Take another little piece of heart now, baby.

There are lots of elements of my separation from my husband that are complicated and frustrating but when it comes to arrangements regarding our daughter Lulu we have always agreed on the importance of stability for her, she sees her dad every Monday and Tuesday night and every other Saturday night. We even have a spread sheet! We are both as amenable and flexible as we can be to the other if something comes up and things need to be changed. I gave my husband two weeks notice of my long weekend to New York when I was meant to have Lu and it was no problem for him to swap weekends with me, see, Lu is our common ground. The first night she stayed with him after he left was also the first night she had slept way from home without me, it absolutely broke my heart and I sobbed all night. She was only two, still a baby, still in nappies. She needed me. She couldn’t talk properly, how could she tell me if she was sad or unhappy? She had spent the first nine weeks of her life in an hospital incubator, and now I was having to give her up again. I hated my husband so much for creating this situation but I couldn’t refuse him. I trust him implicitly with her, he is just as good and as capable a parent as I am and as time went on it became easier. I embraced the nights of uninterrupted  sleep  and Lulu enjoyed her time with her dad and his family. FaceTime is a wonderful thing. As long as she felt loved and safe she was happy wherever she was. But now it is two years later and Lulu is getting older and it is getting harder, for me,not her. She is now fully aware of who’s house she is at, who she will be spending the day with and when I Face Time her she is often far more interested in what ever game she is playing than talking to me. It makes me feel insecure, like the photo in Back to the Future that fades people out. I wonder if she is going to forget me, am I literally fading from her memory, am I not so important to her anymore? Please bear in mind that at the most she is at her dad’s house for two nights in a row and that she actually lives with me. I know that this is my issue, I want her to be independent, I’d hate for her to be pining for me. I know that she acts the way she does because she is secure in the love that her dad and I have for her. She is all the things I ever wanted her to be. Deep down I know that I am being melodramatic, that my baby loves me and misses and that I am important to her but every time she walks out the front door hand in hand with her dad that Janis Joplin song plays in my head…Take another little piece of my heart now, baby.