I have typed out more texts to my ex than I have ever actually sent.
They live in that strange digital graveyard of drafts, started and then deleted before my thumb ever hits send, usually somewhere around 11pm, which seems to be the hour my unfiltered thoughts come out to play whether I invite them or not.
In the early days, some of those texts were soft in a way that embarrassed me later. Not angry, not sharp. Soft. A memory that surfaced out of nowhere, a moment that felt worth saying out loud even though there was nowhere left to put it. I'd start typing and then stop, because somewhere mid-sentence I'd remember that we weren't those people for each other anymore. But I want to be fair to that version of me, the one sitting with her phone at 11pm second guessing her choices, wondering if she'd gotten it right. That was thirteen years of my life. Of course it took time. Of course there were soft texts that never got sent. That wasn't weakness. That was just honest.
The angry ones came too, especially in the thick of early coparenting, when the handoffs were still jagged and every miscommunication felt enormous.
I wrote plenty of those, fast and sharp, said everything I needed to say in a draft nobody ever read, and then deleted them before I did something I couldn't take back. That system saved me more times than I can count.
But here's the thing about now. I don't draft those texts much anymore.
Not because the coparenting is perfect. It is absolutely not. There are still bad days, still moments when an angry text lands in my inbox and I have to set my phone face down and breathe for a full minute before I respond like a rational adult. I am still learning to ignore what should be ignored, hold the boundaries I've set, and move on without carrying the weight of it into the rest of my day. That part is ongoing. Probably always will be.
What's changed is everything else.
I look at my life now and I genuinely like what I see. My home, my career, my kids growing up surrounded by more love and support than I could have engineered on my own. My parents are close enough that the kids see them constantly, which was never part of the original picture I had for my life but has turned out to be one of the best parts of the new one. Some mornings I walk through my house and think about the white picket fence version of life I used to imagine for myself, and I feel something, a small flicker of something. But it passes quickly, because the life I'm actually living is full in ways that picture never accounted for.
Bauer is stealing shoes as I write this, probably depositing them somewhere in the backyard with the rest of his collection. I have a robot vacuum in almost every room because of him, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write about my life, and yet here we are and I would not change it. My kids are loud and funny and growing up knowing what it looks like when a woman builds something from scratch and refuses to apologize for it.
The unsent texts were part of the process. Every single one of them. I don't regret writing them and I don't regret deleting them. They were how I moved through something big, quietly, without making it anyone else's problem.
I'm on the other side of it now. Not the white picket fence side. Something better. The side where the life is actually mine.
I'm Nathaly from Yo-Momma: single mom of three, hockey rink regular, and curator of the stuff that actually survives real mom life. No fluff, no sponsored nonsense, just what works.
