I’ve been sitting on this letter a long time. I never had the courage to spell it out until now.  It’s been 6 months since I left you. To be honest, it’s been a great 6 months. It’s given me a lot of time to take care of me and to focus on my own happiness, something I never got to do when I was with you. Of course, there has been some hard stuff too. It’s not that I miss you, at all, but I do miss some things about our life.

You asked me when we broke up, what the good things were about our relationship and what positive things I would take with me. I’ve done a lot of reflecting on that issue. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

That sweet daughter of yours. I remember so vividly snuggling with her last year. She looked up at me and said “I love you mama, you are my mama,” I could’ve died. I was so happy. You may never see it, but at that place in time I was her mama. Sometimes you and her mother take for granted how lonely she gets and the attention a 7 year old needs. I was the one there for her. I was always a parent to her.  I want that again, but I want it in a way that I don’t have to feel guilty about being called mama.

I miss holding the B. I remember the first time I picked him up, feeling how soft he was and how easily he drifted off to sleep as a pup. I could never explain to you the way it felt to hold that little guy in my arms after losing the child in my belly.  I still want to cry when I think about it. I miss that so much. I miss my sweet boy. I lost another one when I let you have him. But, I couldn’t bear making that little girl hurt and I couldn’t bear being in your home. So I let him go and I regret it.

I want to have more things to reminisce about, but I just don’t. When I think about it, there are only terrible things I feel for you. Everything went downhill after my second pregnancy loss. I’d say ours, but mine seems more accurate as you were disappointed when I found out (both times) and relieved when I lost them (both times). But in reality, they always were just mine. You lost any claim to any part of me when you tightened your hands around my neck just a few weeks after I sat on the toilet at home alone all day bawling while I expelled the dead tissue from my uterus.

Maybe I could reminisce about all the sweet words you used to whisper in my ear, but that just makes me think about the lying. You might still think that I was oblivious to it. Shit, you lied to me, over and over, and over. Things that you had plenty of opportunity to come clean about, but you hid them anyway.  I still don’t know why. Those are the memories that really take over for me.  I replay the conversations in my head and you lie to me every time. Who doesn’t tell someone that they are still married? We were together for 4 years!  Those lies are the reasons why I still shake when someone says something nice about you. I really hope at some point you take the time to get some real closure for yourself… or maybe you should just keep your options open for insurance reasons.

Of course the short fuse and the drinking are nothing to reminisce about. The way you ignored me every night for a bottle of liquor and passed out on the couch until 3am. There was no intimacy and very little sex. Heck, even I stopped trying at the end. I knew that some random night you’d come up into to bed drunk as hell and poke me in the back with your dick. And I would relent because it had just been so long since I felt wanted. It’s sick.

I have very little respect for you now. So judge.  Please judge me for leaving a man that left bruises on my neck, who swept 2 lost pregnancies under a rug, lied to me everyday starting the day that we met, and couldn’t even get  hard on for me unless he was plastered. Please, tell the world how terrible I am.