Singing the Single Mom Blues

I have a beautiful 11-year-old daughter.  I spent five years in fertility trying to get her.  I couldn't believe how lucky I was when she was born.  She was a happy, sunny child.  I loved everything about being a mom...  I even quit my job so I could work at home and breast-feed her.

Then one of my husband's businesses imploded and I had to go back into the work force.  Just a couple years after that, I figured out how to work at home again so I could be near her.  I'd been working at home for about 5 years, running my own little marketing company
when the divorce chip in my husband's brain activated and I was forced to go back to a full-time job outside the home.  Way outside as it turns out.  I found a great job 25 miles away and that meant a two hour commute every weekday.

The commute was a hellish, involving some of LA's worst traffic.  But I did it because I needed the steady money and benefits.  Then I got an opportunity to work 6 miles from home for about the same pay.  I took it. Even though it meant giving up my work family I had
grown so close to.  But I did it because I could be closer to my daughter and I could escape the mind-numbing commute.

So I should be happy now, right?  But I'm not.  Mostly because my dear daughter is so angry about the divorce that she's taking it out on me.

Even though the divorce wasn't my idea.  Even though I was the one that finished the remodel on my own and dealt with the sale of the house and had to move an enitire home into storage in only two weeks.

My daughter doesn't know that her dad dumped me for a romantic fantasy that didn't pan out.  She's not aware of the lies he told in mediation, or his years of selfishness or inadequacy.  All she knows is - if he left my mom, he can leave me.  And that terrifies her,
as it would any child.