Closure

I woke up so sad, wanting to talk to him so badly.  After all of this and all I know now, a terrible black-red hollowness in my mind still threatens to eat away at its edges until there's nothing left but wanting him.  It'll be over 100 degrees today: the kind of day we hate, with the heat/humidity haze stuck in the air, even at 7 o'clock in the morning.  I replay all the things about our life together every single night.  I woke up hardly able to breathe.

But, I woke up anyway, and I made breakfast for my daughter before her first day of band camp.  I packed her last check for camp, her medical release, a water bottle, and a snack.  I put last night's dishes away while I made coffee for us.  I fed the cats and got her to camp on time. 
 
I live now to take care of my kids, but this is who I've been all this time.  This is where I find unconditional, never-ending love and my reason to keep getting up. 

Our biggest issue was the way he treated my kids.  From the very start, I couldn't ever be silent or let him "be the man."  He couldn't forgive me for it, and it just got worse.  I thought things would be so different.  In his past, his step father punched him and gave him a scar on his face that he carries with him to this day, and his mother stopped him from calling the police.  I was never that woman, and I always made that clear.

He pushed me down and screamed in my face several times over the course of our nearly five years, and I could forgive it.  

But it was different with the kids.

He resented me when I called him on the threats of violence he made to them.  He slapped my son on the back of the head, and he said it was nothing; I was over-reacting.  He would mock me and say that I was never scared in my house, and he should be praised because he was nothing like our fathers.

A week or so after he left, I sat in the floor with my daughter showing her my old poems and journals.  I was checking in with her because she doesn't seek me out to work out her feelings, and I worry about her most.  We talked for some time before she told me about the time in recent memory that he slapped her face for having a bowl in her room.  She thought I knew because he said he would talk to me.  He never did.  He knew that wasn't going to be ok.  If nothing else, it's this that stops me from calling or texting.  It's this that gives me closure.  It would have just gotten worse from here.