Reconstructing Cori

Tag: mental-health

  • The biggest lie I told myself

    The Story I Clung To

    In one of my earliest posts, I wrote something I genuinely believed:

    That if I were ever in dire straits, my ex-husband would step up.
    That the version of him I faced during his spiral wasn’t truly who he was.

    That was a lie.

    A lie told to me
    by me.

    A lie I held onto because the truth was too heavy, too messy, too painful. And while there are a dozen reasons why I gaslit myself—childhood instability, the naive belief that love could fix anything, ignorance, fear—none of them excuse the story I kept rewriting to protect someone else at the cost of myself.

    And at the cost of my children.

    This past year changed that.

    This past year burned every illusion to the ground.

    The Truth I Can’t Unknow

    He hates me.

    And honestly?

    I hate him too.

    But not for what he did to me (okay, maybe a little), but for what he continues to do to our children.

    I am done sugarcoating.
    Done reframing.
    Done excusing.
    Done assigning blame to diagnoses, PTSD, or emotional immaturity.

    He doesn’t get my sympathy, my compassion, or my protection anymore.

    There are moments I can’t ignore—moments that explain a choice my children should never have needed to make.

    Like the day he told our 12-year-old, who struggles with severe ADHD, that she “ruins everything.”

    Do you know what that does to a child who already feels misunderstood?
    She didn’t just hear it.
    She believed it.

    Or the nights they tiptoed around his house like emotional landmines, whispering to each other about which version of him might show up.

    Kids shouldn’t have expertise in survival.

    They watched him become two different people: the patient, broken, soft-spoken man he showed to his then-girlfriend and her child… and the version he revealed when the doors closed.

    And still—still—they tried to love both versions.
    Tried to understand him.
    Tried to excuse him.
    Until they couldn’t anymore.

    The Choice They Shouldn’t Have Had to Make

    Earlier this year, he and I agreed the kids would live with him during the school week. He makes triple my income. He bought a house in a safer district. He gave them their own rooms and expensive toys. Meanwhile, I was over here juggling overdue tags, shifting bills like Tetris pieces, living in a sketchy two-bedroom apartment.

    But my children chose to come back to me.

    They chose safety over comfort.
    They chose emotional stability.

    Children don’t give up comfort unless something far more valuable is at stake.

    People love to say kids are resilient.

    But resilience shouldn’t be required to survive your own parent.

    The Moment Everything Broke

    When the kids told him they felt safer with me, when they admitted they didn’t want to live with him because they were scared—the rest of the illusion shattered.

    His behavior wasn’t temporary.
    It wasn’t circumstantial.
    It wasn’t something love or time could fix.

    It was a choice.

    And once you see that, you cannot unsee it.

    Their courage forced my clarity.

    They chose me—not because I had more to offer, but because what I offered was enough:

    Enough presence.
    Enough predictability.
    Enough love without conditions.

    The Fallout

    A little over a month ago, they moved back in with me—midway through the school year.

    The very next day, their father contacted the school to report that they were out of district. He claims it was to avoid a misdemeanor charge of mail fraud, but even after being shown the statutes confirming the kids could legally continue attending, he still argued against it.

    He is now selling his house.

    It has been over a week since he left our oldest on read. Before that, nearly two weeks.

    This morning, I found a drawing one of my kids made—just a character design, part of a D&D/comic idea. But beneath the sketch, tucked between backstory notes, were four words that hit harder than any accusation or argument:

    “I miss my dad.”

    I can’t describe the feeling of reading that.
    Grief and anger hit me simultaneously, but it was more than that.

    It was the realization that he is choosing this.
    Choosing to ignore his children.
    Choosing absence.
    Choosing silence.

    Choosing to abandon the relationship they still, heartbreakingly, crave.

    Why I’m Writing This

    I’m not writing this for sympathy.
    I’m not writing this to villainize him.
    I’m not writing this to punish anyone.

    I’m writing because silence has protected the wrong person for too long.

    Telling the truth is the only way to stop pretending.
    The only way to stop shrinking.
    The only way to teach my kids that love should never require self-erasure.

    He hates me.
    Fine.

    I don’t owe him the softer version anymore.

    What I owe—and what I will give—is safety, stability, and honesty to the kids who chose me.

    Not because I could give them more,
    but because I could give them enough.

  • A long ass update on life

    As I start this, I’m sitting at work, listening to a forty-minute conversation between my ex-husband and myself from before we officially separated and divorced. The first two minutes are nearly silent. That was normal for us, to begin a conversation with the need to speak, but neither of us wanting to really start it. Whatever can we opened was going to be an effort in closing back up. The last 38 minutes is a back and forth, with me pleading for palpable effort, him countering with how he wanted to but couldn’t, or how he was putting in the effort but I just didn’t see it, or my now favorite trigger, the subtle suggestion that I just wasn’t worth it.

    Admittedly, it probably isn’t the healthiest thing for me to listen to these recordings, especially years later. There are times when I listen and it absolutely destroys me. I remember that woman, I remember the weight of her in my chest, the desperation to just be heard in her voice. The pleading for equality. The attempts to explain the disparities and the quiet, whimpering defeat at the end of the “conversation” where I walked away feeling guilty or ashamed more often than not.

    Guilty or ashamed for even approaching the subject to begin with. Didn’t I know what he was going through? Why couldn’t I see the effort he claimed he was putting in? Compared to how I’d grown up, compared to the rest of the world, compared to other relationships, didn’t I know how good I had it? He didn’t beat me. He didn’t openly berate me. We had a roof, clothes, food, vehicles.

    But sometimes, when I listen to these recordings, they remind me of just how far I’ve come.

    And how far I’ve yet to go.

    Listening to them is like watching an old version of myself through thick glass — close enough to hear her breath catch, but far enough removed to finally see the miasma she was choking on.

    The silence at the beginning, the pleading in her voice, the guilt she swallowed like a morning vitamin… none of it surprises me anymore. But it does something else. It reminds me how much I tolerated simply because I didn’t know I deserved better.

    Sometimes, when I hear her — the self-blame, the way she bends herself in half trying to hold a crumbling marriage together — it breaks my heart. Other times, it lights a fire in me, because I can see so clearly now what she couldn’t back then.

    That’s the strangest part about healing:
    you don’t realize how far you’ve gone until you look back at the version of you that was left behind.

    The woman in that recording?
    She was tired.
    She was conditioned.
    She was surviving.

    And she’s not the woman I am anymore.

    Because somewhere between leaving that marriage and everything that followed — the health scares, the financial strain, the heartbreaks, the rebuilding — I became someone entirely different.

    The woman in the recording, the me before, was living in constant negotiation. Not only with someone who made her believe love had to be earned, but with herself.

    I negotiated and apologized for having needs. I convinced myself that if I held on just a bit longer, tried just a bit harder, stayed just a bit quieter, focused just a bit more on making his life easier… then maybe it would all be worth it. But the truth was, there was never going to be an “end.” There was always going to be something else he needed that outweighed what I did.

    I settled for “less harmful” instead of healthy.
    I graded my marriage on a curve built from childhood, trauma, and loneliness.


    I normalized my pain by justifying it.

    Other people had it worse. Other relationships were harder. I’d survived more as a child. I’d already endured abuse, cold winters, government cheese, and the taunting that came with clothes that didn’t fit or smell right. My children had more than I ever did at their ages — so who was I to complain?

    When I first started this blog, the idea was honesty. Brutal honesty.

    But I wasn’t being completely honest. Not with myself.
    I was still making myself small. Sure, I had emerged a bit, taken up a bit more space, but I was still hunched over, still placating, still trying to soothe a beast with my back pressed to a wall. I was still acting as an emotional container for someone else and placing myself further down the line. Not last anymore — but definitely not first.

    One of my earliest posts mentioned how I didn’t hate my ex-husband, how I took accountability for the downfall of our marriage, how I wanted to co-parent peacefully and wish him well because that benefitted our kids.

    But the truth — the real, uncomfortable truth — is that I was still unsure of my worth. I was still measuring myself by his responses. Still looking to him for cues on whether I was doing “enough.” Still using his emotional temperature as a barometer for my value. I wasn’t fully healed; I wasn’t even fully honest. I was performing stability because I thought it was the only way to keep the peace.

    And life has a funny way of testing the lies we tell ourselves.

    Because this past year didn’t give me the luxury of staying small. It pulled me forward whether I was ready or not. It pushed me into situations and ER visits I never expected. It dragged me through financial strain that made me question every decision I’d made. It led me into relationships that taught me in weeks what my marriage didn’t teach me in years. It stripped away the versions of myself built on survival and forced me to confront the one built on truth — actual truth — my truth.

    This last year — messy, painful, expensive, revealing — became the kind of clarity I never asked for but desperately needed.

    So here’s the part where I finally start to catch you up.
    Not the filtered version.
    Not the polite one.
    The real one.

    The one where I stop glossing things over, stop minimizing the abuse, stop joking about the trauma just to make it easier to swallow.

    Unless it’s funny. Then it’s fair game.

    This past year has been a rickety roller coaster. Since my last blog post, I’ve had my gallbladder removed unexpectedly. I’ve ended relationships and gained new ones. I’ve made enemies. I’ve spoken my mind when silence would’ve served me better, and I’ve stayed silent when my voice would’ve mattered. I’ve been between homes, hit rock bottom financially, and scraped by on the skin of my big toe. I’ve been shown the worst of the people I once trusted and have been the recipient of unsolicited kindness from absolute strangers. I’ve been a bitch to those who didn’t deserve it and kind to people who deserved a backhand. I’ve questioned my sexuality, my sanity, and my ability to even survive.

    But I’ve also learned what being appreciated feels like.
    What being seen feels like.
    And I’ve learned that sometimes, it’s really uncomfortable.

    I’ve tried to self-sabotage and run from the best relationship I’ve ever been in because I was scared. I’ve met the greatest love of my life and experienced a level of patience and rationality I didn’t even know existed — a kind of steadiness I didn’t realize was possible.

    And as I finish this, two days later and sitting in the home I’m getting ready to share with my loves, that’s where I’ll leave this for now — right on the edge of a difference I’m still learning to trust, a softness I’m still learning to believe I deserve, and a chapter I’m still learning how to write.