It’s been six weeks since I held my baby girl.
I don’t really know why I’m writing this. Maybe I just need somewhere to put it.
I’m going through a divorce with someone I genuinely loved more than I can explain. And one of the hardest things for me to process isn’t even that the marriage is ending. It’s looking at someone I shared a life with and wondering how we got from loving each other to this.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend our marriage was perfect or that I was perfect.
We fought. We argued. We both got angry. Things were said in the heat of the moment that shouldn’t have been said and, speaking for myself, there are things I wish I could take back.
I can own that.
But what I cannot own are things I genuinely did not do.
There are now allegations being made about me that I completely deny, including allegations of abuse. I know Reddit only has my side of the story, and I’m not asking strangers to decide who is right or wrong. But I know what happened in my marriage, and I know there were times when I was on the receiving end of behaviour that I believe was abusive too.
What is destroying me, though, isn’t the accusations.
It’s my daughter.
It has been six weeks since I last held my baby girl.
Six weeks.
Today I was sitting in church and there was a little baby girl in front of me. I looked at her and something inside me just collapsed. I can’t properly describe that pain. I miss the weight of my daughter in my arms. I miss seeing her face. I miss being her dad in all the tiny, ordinary ways that you never realise are everything until they’re gone.
That’s the part I can’t understand.
Her mother knows me. Whatever she thinks of me now as a husband, she knows how much I love our child. She knows that if there is one place she can hurt me more than anywhere else, it’s there.
And that’s exactly where this has gone.
Now I’m fighting through lawyers just to have contact with my own child while simultaneously defending myself against allegations I say are untrue and dealing with the financial side of a divorce where it feels like everything I’ve worked for is also being fought over.
I understand that a marriage can fail.
I understand that two people can hurt each other, become angry, resentful and eventually decide they cannot be together anymore.
What I don’t understand is how someone you once loved can become someone you barely recognise.
Take the money you so desperately want, Fight me over the house. Be angry with me. Divorce me.
But why does our daughter have to become part of the battlefield?
She isn’t a weapon.
She isn’t property.
She’s a little girl who deserves both of her parents loving her.
And I’m her dad.
I don’t want revenge. I don’t want my daughter growing up believing her mother is a terrible person. That’s still her mother, and I will always respect that relationship.
I just want to hold my little girl again.
Six weeks doesn’t sound like forever when you write it down.
When it’s your child, it feels like a lifetime.