Acceptance doesn’t mean it stops hurting. It just means you stop waiting for things to be different.
Breaking up is hard enough on its own. Breaking up when you have a child together is a different kind of hard — one that doesn’t let you cut contact cleanly or heal in a straight line. You still have to communicate. You still have to show up. And you have to figure out how to do all of that while carrying the anger and the grief and the constant reminder that this person is still in your life whether you want them to be or not.
I’ve read dozens of articles on how to get through a breakup. Writing has helped more than any of them. And after all that reading, I came across Lisa Steadman’s advice on post-breakup recovery and realized I was already doing some of it — just messily, and without knowing why it mattered. Here’s what I’ve been holding on to:
Create new boundaries.
This was the hardest one. Emotionally detaching from someone when you share a child is complicated in ways people who haven’t been through it don’t fully understand. Early on, I blocked him on everything — then unblocked him and started checking his accounts when the anger settled into something quieter and more desperate. I hated that I was doing it. Then he posted photos with her and I realized he had blocked me from seeing his accounts. That was the moment something snapped into clarity: I was still holding on to a small piece of hope that things could be fixed. He had already moved on. And in blocking me from his accounts, he had also effectively blocked himself from seeing Xavy.
I eventually blocked him everywhere except one channel for communicating about Xavy. When he started asking about my personal life, I shut that down. When I realized that even Xavy-related messages were keeping me emotionally tethered, I set those to go unread too. Now if he video calls, it’s the nanny and Xavy who talk to him. That boundary has held, and I’m proud of that.
No online ex-bashing.
I did a lot of this in the beginning when the anger was loudest. I don’t anymore. Partly because the anger has quieted, and partly because I’ve accepted that none of it was really in my control. After three years together, I eventually understood that this was a pattern in him that existed before me — there were people before me who were smarter, more beautiful, more than enough, and it still happened. It had nothing to do with what I was or wasn’t. Online bashing was never going to change that, so I let it go.
Follow the six-month rule.
It’s only been 58 days, but I’m getting there. My family — my parents, even Xavy’s nanny — and my friends and work have carried a lot of the weight. I won’t pretend there aren’t still nights when I look at Xavy and cry without quite knowing why, or mornings when I wake up and the first thought is still him. But it hurts less than it did last month. And less than the month before that.
Every time I look back now, I try to remind myself: this was not something I could have fixed. The lesson was never about what I did wrong. It was about what I now know to protect.
Letting go of the anger, the pain, and the what-ifs — that’s the work. And day by day, I think I’m actually doing it.
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