After meditation this morning, I realized it was time to cut the cord with my son’s father. I love him. I always will. We made a person together. He comforted me in the darkest year of my life.
We also made a lot of chaos together because we both had a strong need to control. His need to lie was a desire to control, even if it stemmed from fear of rejection. My need never to be lied to is the need to control. Our needs to control came from very real and scary places. What we did with those realities, with the tools we had, was like toddlers acting out Lord of the Flies. The gift in all of that was the learning—the lessons.
There is no allowance when constricted so tight. It’s like a 3-person jump rope. All the players have to have a similar goal, and have similar ability to hold that rope loose enough to allow it to slap onto the pavement, and tight enough to get it overhead. If the rope is too tight, it ain’t gonna have that schwing. If too loose, it’s lackadaisical flaccidness holds no shape.
Before this morning, I was not ready to cut this energetic tie. That is the simple truth of it. It created anxiety. It felt like abandonment in the face of feeling abandoned. That is the codependence one learns growing up in an enmeshed family with little skills. There have been moments in the past five years where I have simply wanted to cut him out of my life, but then the nuances of that place of frustration or resentments or animosity [I feared] would injure our son. The last three months, my Gut Brain has been moving me in this direction, as our son neared his seventh birthday.