Brave Enough To Be Bliss

Chapter 14 — Hard-Knock Life

“You’ll never do a whole lot unless you’re brave enough to try.” Dolly Parton

Having found no resolution to the struggles in our marriage, by the time Kylee was a sophomore in high school, we decided it was time to proceed with a divorce. Hard-knock is defined by Merriam- Webster as “marked by difficult or painful experiences or circumstances,” and that’s exactly what Kylee experienced her sophomore year of high school. On the Friday before Labor Day weekend in 2011, we explained we would be getting a divorce and her dad left that evening.

Following that, everything I did was focused on impacting her life as minimally as possible. Unfortunately, life didn’t go along with that plan .

September 2, 2011: We tell her about the divorce. November 14, 2011: She suffers a concussion on the first night of basketball tryouts. December 30, 2011: Kylee and I leave our family home and move into a townhome. January 10, 2011: She reports no more concussion symptoms and returns to practice. February 1, 2011: She suffers a career-ending concussion. April 18, 2011: Physician requests 504 plan which was changed to an IEP in order to provide special educational services and support to meet her unique needs. I worked with the attorney to draft a settlement that would be very fair and agreeable to my husband so there was less chance he would be tempted to say anything negative about me. I was supportive of her seeing him whenever she wanted. I spoke positively to her about him at all times , which wasn’t difficult because I loved the father he was to her. The fact our marriage didn’t work wasn’t reflective of my feelings for him as a human being and I missed our family a great deal. While there isn’t an easy divo rce, we came to an agreement easily and always put Kylee’s best interests first. Personally, I had experienced my parents’ multiple divorces, so I was well versed with the process and potential pitfalls, and we did everything we could to limit her suffering through the transition. It was hard to adjust to not having our family of three for sure, but overall, I felt I was taking to single life fairly well. That is until one day, when the ice wouldn’t come out of the freezer door. I’ m pretty self-sufficient, but there always seems to be one thing that is my nemesis in any house I live in. At this house, it had been the ice maker the whole time we had lived there. The other two didn’t seem to have any issues with it, but every once in a while, it would get backed up. Knowing it was just “the thing” I couldn’t handle, my husband would come take care of it for me and make it look easy. There would be times he wouldn’t be there, and I would try to do what he always did, but it never worked, and it just was so frustrating to me. One day, not long after he moved out, the ice maker wouldn’t work. I tried to fix it to no avail and then I lost it. Seconds later, Kylee and two friends walked in through the garage door a few steps away from me so there was no time to recover. The girls stopped in their tracks and stared at me on the floor by the freezer, and Kylee, quickly assessing what was going on, calmly came over, fixed the ice maker and closed the door. I had wanted to shield her from any of my feelings so as not to add to her sadness and worry. I remember apologizing and feeling embarrassed that they walked into that, but now I can look back and see it really was OK for her and her friends to see me cry once. It was a very rare thing for her to see me cry and if there was one time it was normal and natural to cry, this was it. The divorce, not the ice maker. The divorce was a big change for all of us, so it was probably healthier for her to know I got a little sad sometimes too. While we had to move out of the house we had built nine years earlier, I bought a townhome in the same subdivision so at least she would still be in the same neighborhood the majority of the time. I generally started coming home from work at 5 p.m. so I could spend as much time with her as possible. I remember being surprised that I still got everything done that absolutely had to be done. And there were days that she was with her dad, so I would work late on those evenings to catch up on anything. However, I learned I was the one with

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