Seperation

     My parents are separating. 

    After years of hoping and praying the cycle would end and we could all have some peace, here we are, at the edge of the end. 

    Why do I feel so sad? Why do I feel so defeated? I'm 31 years old and I know that its time for her to let his narcissistic butt go and learn to regulate on her own. And yet I still feel like a 12 year old wishing that all the love stories were real, that my dad cared about other people more than himself and that he would change, not just for her and for us, but for himself. He's not a bad person. He's just so self-protective against some imaginary rejection that it becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy and he pushes everyone away. And he's finally managed to push away the one person who has stuck by him through everything. Loss, death, job insecurity, borderline homelessness, and so many disappointed dreams. 

    My siblings are done with him. The only friends he has are addicts and depressed, and as he is on his journey to sobriety, I doubt they will stay in his life for long. Why do I still feel the need to justify my father? To hold his mental health as a personal priority?

     I am married with three children of my own, about to move to another country and I feel so lost because my parents aren't one unit anymore. I'm scared of all the changes coming. But I'm even more scared everything will be undone and it will go right back to how it was before. With my father relapsing, if he starts making all the right empty promises to my mom, and if she starts believing them. I want her to come with me, to get away from the possibility of reconciling. But she has a whole life here that she can't get away from. A sick father, a job that relies on her, friends and church and community responsibilites. I think its one of the things that gives her the strength to not be lonely. And to finally see my father as the anchor around her neck that has been weighing her down for years. But when she's still here, still available... I worry that he might manipulate his way back in to being taken care of again.

     But he seems just as done. She took him off his pedestal and has no interest in putting him back on it, and he wants nothing less than admiration. Not love. Not even respect. But complete admiration. Because he is, after all, the smartest one in the room at all times (in his opinion). 

    Why does this VERY RIGHT, VERY CORRECT, and LONG-TIME COMING change... make me so sad? Not just that... it makes me doubtful of my own marriage's ability to last? My marriage to a completely different man. My marriage that has never been the rose-colored glasses marriage my mother's was. My husband has a reliable job and provides us opportunities that I never could have dreamed of growing up in poverty. Things like... Owning a house. I know. A millennial who owns a house. Its unheard of. Not only that, but I'm able to be a stay-at-home mom. My husband continually sacrifices so that our kids can have everything they could need or want, to keep us all safe. And unlike my father, shows up for student-teacher conferences and plays, and birthday parties, and listens as the kids make up songs and put on fashion shows and tells them how much they are loved because of who they are and not how they make him look. 

    My husband is not my father. And I am not my mother. And the traumas I went through will not be my children's. And yet the fear lingers and the sorrow follows me and I am scared of the future.