Dracona, it is your perception of family that is causing you conflict. You and your daughter are family and YOU can provide her with stability without a father figure. I am raising my grandson...he has not seen his mother in over a year because he has never been or never will be a priority for her. He has been with me his entire life and does not know anything other than his experience. His father (my son) is in a position to take him now but we both agreed that it is not in the little ones best interest. Consistency and stability with a lot of love and laughter. I struggled too until I realized that I make the difference in his life...yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I can not control others but i can make sure that I give him everything I have to give and that he does not lack for love on my part. Just love her ....we will make mistakes along the way but as long as your love is constant she will learn true family values from you. Much love to you beautiful!!

Dracona,
I do understand your feeling around family but you also have to consider how healthy the family was/is. Your daughter needs strength, honesty, love and peace in her life. If that was happening then there is a loss for her. You are a small but true family. Believe it. I read a long time ago that a child only needs one strong, stable adult who truly loves them and is there for them in childhood. You are that person for your child. Sometimes in those moments, I ask myself this question: "Is the relationship you had one that you wish for your daughter?" If the answer is no, then give the love to yourself and to your daughter and find some peace. She needs to see your strength and your self-love to be a self-confident woman one day. I see this in my 18 year old daughter now. She has seen me up and down and had a bit of a job (I am seeing now) in helping me love myself. I don't want her to have that job. Ever. I have to be okay on my own. I am one of her teachers just like you are for your little one. You can do it. Love.

Thanks ladies. I know I can be that with my daughter. I know she doesn't need a man. Just as I don't. It's harder having allowed someone I am no longer with take that role. He is still very involved with her. I don't think I could be in college with out him taking care of her. And me... Who I am will never let another man take that role. She will not have another daddy. Nor do I wish to take her away from him. I do not want her to have any feelings of loss ingrained in her. She's only turning three. But if she is like me she will remember. I remember being a baby. I remember my second birthday. I remember wearing diapers. I remember more than my mother. I just want a working home. With both sides of the equation.

Is he your daughter's biological father? Just curious.

Dracona...not all "working homes" are truly that...working homes. Yes for some families, a mom and dad are under one roof for the children but it's not everything that appearances would have you believe. I'm the product of a two parent home until I was seven. Then I was the product of a single parent home. Which did the most damage to me growing up? Hmmm...I'll never really know. While living with both parents, I witnessed my father physically abuse my mother. I witnessed my mother have another baby with another man. While living with just my mom, I witnessed and lived the complete departure of my father who never cared enough to come back and see his daughter...not once. To this day, I never saw my father again since I was seven. I witnessed my mother get physically abusive with my sister. I could continue but won't.

All I mean by this is to show you what you DO have...you have your daughter who loves you unconditionally. PERIOD. You love her too unconditionally. PERIOD. Her father is still involved in her life and I have no doubt he loves her too. There are so many different family dynamics in the world today. However, as long as your daughter is saturated by the love of her parents regardless whether they live under one roof or two, she has so much to look forward to in life. You want her to witness love and know she's loved...by what you've said above I promise you she feels loved.

What more could a beautiful three year old little girl want but the love of her mother and father no matter how the family is structured. Be gentle with yourself and cut yourself some slack! I could only wish to have had my mother be more like you when I was growing up. Just know the peace and calmness will come when YOU allow it to. Surround yourself in your daughter's love today and see how much she brims with the love you've already given to her!! :)

Much love to you today, Dracona.

no creo, he is not. the real one left me when i was pregnant, lives 5 mins down the road from me still, and has seen her 4 maybe 5 times in her life. i get child support because they take it from him. he will never be anything to her, nor will she let him. I had a relationship after the split from her surrogate dad. she will never let anyone else be her daddy. she loves him. and she is a smart little girl. she understands alot more than most children her age, hell, she isnt even 3 yet and she can write her letters and will do art pictures for hours and hours. very smart. i dont mean just squiggly lines that look like something. she draws oceans and suns and moons and mountains with whales and sea anenomies and shark teeth. I will not discount her intelligence by saying she doesnt understand or wont remember. you never know how much kids remember, or what they understand because they dont always know how to communicate it. i remember things from being very young. she just might too. so. he is her daddy. he was not an N. it was never a "bad" relationship. it just wasnt working anymore... i wanted more, he wanted nothing to change. simple. i couldnt stay in a stagnant place, so i left the nicest man i had ever been with.
the relationship i found after, was an experience. and a test to myself. while a nice guy, he has his own issues and he crossed my boundries and i left. now i am completely single again... with my baby girl.
but in that relationship, while she would play with him and definately liked him. i realized i will never have what i had with her daddy. the morning cuddles. the talking. and i miss it very much.
i miss him too. i always have since the day i left. but i couldnt stay where i was with him, he was a slob. cant even pick up his pants. he eats something and throws the wrapper on the floor. along with crumbs or whatever else. i come home to overturned chairs, sticky floors, stained furniture, and a sinkful of dishes. no matter how much i cleaned the day before. i pleaded and pleaded. he still stuck to his video games. it just wasnt going to work. but it doesnt mean i dont miss who he is. talking to him, he is a stable minded, wonderful person. but he cant get out of himself to even clean up. maybe someday he will grow up, then again, maybe he wont, but i couldnt wait around to find out.

Dracona, I am older than you, and despite so many abusive men coming into the life of me and my gorgeous sons, not one of them stayed and every man including their own bio father let them down. They trusted both my N husbands but they let them down too! I moved to another continent with my sons to be what i thought would be ' a real family'but that guy proved to be unreliable, lazy and childish and I couldnt risk relying on him, so we moved all the way back across the ocean , just me and my boys. This archetypal image of a 'proper' family doesnt exist, let it go, if it is meant it will come, but please take it from me , setting all your love and trust and that of your children into these flaky, juvenile, helpless men just isnt worth it. When I came back home, an elderly family friend said something to me which I will always remember .... YOU are their family and you are all they need. And you Dracona are all the family your daughter will ever need,and if by the grace of God a man comes along who is worthy of you both then, hey thats a bonus, but in the meantime let that fantasy go, society set us up to believe in the nulcear family, and it may as well have put 'bomb' on the end of that word lol we all here on this forum can bear testimony to that !!!!! Godbless you, wishing you the peace and happiness you and your daughter deserve and when you are able to realise it, you already have with each other in your little but perfect family (((((((((((hug)))))))))))) 2 Butterfly

Thanks butterfly. i know these things. and i wont let someone in her life that will let her down. i just wont let it happen. and this is how we will be... but it doesnt help the heartsore. i love my daughter dearly. i will be everything she needs. and i will never lie to her. i hope im enough for her not to have the same problems with relationships that i have had. sure, we all want better for our children.. but i really dont want her to ever be like me. ever. the home life, the marriage, the whole fantasy of meeting someone and falling in love was taken from me before i could even think about it by my own family, then something that is suposed to be beautiful, turned into something disgusting. it turned into needing someone to validate me. wanting anyone to love me.... doing anything so that they would. i cant let her be that way. i cant. i want her to have her dreams. of anything, in a healthy way. i never want her to let anyone treat her the way i have been treated.

i was raised by my mother. a family of five she was a waitress...my father left when i was six...and for a while we lived in a small shack like cottage...it was painful as a child i missed my father....by and by i forgot about him and eventually reunited at age 17 and went on to know him...but my family was is and will always be my mom...she is my rock...my best friend...and she has always been there for me..she has always been on a journey of self discovery...the song you are the wind beneathe my wings.. that song tells it all about how i feel about my mother...dont underestimate the power of women in this life..it would be great to have had a loving father..but not many of us have...its illusion and the stories we have been told that create this image of family...i rather think of it as a pack..like dogs...you and your child and other loved ones are a pack...a tribe...maybe we should throw out that work if it brings to much bagage...i am considering throwing out the word love and expanding my vocabulary ...the word love also brings to much illusion to the mind...be a good mom in your pack of two...a loving mother is worlds greatest gift.

thanks one. i hope i can be. i really do. im so sickly afraid i will turn into my mother... that she will resent me the way i resent mine. i cant have that. she is all i have.

I think if you're realistic w/ yourself..that there's a real chance that this will cycle through to your daughter's future relationships, you'll have a better chance at preventing it. I was deathly afraid of putting my kids through the hell that I grew up around. I knew in my SOUL that I would never do that to them. I now know that that was a foolish ideal because I could "talk the talk" but didn't know how to escape from my own bad marriage - and am still struggling to break free. She saw too much and heard even more. It's affected her (17) greatly - as it has my son (24). I can only talk them through the pain and anger they both carry and acknowledge that they are going to have challenges being in a "normal" relationship - since they never really saw what that is. Stay honest w/ yourself and as she grows you'll be able to talk openly about what a healthy relationship really is. My daughter has been in therapy for a couple of years now and it's helped. Things really will be ok.

Im sorry about that kmo. at least you are there for her now... she has hope now. its not easy to leave, when you want to believe so badly... when you look at all the factors that come along with a divorce, when you remember the vows. I would like to say this wouldnt happen to me... but i never know how much strength i have left until confronted with a challenge. the most recent relationship i am very proud of myself about. i LEFT. i up and LEFT, in spite of his begging, in spite of his it will never happen again, in spite of his anger and trying to guilt me, with the you dont love me then. i LEFT. with my daughter. with my life. The old me wouldnt have left. would have stayed because he said so. the man who my daughter calls daddy. i left. because i wasnt happy and i didnt see him trying to make me happy, now i think i should have tried harder to be happy myself before leaving. but at the time i felt i had tried everything. im not sure i had. because otherwise, why would i still miss him? he is a good man. the rest of his life just doesnt reflect it. but all this self introspecting ive been doing, says you cant wait for someone to change, and you cant wait, and if he truly wanted this life with me, he would do things that would help make us both comfortable, instead of me feeling like so much fell on my shoulders simply because he didnt want to get up. once, he got up, and was doing so awesome... but i didnt believe it would last, and it didnt, but i wasnt very positive about it to him openly. but i miss us cuddling together, i miss the stability of emotion,
i miss coming home at the end of the day and it truly feeling like home. i just felt like he never wanted more. after 2 years we never even talked about marriage, which is required of him to legally adopt my daughter. he refused to fix his finances, and was always late on bills. always. even though we make the same. i felt so wrong for leaving him for such stupid fixable things, but i didnt feel that he wanted to fix them, because if so, he would have taken at least a single step in the 2 1/2 years we were together towards making himself stable. and when i started wanting more, another baby, looking at buying a house... i was hurt that he still wouldnt take steps, with me, together, to achieve such a thing. and he still hasnt.

it seems sometimes guys like this who are nice and kind and genuine, but immature and irresponsible, meet someone and then shape up to be the man their personality reflects. because meeting that person means, im ready.

i guess it just hurts that i wasnt that girl for him. and now there is my child involved. and he is an awesome dad to her... i just get left on the sidelines now. the ex. the one who left.

what i was starting to say up there, was at least you can talk them through the pain now. they will have the closure they need. the reason why. and they are old enough to understand at least to some extent, and relate. they will know it didnt mean that you didnt love them, or that they werent important.

i wish i could have that with my mom, but she still belittles me every time i open up. tells me im nasty and she doesnt need that in her life when im in "these" kind of moods.

keep talking to them. it will help them so much in the end, that they will be able to move on from tragedy.

Just realized that you actually founded this group. Amazing!

I wish i had more time to be a bit more involved, just so busy lately. :)