Once upon a time, my good friend Kim and I found ourselves at sea, furiously treading water as we headed towards divorce. My slowly sinking rowboat of a marriage had finally gone down, and Kim had been hit by a speedboat she never saw coming and was thrown overboard. It doesn’t matter how we got there, in the end, even though at the time it seems to matter very, very much. As we struggled to understand that our marriages were most likely over, we couldn’t find a single resource to help us gauge what came next. Should we leave? Could it be fixed? What would hurt the children more – staying or going? Stay, fix it, preserve the home for our children, who we never intended to raise with any one but their fathers? Stay, teach those children what bad relationships look like, and kill any hope that they would one day have healthy relationships? Or go, save ourselves, and possibly create a black hole of sadness in the hearts of our small children? Go, and teach the kids to be healthy and happy even if it means a difficult decision? It was like The Clash was playing 24 hours a day in our heads. Stay or go? Stay or go? Stay or go?
We cried, we drank, we talked, we sat quietly with our legs drawn up and our heads down, we went to marriage counseling and therapy.
A therapist finally helped me decide. She said, “Heather, you know when you get on a plane and they run through the emergency instructions? What do they always say about the oxygen masks? They say put your own mask on first. If you cannot breathe, you cannot save the child you are traveling with.” If you cannot breathe, you cannot save your child. And so, in the end, we both left. We had to. We couldn’t breathe anymore.
We wanted to write a blog that would help others breathe when the oxygen masks where dropping around their heads. So here we are. It’s not always perfect, and we’ll be honest about that. Sometimes it’s amazing, and we will share our gratitude for how our lives have gotten better. It’s not easy, and we hope you’ll laugh at the absurdities of single parenting with us. We wanted to be the stewardesses, if you’ll let us.
