What emotion feels like home, even if it isn’t healthy?
That would definitely be guilt. I swam, floated and dived repeatedly into a pool of guilt for years after I left my ex-husband.
Guilt that had to do with my kids. Not great experiences they had, because of me not being with them one hundred percent of the time.
Responsibilities they had to shoulder when they absolutely should not have had to, because I wasn’t with them one hundred percent of the time.
The guilt consumed me. I lived it, breathed it and ate it. Then one day I typed “feeling guilty after a divorce” into the search bar and found all kinds of information, comments and experiences by other women, who felt the exact same way I did. And my world started to open back up.
That very same day I also had coffee with a friend whose parents split up when she was young and at times, she too, was left in the custody of an alcoholic parent. She reassured me that despite it being challenging, she came out okay and my kids would too.
bloom.planted.north 
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