There are challenges in a separation that aren’t easily foreseeable when you start the process. The Ex and I managed to do things rather rationally considering the difficulty of breaking up after sixteen years together. We tried to be mature, to help each other out and to put the kids and the family first. We have had some failures in our plan, however. One of the things we would have liked to do was try and dedicate some family time to the children, doing activities or taking short trips together, so that they wouldn’t lose that sense of family which we feel is important for their stability.

It’s been mostly my fault. I’ve had a hard time deciding to spend time with them and the Ex, I wasn’t ready, I still am not really ready for it. I’m beginning to worry that I never will be, but as the Ex says, they’re growing and in a few years they won’t want to spend time with us. He’s right, I have to get over it and make an effort. I have to learn to be with him, in a family setting, without all the negative feelings I still have towards our break up. Towards the break up of our family, for which, honestly I still blame him. Although, rationally, I am aware that it’s not actually solely his fault. Or rather, blame shouldn’t be coming into it anymore.

The other difficult aspect of all this is that I rarely get them for the weekend. I usually let the Ex decide because, honestly, considering all his health issues, if he wants them he should get to spend time with them. I don’t want to have a rigid schedule of every other weekend because I don’t want to take away their time together, and I get them all week.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy having free time and being able to manage my weekends as I want, but I miss them too. They don’t have an awful lot of free time during the week so I don’t get to just have them around the house playing and being bored and doing random things together. It’s always a difficult sort of balance that we keep.

I don’t really have a solution, we can only do the best we can, so we’ll see how things evolve cause everything is always evolving. I just wish sometimes things could be a bit easier, if only in my own head. Cause at the end of the day, that’s the problem. I worry myself into a wormhole and can’t get myself out of it, even though the solution may be simple, or right in front of me, or both. But I can’t see it for the chaos of all the possibilities and variables and conflicting feelings in my head. Maybe I should try some meditation or something to teach myself to be more zen. Or zen-like, zenish, possibly, or even just something in the vicinity of zen would be nice. Zen-adjacent, that’s my goal for the end of the year.