A Letter To My Daughter About Divorce

Melina,

I write this letter today as we finish our first full weekend together to let you know that you are my daughter and I love you from the bottom of my heart.

Right now you probably have no clue what is going on.

Being bounced around like a pinball, back and forth between homes, grandparents, and places that seem new and scary. I want you to know that I love you and I understand what you are going through.

I have been in your shoes many years ago, and I know what it is like to feel so lost and confused. I was just a little older than you when my parents split up. I know that you wish things could be different, and I do too, but sometimes love isn’t enough to keep people together.

Perhaps you might tell people that you have two houses now, with a look of excitement and confusion. But as you grow, I am sure you will have more questions.

So today, I will tell you a story about love.

Before you were born, I was deeply in love with your mother. I never met another woman like her that was interested in who I was as a man and who could make me laugh.

She came to my rescue when I was lost in the world after being in the Marines for ten years. We traveled the world together, and we wrote our own storybook of love and adventures. Everything was amazing and the day we found out we were having you our lives changed forever.

I will not lie, Melina, I was very afraid to be a father.

I was just figuring out who I was as a man, and I think your mother did not know herself too well either. But it was the birth of you, that forced us to grow as humans.

We had a lot of work to do as a parents, and I wish we could have done some of that work before you arrived, but that’s the cool thing about love, there are no expectations, and it is neither happy nor sad, but merely a reflection of all the great times we have in life. And so we tried our best and had a lot of laughs and adventures.

But we also did lots of yelling and screaming, and hurt each other. And so now our lives are shaken up, and you might feel anxious because you don’t know what is wrong or right.