A confession & a promise

I have a confession:

I am a liar.

Not the kind you’re thinking of. I was cured of telling bold-faced, purposeful falsehoods at a very young age. It’s a tragic story involving a 5-year-old girl, a fabricated birthday party and, later, the resultant denial of ice cream. I’ll tell you about it sometime.

I’m guilty of a different kind of dishonesty. It’s nothing you haven’t heard about before. In the social media age, many of us are guilty of presenting our lives to the world dressed to perfection. I’m not so sure that it’s always a bad thing, either. Sometimes we need to see alternate versions of ourselves, the world, and the people around us. Something different from the ones we wake up to everyday.

Call it a coping mechanism. Yes, an unhealthy one, but something you can lean on, a brief respite when your reality is too big and too scary to face.

But…I think I’m ready to own it now, even though everyone close to me already knows. Has known, for a while.

And yet, it’s so hard to say.

I am divorced.

There. I was going to type “a single mother,” but the small inward relief I felt told me instantly that that wouldn’t be the whole truth. That’s not the more difficult truth, the one that I wish didn’t exist. Am I a mother? Yes. Am I single? Yes. But I was not made so by accident.

I chose this.

That’s all I really have to say at the moment. The whys and hows can wait, perhaps (probably) indefinitely. I reserve the right to keep the details to myself, but I can make one promise. To myself, more than to anyone who may read this.

Whatever I do say, whatever glimpse of my life I choose to share with the world, it will be the truth.