How Hard Is It To Separate?

Posted on June 3rd, 2008 by Guy Lewis

I have no idea what I am going to write about here, except that it has been very hard to separate because it is hard for everyone concerned. As much as it makes so much sense to separate there are many reasons why we keep ourselves together. I’m not talking about the ‘we’ as everyone. I’m talking about the ‘we’ as me and my partner and both our families.

We are going through turmoil. We sat for a day thinking and feeling what it was like to know that my partner had made the decision to move out because it was just too hard to keep our families together and that there were significant issues with at least one child that needed addressing. This is pretty much a quote from her on that day later on.

I begun to notice a pattern that occurs with us where she moves from anger to complete hatred and bitterness for the affect her daughter has on her life and for us living together. Its a pretty big responsibility to put on one person but sometimes, fairly regularly recently it has felt that way because of the issues that occur between them and the background they have together.

Yet later on that day, and following on in the next morning she began to feel different. Her daughter was not created like that, it was the situation she was brought up in that made her have such a low self esteem.

She wanted to protect her child and didn’t want to destroy all that had been created for her, here in our little village surroundings.

For me, I was still back at the anger stage. She had caused us a lot of uproar, and I felt angry that my partner’s daughter could be so vile and viscous to my partner. I felt that she needed a lot of support to deal with some deep routed issues that needed some heavy psychological input from people outside our family.

Then my partner begun to feel there was a difference between how we felt. I had to tell her I had been left back in the anger phase myself, I didn’t have the maternal or paternal instincts to pull me through to want to nurture her like she did, and it wasn’t ‘wrong’ to feel that was since I was struggling with my feelings about how badly my partner has been treated by her.

It is a cycle I have noticed before but have not been on top of before. The end result in the past has been to create arguments because I was still angry with my partner’s daughter whilst my partner had moved on to the ‘nurturing’ stage.

I feel neither is wrong, both have a right to feel the way they do.

Its not easy living with someone else’s children at the best of times. When there is deep routed issues they need to be addressed. No mucking about. Get them dealt with, nip them in the bud. Sort them out and move on. Don’t let kids get away with blaming their parents when the realisation of what has happened to them in the past enables them the choice to leave the past behind and develop themselves with support to move on and make their lives a success.