson and aunt/mom/something-or-other (Really,
what do you call your mother's boyfriend's son's mother?). They were
thrust into this mess by parents who for whatever reasons have chosen
not to commit or not to commit fully to one another.
They struggled for a while. And I worried...a lot. But, in the
end, or the beginning depending upon how you look at it, they chose to
call this a family when none of us were willing. They chose to commit
so much that they have, on their own, dropped the "step" prefix when
they
