Page 14 of Not Until Her
I fold my hands, and I must look quite menacing, because she quickly closes her mouth. I didn’t know I still had it in me.
“Can you do me a favor? Can you be fully honest from this point forward? For my daughter’s sake.”
I’m not a fool. These two will regret trying to make me feel like one.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “Caleb was fine with sneaking me around, but I really didn’t want to, I swear. That’s why I pushed for this. You deserve to know what’s going on when she’s not with you.”
“Has he asked her to lie to me?”
She hesitates for a few brief seconds, but nods.
I’m so filled with rage that I start shaking.
How dare he? Not only convincing my baby to lie to me, but making it seem like it’s okay? She’s too young to have it in her head that there are some things she has to keep from her mom. I’m not supposed to be dealing with the secret keeping until her preteen years, which aresofar away.
I thought I had more time.
Now I’m sitting across from a woman I don’t know, in a restaurant I don’t like, mentally berating myself for not being the kind of mom she would immediately run home and tell all of this to.
I don’t blame her for a second. I’m not upset with her. She’s young and impressionable, and I know she loves her dad so much.
I’m beyond upset with the adults here, and my feelings are so big and unwieldy at the moment that there’s plenty left to be upset with myself, too.
“Look, you have a great kid. One who loves you so much, and gets so excited when it’s time for Caleb to drop her off that it hurts his feelings. He’s expressed to me that he doesn’t–” she stops for a moment, shaking her head. “Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I want you to understand. Nothing about this is okay, but he knows you’re her favorite. He knows he doesn’t have what two have.”
“His jealousy is no good reason to convince our child that it’s okay to lie to her mom.”
She nods. “I agree with that. I’ve tried telling him the same thing, I swear.”
“But that didn’t stop you from coming around.”
Her gaze falls to her hands where she fidgets with the rings she’s wearing. There are a lot of them. Her hands must get tired of carrying all that weight.
“At first it didn’t. I don’t expect you to forgive me for this reason, but maybe you’ll get it? Our relationship was new. I wasa girl with a crush, trying to impress a guy that I was still getting to know. It didn’t seem like my place to question him, but it does now. It’s different now.”
“Why now?”
“Because I know him very well. I know Lia well. I know a lot more about you than I did. All three of you deserve better than this, and he realizes that, too.”
If she’s right and he has come to his senses, it makes sense that she was the convincing factor. He wouldn’t have gotten there on his own.
“What has he told you about me?”
“Not a lot. Just that you were both young, and life moved too fast for either of you to slow down and figure out what wasn’t working.”How insightful of him.“And he told me that you’re a…lesbian.”
She studies my face after saying the word. I can’t tell if it’s to check if I’m offended by it, or if she’s worried I might tell her he was lying.
If only she knew how little she had to worry about. I’m the least threatening ex-wife on the planet, at least in the way that you couldn’t pay me any amount of money to be interested in him again.
“Yep,” I confirm. “One of the few things I can thank him for helping me realize.”
In reality, it was much more complicated than that. It took me a long time after things ended between us to find myself.
I love being a mom. I let that become my only personality trait for the first couple years of Dahlia’s life.
When I found myself ready to date again, I didn’t know what I was even looking for. I thought I was bisexual for most of my life. I dated girls and boys in highschool, but none of those relationships were deep enough to make me wonder if I preferred one over the other.
I know now that the problem wasdating in high school.We were all just kids. I had friends who seemed confident and sure of who they were, but I wasn’t self aware enough to even notice that Iwasn’tsure. I never thought to question it until I started dating as an adult.