"Grant, the baby's been crying all night, and I don't know what to do. Charles said they're too busy to help this week." "Grant, I made a mistake. I see that now."
"Can we talk about working things out?" The answer is always the same. No. Not because I'm trying to be cruel, but because I learned something important during this whole nightmare.
You can't save people from the consequences of their own choices. You can't love someone into making better decisions. And you definitely can't build a stable life with someone who's willing to torch everything you've built together for the approval of people who see her as nothing more than a means to an end. Her choices are her burden now, not mine.
The kids see her every other weekend. Supervised visits at a neutral location because the court decided she needed to prove she could prioritize their well-being over her own drama. Sometimes she shows up. Sometimes she doesn't.
The kids have learned not to get their hopes up too high, which breaks my heart but also makes me proud of how resilient they are. "Dad," Emma says, interrupting my thoughts, "Jake put eggshells in the pancakes." "Did not," Jake protests. "That's just texture."
"Gross texture," Sophie adds helpfully. I look at my three kids, my actual kids, the ones I chose to protect when their mother chose something else, and feel something I haven't felt in a long time. Contentment. Not happiness exactly, because this isn't how I thought my life would turn out, but contentment with the knowledge that I did the right thing even when it was hard.
"All right, troops," I say, standing up to survey the pancake disaster. "Let's start over. And this time, maybe we leave the eggshells out of the recipe." "Can we put chocolate chips in instead?" Sophie asks.
"Absolutely," I say because life's too short for plain pancakes and too precious to waste on people who don't appreciate what they have. Outside, it's starting to rain. But inside our house, our actual home now, not just the place where we used to live, it's warm and safe and exactly where we belong. Not my baby, not my problem.
But these kids. This life we're building together. This peace we've found in the aftermath of someone else's spectacularly bad decisions. This is all mine, and I'm never letting anyone take it away from us.