Hinge, hickeys, and healing, or whatever

Last week, on one of my last nights in our shared marital home, I was putting the girls to bed by myself when we were going through a box of our family pictures. The twins like to ask which of them is photographed and if it’s from ages 0-2, unless they are both in it for me to run cross analysis, I just guess. We played several dozen rounds of that game before I noticed a pattern in our family pictures. Out of hundreds, there weren’t any of all five of us. There are pictures of our children, pictures of my ex-husband with our children (that he took), and pictures of me with our children (that I took). And I remembered how I used to beg for us to spend time together. I asked for us to be, to act out, what we appeared to be, a family. Divorced nearly the whole of our marriage. I sent a text to him, saying our children weren’t really losing anything. Not anything they ever had at least.