I had prepared for this question.
I had talked to Patricia and to Sandra and to a child counselor named Dr. James Whitfield, who worked with children navigating family changes.
“Dad has his own home now,” I said carefully. “But you’re going to see him all the time. That’s not going to change.”
Dylan thought about this with the serious expression he always wore when he was processing something.
“But you’re still my mom,” he said.
“Always,” I said. “That one never changes.”
He nodded once, satisfied, and went back to his dinner.
I excused myself to the kitchen and stood at the sink for a moment with my back to him.
That one I let myself feel fully.
It has been 8 months since that Saturday afternoon in October.
Natalie and I have spoken twice.
Short conversations, careful ones, the kind where every word is chosen deliberately because the ground between you is still uncertain and you are not sure yet where it is safe to step.
I have not forgiven her.
I want to be honest about that, because I think there is a version of this kind of story where forgiveness arrives cleanly and quickly and ties everything up neatly at the end.
And that has not been my experience.
What I have done is decide that the anger, the specific, searing anger of being betrayed by two people I loved simultaneously, is not something I am willing to carry at full weight forever.
Not because they deserve to be released from it, but because I do not deserve to be trapped inside it.
That is a different thing from forgiveness.
It is something I am working toward at my own pace.
Sandra comes over on Thursday evenings.
We sit on the back porch after Dylan is asleep and talk and sometimes don’t talk, and it is one of the most grounding things in my week.
Dylan started first grade in September.
He lost his first tooth in October and was devastated that it happened at school and not at home, and then immediately delighted when he realized the timing meant he got to tell the story twice.
Once to his class and once to me.
He is okay.
He is more than okay.
He is 6 years old and completely himself.
And that, above everything else, is what I needed to know.
I went back to work the Monday after I served Col in the divorce papers.
I walked into that hospital and I did my job and I came home and I made Dylan dinner and I helped him with his reading and I put him to bed.
And then I sat in my kitchen alone, and I was quiet for a long time.
Not broken.
Not destroyed.
Just rebuilding, quietly, one ordinary day at a time.