As any parent knows, from the moment your kids are born, you spend most of your waking hours hoping nothing bad will happen to them. During a split, you see pain and confusion in their innocent eyes?a situation so unjust that you want to flog yourself. They ask the inevitable questions??If you love us so much, then why did you and Mommy break up"??over and over, and the answers you come up with are so maddeningly useless that you can?t stand hearing yourself talk. Friends quote you the divorce rate and remind you that you aren?t the first or the last couple to break up. People who have gone through a breakup tell you, ?Don?t worry, you get used to not seeing your kids every day.? You want to punch these people in the nose. Others, less prone to sugarcoating things, tell you their son or daughter barely spoke to them for a couple of years after the breakup, but then they got older and, over time, things started to improve. You want to punch these people too. Nothing salves the guilt. You carry it around day and night. An essential part of the journey through divorce is to make sense of, and figure out how to process, the guilt that threatens to engulf you. Immediately after you tell your kids the news that is going to shatter their existence, the guilt takes root inside and starts to spread. On most days, you privately ask for more of it, because you?re convinced you deserve to feel all this and more for what you?re making your kids go through.
You own the ...