I’ve mentioned before that Chris and I have been taking things pretty slowly and carefully with our kids and what they’re exposed to, as far as our relationship. And I think it’s gone really well – our kids get along well together, and his kids seem to like me, and my girls adore him.

One of the things that he and I have talked about many times, but hadn’t actually done yet, is having a sleepover when the kids are in the house. On the nights when Chris doesn’t have his kids, sometimes he’ll come over for dinner and hang out until after the girls go to bed, but typically he’ll come over around 9 p.m., after the girls are already asleep, and he leaves to go home long before they wake up in the morning.

Saturday was a little different. We met up with our kids at Pullen Park and let them play together. Chris’s mom was also there, which made me a little nervous, but this is the second time I’ve met her, and she seems to like me as far as I can tell. (Older Southern women can be hard to read. They’re going to act like they like you, no matter what, because that whole Southern Hospitality Gene is fully ingrained in their personalities.)

The kids had a great time, although it was ridiculously hot and sweaty at the park. After a couple of hours, we split up – he took his kids to their mom’s house, and I picked up Jasmine (my girls’ favorite baby-sitter) on our way home.

The plan had been that we’d go back to our respective homes and clean up, and then Chris would pick me up for a date night on Saturday night. I showered and got dressed while the girls hung out with Jasmine (seriously, teenagers are the BEST), and I ordered pizza for them to have while I was out. It was getting kind of late, and Chris hadn’t gotten to my house yet, which was odd.

Then he called and said, “Sooooo, I think we’re having dinner at Bonefish Grill.”

Me: “Ok, that’s fine with me, but why there?”

Him: “Because my car just broke down next to it.”

Yikes. So, instead of him picking me up, I hopped in my car and took off to pick him up. He had managed to get his car into a parking space by coasting downhill into a shopping center. He called his mechanic (who happens to be a friend of his), and he said he’d come out to meet him the next morning to look at the car. But basically he was stranded with me from Saturday night until around 11:00 a.m. on Sunday morning.

And that’s the backstory on how we had our first official sleepover with the kids in the house. He couldn’t leave before they woke up, because his car was dead in a parking lot five miles from my house.

Around 6 a.m. on Sunday morning, Lucy came to get in bed with me, the way she always does. I let her climb in, but I said, “Look, baby, Chris is here too, see?” I didn’t want her to be scared, and she wasn’t, she just looked kind of confused. I scooted into the middle of the bed and pulled her up next to me, and she kept craning her head up to look over me at Chris, like, “Huh. Well this isn’t part of our routine.” Then finally she lay back down and went to sleep for a while.

(Side note just because some people may read this and wonder: everyone was sleeping fully clothed. T-shirts and pajama pants all around. Just in case anyone was worried.)

By 8:30, Catie came into my room too, which woke us all up. She saw Chris was there and was totally unfazed. Lucy was happy by then too, and I turned on the TV in my bedroom for the kids to watch cartoons for a while. They climbed all over us and tickled each other and laughed, and it was a really great little moment there.

Finally, we got out of bed and got dressed, then went out for pancakes, before taking Chris to his car to meet up with his mechanic friend. (It turned out to be a dead alternator. It’s fixed now.)

I love that my girls love him and are totally at ease with him. In fact, on Sunday morning, I fussed at Lucy for something (I don’t even remember what, it just got a, “no ma’am, we don’t do that” from me), and she ran to Chris and buried her face in his neck for comfort. And Catie gives him hugs and kisses whenever she can.

Watching how easily their relationship has developed makes me really happy. He’s great with his own kids, I should’ve known that he’d be equally great with mine.

Later on Sunday, I had this conversation in the car with Catie:

Me: “Hey, Bug, I need a favor. How about we don’t tell Pop-Pop that Chris spent the night?”

Catie: “Ok, but why?”

Me: “Well, Pop-Pop thinks that boys & girls shouldn’t spend the night together unless they’re married.”

Catie: “Why does he think that?”

Me: “You know, babe, Pop-Pop is just old, and there were certain things people believed when he was young that we don’t believe anymore, but he still does, even though it’s stuff that doesn’t matter anymore. Does that make sense?”

Catie: “Is this like how he sometimes says bad things about black people?”

Me: “Yes, exactly like that. We know that’s wrong, and we don’t believe that anymore, but that’s how things were when Pop-Pop was growing up, so he still thinks that way.”

Catie: “That’s silly.”

Me: “Yep, it sure is.”

And then she dropped it, and she hasn’t said a word about the sleepover since then. I know my dad will eventually find out, and I’m sure he’ll flip his lid, because even after two kids, he can’t handle the idea that maybe I’m not a virgin anymore. But as much as I love my dad, he doesn’t get to dictate the rules of my relationship. So, if/when he finds out and gets upset, we’ll deal with it. That’s just life.

But right now? Life is really, really good.

I suppose it’s universally known that divorce sucks, right? I mean, that’s no secret. And it’s worse when there are little kids involved. Again: not a secret.

But I’ve always had this rule, that I will do everything in my power to limit what the kids are exposed to. Dave and I go through phases where we get along, and phases where we don’t, but the kids don’t hear about it when we’re fighting. I never want them to feel like they’re being put in the middle, or forced to pick sides.

Since Dave lives in Seattle and we’re in North Carolina, I do whatever I can to try to facilitate the girls’ relationship with their dad. If they ask to have a FaceTime chat with him, unless it’s in the middle of the night, I always text him to see if he can talk to them. I try to make sure they get as much time with him as possible when he’s in town. Sometimes it’s inconvenient or hard for me personally, but I put my own feelings aside for their benefit. What am I going to say, “no I won’t text Daddy to see if he can chat, because I’m really annoyed with him right now”? He’s their dad, they have a right to a relationship with him, and the way I see it, it’s my job to help that along however I can.

I thought this was just a common sense rule of divorce. It seems so basic, doesn’t it?

It’s interesting, dating someone who is also divorced with kids, and seeing how other people handle the same life situations. And I have learned a lot about the kind of ex-wife I will never, ever be.

Chris told me ages ago when we first started dating that his ex-wife had some “anger issues” (phrasing it nicely), and I knew some stories of things that had happened between the two of them (and I’ve seen the court papers myself), but I naively thought that the kids weren’t exposed to any obvious hostility between the two of them.

I was wrong.

Based on his ex-wife’s behavior, I’m now coming up with a list of things that I vow to never do as a divorced mom. For example:

* I will never tell my kids that their dad doesn’t love them.
* I will never tell my kids that their dad didn’t want them.
* I will never call my ex-husband names in front of my kids.
* I will never tell them that they aren’t allowed to hug their dad.
* I will never tell my kids that if Daddy gets mad at them, they should call 911 and say that he’s trying to kill them. (No, really. I’m not making that up.)

This list could go on and on. There are also things that don’t involve the kids that I will never do. I mean, just as an example? I will never randomly text my ex-husband in the middle of a workday to call him a c*cksucker, for no apparent reason. Which has very little to do with my relationship with Dave, and more to do with the fact that I would never text anyone in the middle of a workday (or any other time, for that matter), just for the purpose of calling them a c*cksucker. I mean, honestly. That’s just rude. What would Miss Manners say?

Up until recently, I didn’t think that I had some superior moral compass or anything, I just thought that I was doing what all grown adults try to do when faced with a divorce while their kids are young. Now I’m wondering if her “do everything possible to alienate the kids from the other parent” scenario is more common. I really and truly hope that’s not the case, though. Because I cannot imagine how much that sucks for those two sweet kids.

Chris has two kids that are somewhat close in age to mine. His daughter is 8 and his son is nearly 6 (and is also a kindergartener-going-on-first-grader like Catie). Since he has the kids half the time, we decided a while back that if we wanted to try to spend any substantial amount of time together, eventually our kids were going to have to meet.

The thing is, neither of us wanted it to be some formal introduction of, “….and this is Mommy’s boyfriend,” or anything like that. We figured the best way to handle it was to keep it as low key as possible.

So, a few weeks ago, we met up at a McDonald’s PlayPlace. We sat at tables next to each other, and just chatted casually while the kids played. The idea was that if they wanted to play together, great, but there were also other kids there for them to play with and nobody would feel pressured. And it actually worked out REALLY well, everyone seemed to hit it off.

Since then, we’ve gone on a few other outings together with the kids. We’ve met up at playgrounds and gone to a local street carnival, that kind of thing. Chris and I have (so far) made a point of not having any physical contact with each other when the kids are around (no hugging, kissing, holding hands, etc.). For a while there, I wasn’t sure that the kids had any idea that we were dating, or if they thought we were just friends.

That has changed, recently: I accidentally referred to him as my boyfriend while talking to someone else when Catie was within earshot, but I don’t know if that word really means anything to her yet. On Chris’s end, his 8 year-old daughter has been asking questions about me that indicate she knows that I’m his girlfriend. But fortunately, all of the kids seem to be ok with it.

Last weekend, we decided at the last minute to meet up at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, but unfortunately we got there at 4:30 p.m., not realizing that the museum closes at 5 p.m. (Oops?) So instead we went for some Goodberry’s frozen custard.

While we were having ice cream, the kids whined that they wanted to go play somewhere else. Chris noticed a Chick-Fil-A next door, and while I have tried for the past year or so to boycott them due to their anti-LGBT views… well. It was over 80 degrees outside and they had an indoor, climate-controlled play area. So, yeah, we went to Chick-Fil-A. (Apparently my morals are for sale when the price is air-conditioning.) They played for about two hours and had a blast.

Lucy is a little too young to join in with the older kids when they play, so she decided that the best game was to keep going in and out of the play area. Since we were at the table right next to the door, it meant that Chris had to keep jumping up to open the door for her. Lucy would come up to the door of the play area and lean on it until Chris opened it for her, then she’d run over to me, give me a kiss, then run back to the door and look over her shoulder at Chris until he opened the door for her to go back into the play area. I told him he could stop, he didn’t have to play along with her little game, but he was a good sport about it.

One of the times she came out, instead of running over to give me a kiss, she ran up to him and raised her arms up in the air, the universal toddler sign language for “pick me up!” He picked her up, and she hugged him and buried her face in his neck for a couple of minutes. Then she wriggled back down to the floor and got back to her game of running in and out of the play area. But it was such a sweet little moment, I wish I’d taken a picture.

I did get a picture of this a couple of weeks ago, though.

All four kids on a tire swing, and all four of them were yelling for Chris to push them higher and faster. That was a pretty great moment right there, too.

I made Chris promise a long time ago that he’ll never ask me to marry him, so it’s not like we’re going to have any kind of Brady Bunch thing happening here. But I have to admit, I do love that our kids seem to enjoy each other and all get along really well. It’s a pretty fun dynamic to watch as it evolves.

Man, two posts about my brain chemistry and I go and turn into one of those confessional type bloggers who pours their entire private life on the Internet. Watch out, here I go again.

VERY IMPORTANT WARNING: If you are part of my immediate or extended family, you will most likely want to skip this post. I’m about to say some things about myself that are definitely less than flattering.

So, when The Guy and I broke up, I was… not very nice about it. I didn’t handle it well, and I said a lot of very mean things about him (mostly on Twitter). I was hurt and angry. But there’s been a pretty major shift in the last couple of days, and I’m starting to recognize some of my own shortcomings.

Way back in March 2012, when The Guy and I first started dating, it was the beginning of what I can only refer to as my “Post-Divorce Slut Phase.” I’m not sugarcoating it, that’s what it was, really. I’m not particularly proud of my behavior, but I’ll own it. (And, well, ok, I admit that it was a lot of fun.) I think that my ego and my self-esteem had been so damaged by the end of my marriage, that I actively sought out positive reinforcement from other men. Lots of them. As in, I’d have to sit down and write out a list and think really hard to even try to remember exactly how many guys I slept with last year.

(See why I said my relatives should skip this post?)

I will say, because I feel like I need to, that the girls were never exposed to any of my behavior. The things I did only occurred when they were with a baby-sitter or Dave or my parents or whoever. And I’ve thought about how odd it might be for them when they’re older, if they find this blog and read this particular entry. All I can hope is that they’ll be old enough to understand.

So, The Guy? He knew that I was dating – and sleeping with – a lot of other guys at the same time that I was dating/sleeping with him. And he was ok with that. He had separated from his ex right around the same time that Dave and I split, so he wasn’t ready to jump into a serious relationship, just like I wasn’t.

(Random aside: I should have blogged a lot of this stuff as it happened last year. I probably could’ve gotten a major sponsorship from a condom company.)

But there was this weird chemical attraction that he and I had to each other. With other guys, I’d go out with/have sex with them a couple of times and then drop them like a hot potato for some reason or other. But I always came back to him. He just “got me,” in a way that nobody else I dated really seemed to get me.

At some point last fall, I decided that I was done with all of the other guys, and I only wanted to be with him. I realized that I had fallen in love with him – HARD – and that was that.

The problem was, while I was slutting it up all over town, he had been dating one other person besides me. So, basically, I was asking him to dump this other person and only focus on me. And when he hesitated, I interpreted that to mean that he didn’t really want me that much, and I ended it.

And that was that.

Fast-forward a few months. We haven’t talked since right after Christmas, and I saw that he clicked on my online dating profile. I saw that picture of his face and I burst into tears. I wasn’t expecting that – either seeing him or my reaction.

I tried to ignore it. Then, a few days later, I saw he clicked on it again.

I messaged him and said, “I’m genuinely curious: are you trying to torture me or yourself?”

That opened the floodgates. He told me he missed me, he still loves me, he called me Sweetie…

Then he said something to me that kind of struck a chord: I never once flat-out told him that I wanted a monogamous relationship.

I mean, I thought I did. I implied it. But I never actually said the words out loud.

And it brought home something that I learned during my divorce: I really and truly suck when it comes to communicating my needs in a relationship.

So. Huh. Whaddya know. Apparently that is not exclusive to the dynamic between Dave and me, it’s just how I am when I’m dating someone.

Basically, his version of the story is that I dropped a few hints, he didn’t immediately pick up on it, and when he couldn’t read my mind, I bolted.

I told this to a friend of mine, and his response was, “Wait. You’ve been miserable and in pain all this time, and it turns out it was self-inflicted?” And, yeah. It would seem that way, at least partially.

We’ve been talking and texting pretty much constantly over the past couple of days. We’ve agreed to meet for lunch – in a public place, no chance of any funny business happening – and sit down and really talk about what each of our needs/wants/expectations are, and see if there’s a chance we could work things out.

(I’m planning to write my stuff down in advance, since, you know, see above re: not being able to say that kind of thing out loud.)

Because lord help me, I do still love him. And I have missed him so, so much.

I don’t know where this is going. I guess I just have to wait and see. And I have to start forcing myself to work a lot harder on what I tell my kindergartner all the time: use your words.

Wish me luck, y’all. I think I’m going to need it.