Sometimes I find myself so hung up on Joel’s past with Lisa.
Not because he had a past — Christ knows I do too — but because something in me feels angry in a way I can’t always explain.
I think I’m angry that she had the best of him and systematically broke him down into someone even he didn’t recognise anymore. Angry that she had all that love from him and gave nothing back. Angry that she had the kind of pregnancy support and certainty I could only have dreamed of — a family that was wanted and planned, not a perceived mistake that I will never stop paying for in quiet, invisible ways.
I know the past can’t be changed.
I know there’s nothing productive about rewriting old stories.
And I know — deeply — that if things had been different then, Joel and I might never have found each other.
That thought alone makes me grateful beyond words.
But still… fuck.
Sometimes I wish we could have had the little family we both deserved from the beginning.
Not because our blended family isn’t amazing — it truly is. I love those monsters fiercely, glares and all. The noise, the chaos, the unexpected tenderness. It’s real and it’s ours.
But I can’t help mourning the quieter version.
The soft mornings.
The planned certainty.
The one where nothing had to be repaired first.
I don’t want a different man.
I don’t want a different life.
I just wish love had arrived without scars — and that motherhood hadn’t come wrapped in apology and survival.
Maybe this isn’t anger at all.
Maybe it’s grief.
Grief for a parallel life that never existed.
Grief for ease.
Grief for certainty.
And still — alongside that grief — there is another truth I don’t want to lose.
We built something anyway.
Not the easy version.
Not the untouched version.
But the honest one.
What Joel and I have isn’t born of naïveté or expectation. It came after loss, after breaking, after learning what love should never cost. We met each other with open eyes and pasts that had already taught us how fragile people can be — and how precious gentleness is when it’s finally protected.
He knows me inside and out.
Not the polished version.
Not the calm one.
The anxious one.
The grieving one.
The version shaped by survival.
And he stays.
This love is chosen every single day — not because it’s simple, but because it’s worth it. Because we know what it feels like to be diminished, and we refuse to do that to each other. What we offer now isn’t impulse or illusion — it’s care.
Our family didn’t arrive wrapped in certainty.
It arrived in layers.
In negotiations and schedules.
In bruises that still ache sometimes.
But it is real.
And it is held.
I still grieve the life we didn’t get.
But I honour the one we made from fragments and faith.
Because there is something sacred about love that survives.
About choosing each other after the world has already proven it can be cruel.
We didn’t get the beginning we deserved.
But we are writing something solid, something true — something that knows the cost of love and pays it gladly.
And somehow, that matters just as much.