I didn’t win the divorce and neither did my ex-husband. It took me almost seven years to realize we were never supposed to.
Because for a while, I absolutely wanted to win, I wanted the glow-up, I wanted him to regret it, and I wanted him to realize what he’d lost.
I wanted to be the one to feel happier first, heal faster, and build the better life. And if I’m being completely honest, there were moments I wanted him to hurt simply because I was hurting. I wanted him to understand what it felt like to stand in the rubble of a life we’d spent almost a decade building and somehow still be expected to function like I was being expected to do. To parent and also work, pay bills, pack boxes, and figure out where my daughter and I were going to live. I wanted him to feel the weight of waking up the next morning and to keep on going like his entire life hadn’t just blown up.
So when people see the relationship my ex-husband and I have today and ask me, “How did you get there?” I need you to understand something. We did not start here. Not even anywhere close.
I wasn’t some emotionally evolved woman gracefully navigating divorce and putting the children first every second of every day.
Please, I was devastated, depressed, anxious, angry, and felt betrayed, embarrassed, and terrified. And he wasn’t perfect through it either. There were angry conversations. There was resentment and disagreements. There were boundaries we had to figure out.
There were new homes, new relationships, new schedules and an entirely new version of our family that none of us really knew how to navigate yet. We were two hurt people trying to untangle almost a decade of life together while simultaneously raising our beautiful daughter who came from it.
That shit takes time. And somewhere along the way, I got tired. Not tired of him, but tired of carrying it. Because anger is extremely heavy. And eventually I realized that no matter how justified I was in feeling it, my anger wasn’t changing what happened. It wasn’t putting my family back together and it wasn’t giving me my life back.
That’s when I had to start asking myself some really uncomfortable question-The first one was:
-What was mine to own? Not who was worse. Not who hurt who more. Not who would win if we presented our cases to a jury of our Facebook friends. What cards did I play in the breakdown of our marriage?
And listen…
If you know the whole story, I’m fairly confident I’m not winning the Biggest Asshole Award here. But that didn’t mean I had nothing to own. I was battling depression and post-partum issues toward the end of our marriage. I wasn’t myself. I was disconnected and unhappy. I was difficult to reach. And I’m sure there were times I was really terribly hard to love. That doesn’t excuse the actions he made and how he treated me. Taking accountability for my behavior does not require me to take responsibility for his. But healing required me to stop building a case against him long enough to actually look at myself.
Then came another question, and this one changed a lot for me.
-If somehow we could erase everything that happened and start completely fresh tomorrow… would I actually want the life we had back?
No, and that realization hurt. Because for so long I thought I was grieving my marriage. But eventually I realized I was grieving the marriage I desperately wanted it to become. I didn’t want a loveless marriage. I didn’t want to spend my life looking over my shoulder wondering if the same cycle was happening again.
I didn’t want resentment and distrust living in our house. I didn’t want to live in a constant cycle of emotional abuse. And I didn’t want my child growing up thinking that staying married at all costs was the definition of a successful marriage.
I wasn’t fighting to get my marriage back anymore. I was fighting because I wanted what happened to be different, but it never would be and there is no amount of anger that rewrites history.No argument you finally win. No apology that is perfect enough to change the outcome. No glow-up impressive enough. No Facebook picture happy enough. And no amount of making someone regret losing you will give you back the version of yourself who existed before they hurt you.
You have to really heal and work on building the next and better version of yourself.
So eventually…I stopped trying to win the divorce and I stopped needing him to look at my life and think, “Damn. I really screwed up.” Because here’s another hard truth I had to learn:
If someone didn’t recognize my value while they had access to me, why would I spend my freedom trying to convince them of it now?
I don’t want to convince anyone I’m worth fighting for anymore.
I want them to just know. And slowly with that realization, the scoreboard disappeared:
Who moved on first-Who was happier-Who had the better relationship-Who had more money-Who was right-Who was wrong-Who regretted what-Who “won”
Because eventually I realized there was only one person who could actually lose our divorce, our daughter, and she had already lost enough. She had lost the version of her family she would never know. She had lost having both parents under the same roof and lost family traditions. She did not also need to inherit our anger.
And somewhere along the way, my ex and I found the one thing we could always agree on:
We wanted our daughter to be happy. We wanted her healthy. We wanted her to feel loved by both of us. So we started there, slowly, imperfectly, and with boundaries. Also with disagreements and a whole lot of biting our tongues. And almost seven years later, we’re getting to a place I never would’ve imagined in the beginning. We can sit beside each other at our daughter’s therapy appointments. We help each other when one of us needs it. We communicate and I genuinely want good things for him. But don’t misunderstand that.
I can have a decent relationship with the father of my child and still loathe things about my ex-husband. Both are true. Healing didn’t erase what happened. It just stopped what happened from controlling what happens next.
And if you’re at the beginning of this right now—angry as hell, devastated, looking at your ex and wondering how you are ever supposed to peacefully raise children with this person…this took years. You don’t have to forgive everything today, you don’t have to stop being angry tomorrow, and you certainly don’t have to become best friends. Unfortunately healthy co-parenting isn’t possible in every situation. Sometimes safety, distance, strong boundaries or parallel parenting are what your children actually need. But if you’re both capable of getting there, to a better co-parenting relationship…maybe stop asking how you’re going to win, because I spent enough time trying to win a divorce that had already cost all of us enough. Eventually I realized: I didn’t win the divorce and neither did he. We stopped keeping score, and somehow…that’s how my daughter won.
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