The Difference in the Kleenex Box

As we sit and look at the box of tissues from different angles I see it blue and white with a hole at the top and he sees it square and made of cardboard. No matter how hard we try we are not going to see it the same way. We see the same sky differently. I see a blue sky filled with clouds that bring me a peace and he see the ominous signs of rain and welcomes the chill that runs through him, because darkness is familiar.

The difference in perspective expands to our child. It is devastating. We see the same little person in such different ways that any observer would never know we are talking about the same child. This detachment in his world, and attachment in mine, creates the biggest divide, the most extreme polarizing daily combat that steals joy from being a parent.

But it is my fault (and his, but he’ll never take his share). I married and had a baby with a man I didn’t want to hurt by calling it off. I was so afraid to say what I knew to be true about someone. I knew he wasn’t stable. I knew he wasn’t healthy. I knew that his childhood trauma ran deep and that those wounds had never been dealt with. I just didn’t fully appreciate how those wounds would rear up. I knew that alcohol was an issue, plus conditional opposition to the world and any authority. I should have been more brave.

I saw it all. I knew it all. I put his feelings before myself. Ironically my immense empathy hurt me. And now I pay the price every damn day for that negligence. My son is joyful and happy and vocal, because my current husband and I have worked to give him a voice, to give him courage and to give him all the security he needs. But still, there is a birth father, that doesn’t see who he is and even though he is only ten, he knows it. He yells it loudly when frustrated. Kids know so much. Kids are more intuitive than we think and if we don’t realize how we naively allow them to be scarred we will continue to repeat cycles.

Now here I am. Happily married to a healthy man who feels and loves and processes life. He isn’t perfect, but he is perfectly imperfect. He, oddly enough, is the perfect father for my child. He is all the nuturing, love, laughter and understanding that my son’s birth father is not. He is all the common sense and patience we need to navigate our world where a person’s deep seeded and unresolved wounds impede our peace on a regular basis. He has willingly and lovingly helped us build our safe zone and he fully and completely understands why it is needed.

Our sweet and charismatic boy consciously sets aside who he is, and what his needs are, when he is away on parenting time. He does this solely to avoid conflict. He surpresses his desires and his feelings because he “knows” they don’t matter. I cringe because that is the darkness I lived in before I found my own courage. That is precisely what propelled me to the light after our son’s birth. I was not about to live in that kind of darkness with the one and only child I have. I was not going to make my sweet innocent boy available to daily wounding. I was not going to raise a child to be like his broken father.

This wonderful and strong boy is being raised to see the world the way it is. While keeping all the light and goodness we can, he knows acutely that there are toxic people, people with “broken brains” and people that care more about themselves than they do about others, even their own children. That, in and of itself, may be one of the best life lessons he learns, so in some fucked up way, his birth dad is the gift that keeps on giving.

Whatever this boy grows up to be, he will be more ready to rise above the toxic culture we sadly allow or accept for all our children. People everywhere escape accountability and joyfully blame others and it astounds me that so many look the other way.

I ache for the pain for my kiddo, but I could not be more reassured he will be okay, because he has my husband and myself. What saddens me most, is that I know I am not alone in this world of toxic and dark co-parenting. So many kids and parents suffer, because one parent is scarred and wounded and insecure and sucks, which makes life for all very unpleasant and unhealthy. Maybe with all these gifts that keep on giving these kids will grow up to change the way the world is headed.