Prologue Excerpted from "The Ten Commandments of Divorce"

The “rude awakening” came late one night just a few months after the separation.

I was in bed, restless and very aware of the empty space next to me. Sleep seemed impossible, and with no one there to spoon with or share a hug, I decided to get up and seek the comfort of my 4-year-old daughter’s room. As I walked in, the sight of curly, blond hair spilling over white sheets stopped me in the doorway. The moon’s light was making her hair shine like a halo, and I slanted a smile thinking about how angelic sleeping children can appear. I tip-toed in, adjusted the linens, as all moms do, and then knelt down beside the bed. Her breathing had a soothing rhythm, and I found myself resting my chin on the mattress so I could listen and follow.

As I studied her tiny features looking for signs of stress, I wondered if her dreams were peaceful. It was a simple notion, but it caused a shiver that left me with a disheartening thought—if this separation has made me feel so alone and isolated, so completely unsettled I found it difficult to sleep in my room by myself, how must she feel? I tugged at the ear of the teddy bear she had tucked tightly under her arm and realized it was her only night-time companion since birth. Could she be as lonely and scared as me?

And that was when it came. There was no lightning bolt or room shaking, no ethereal voice from above, but there was an indisputable shift. My body was still mine, but my emotions were not. I felt the chill of her isolation, and my heart pumped with the fear, anxiety, and guilt that only a child of divorce could know. I fought the urge to climb into bed and comfort my little girl, lay my cheek next to hers and wipe the tears away, but I realized they weren’t hers… they were mine. Somehow I was being allowed to experience her emotions. Somehow I became her, if only for a moment. But that was all it took.

When parents separate, they are so wrapped up in their own emotional turmoil, they sometimes don’t realize how incredibly troubled the kids become. We put a roof over their heads, feed them, and make sure their surroundings are sound. We may get them into therapy, naively make statements like “everything is going to be alright,” and then send them off to school as if their perception of a normal life were somehow still intact. We split up their home and send them packing every other weekend to sleep in a new bed without grasping how dramatically their universe has changed. We know on an intellectual level what we are putting them through, but do we ever try to become them, to really get into their heads and hearts?

Up until that point, I was more concerned with making money and holding it together so I could organize the day-to-day workings of my new single-parent household. I wasn’t really considering how divorced my son or daughter must have felt. After all, wasn’t I the one whose world was rocked, who lost a surname, contact with most of my friends, and was going from couple to single? The truth is I never realized my children had a new status as well. There wasn’t a name or title for them, however; nothing to signify the change in their lifestyle. We don’t actually acknowledge kids in that way. I am a divorcee, but what do we call them? Society sometimes uses the phrase “products” of divorce, as if they were manufactured goods waiting to be distributed.

That night, in the serenity of Heather’s room, with only the moon as my witness, I had my epiphany, that ‘aha’ moment that allowed a new perspective, and I embraced it. I wasn’t just a mother to my kids; I was their family, a huge part of their world, and a link to the unknown that was unfolding day to day in their short-lived but significant lives. Without me, where was their maternal guide? Without me and my leadership, each one might very well become a “product”, a product of what the outside world wanted to make of them.

It was time to understand the significance of the culmination of my eggs and his sperm. No, the Earth wasn’t supposed to revolve around me and my woes. Instead, it was meant to orbit around the incredible creations God decided to put here. As man-made as my marriage and divorce were, Heather and Matthew were not my products, and as privileged as I was to give birth to them, these children were not mine to ruin.