The hardest thing about splitting up a marriage is that you have to share the kids.
Today my oldest son turns 18.
I didn’t see him the day he turned 15, 16, or 17, and I won’t see him today. He moved in with his dad when he was 14.
My idea of being a good parent is to be helpful and supportive, and to celebrate all of the wins and losses and milestones with your children. I want to be involved, I want to be there, I want to look after my kids on every level.
But he has chosen to keep his distance.
There was a time I would have shut my heart off and walked away from someone who didn’t want me involved in their life.
But when it’s your child, that isn’t an option and this relationship has continuously forced me to look rejection straight in the face over, and over, and over again.
There are a lot of bad feelings in the world and in my opinion rejection ranks up there with the worst of them.
It seems bizarre but I have learned about love by face planting several times into the dark depths of feelings of rejection.
Rejection popped up when I thought you could just turn love off, and long before I understand love languages. I thought if my love language wasn’t being met, there was something wrong and the other person quit loving me.
One of my love languages is quality time. I’m going to go out on a limb and say my sons isn’t the same, even though we have never talked about it. The feelings of rejection popped up in me every single day for a long time because he didn’t want to spend quality time with me, or any time at all.
Once I figured out that it was my issue and I just wasn’t feeling loved by the rules of my love language, I learned it didn’t have to mean he didn’t love me. I started to see things differently, and I began believing that maybe he still loved me, it just didn’t look the way I thought it should.
Since then I’ve learned that where there was once love, there is always love. We don’t stop loving someone no matter how hard we try, or how much we want to stop. If we loved them once, we will love them always. This truth has helped me to stop fighting it within myself, and stop believing that the love others felt for me could truly be turned off. It can’t.
Hurt people, hurt people. We don’t hurt others when we are full of love and joy. We hurt them when we are hurting, and we have to close our heart in order to do so.
I was very clear I didn’t want to hurt my son because I was hurting. I always wondered how much the disconnection between us was hurting him, and I may never know, but I wanted to minimize it for him as much as I could given the situation.
For a long time I allowed the disconnection between us to eat at me, but eventually I learned that connection isn’t a 2 way street.
Connection is a personal choice and nobody else gets to decide it for you.
If someones heart is closed or if they are blocking you, our knee jerk reaction is to mirror that back to them. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Closing our own heart off is what causes us pain.
We want to love each other. We are born to love each other, it is hard wired into us, and we always feel better when we choose love.
No matter how I was perceiving his choices, I didn’t have to make the same choice.
I choose to always feel loving towards him no matter what his choices look like to me, or my own feelings of disappointment because he hasn’t switched love languages.
I choose to support his choices, whatever they are, because I believe he is doing the best he can.
I choose to give him the space to navigate life, and to show up for him when he gives me the green light to do so.
I won’t be seeing him today, on his 18th birthday. I will feel sad, and I will likely cry every time I talk about it, because my heart wants to be with him. But I will not close my heart, and I will not shut my love off.
I will be allowing my connection to remain strong and I will be sending him all of my love, all day long.
After all it’s his birthday, a day to be celebrated.