I was thirty-five years old, standing in front of my bathroom mirror with trembling hands, trying to fix a strand of hair that refused to stay pinned. My suit was pressed, my shoes polished, but my eyes gave me away.
No amount of concealer could cover the exhaustion etched into my face — exhaustion not only from single motherhood, but from the looming battle that would decide the future of my children.
Today was the custody hearing.
I had faced heartbreak before: discovering Mark’s affair, signing divorce papers, moving the kids and me into a tiny apartment with peeling wallpaper. But this? This was worse. Because losing Mark had hurt me. Losing my children would destroy me.
The Backstory
The affair had been a cliché — “late nights at the office,” lipstick stains explained away as “ketchup accidents,” phone calls that stopped abruptly when I walked into the room.
Mark was slick. He gaslit me for months, telling me I was paranoid, that stress from work and parenting was twisting my perception. But lies can only stack so high before they collapse.
When I finally confronted him, he didn’t even bother denying it. He just shrugged, as if fidelity had been a silly little rule he’d outgrown.
Divorcing him meant losing our comfortable house, the second car, the vacations. It meant learning how to stretch every paycheck until it screamed. But it also meant keeping my dignity — and teaching Lily and Sam that betrayal had consequences.
We ended up in a two-bedroom apartment, thrift-store furniture filling the gaps. The kids slept in bunk beds. The carpet was old, the stove temperamental. But it was ours, and it was safe.
I carried it all — school lunches, dentist appointments, late-night spelling quizzes, and whispered lullabies to soothe their nightmares. Every ounce of my energy went into Lily and Sam.
Mark, meanwhile, played the role of the “fun dad.”
The Performance
He’d sweep in once or twice a month with lavish gestures: Disneyland trips, expensive toys, shopping sprees. He rented limos for weekend outings. He bought Sam a PlayStation 5, Lily the latest iPhone.
And every single event was plastered across Instagram, carefully hashtagged: #BestDadEver.
By the time he dropped them back with me on Sunday nights, they were overtired, cranky, and buried under unfinished homework. And Mark? He vanished until the next performance.
