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It has been almost a year since my ex-husband and I separated. And today, we walked into a mediator’s office and got a majority of a divorce agreement drafted. Before you ask how we did that so fast, let me share that we have no property to fight over and no money. We had also already worked out our own custody schedule together, and know we have plenty of time to work out the kinks, at least before our daughter starts elementary school. All we needed to do was deal with the fine print. As sad as it was to have it almost over, I know it’s for the best and so does my ex.

But there’s one person who’s not buying that this divorce is “for the best”: our daughter.

After mediation, I spent the day with her. She was difficult. She was whiny. She purposefully pushed my buttons. I lost my patience. I yelled. I may have cried when she was napping. At night, after a rough round at the dinner table with her not listening, and me wishing that instead of dealing with a tyrannical almost-4-year-old I were in Greece being fed hunks of cheese by some stud, we sat down to snuggle before calling her father.

And that’s when she saw her green ball.

“My green ball!” she squealed.

Her green ball is a soft squishy ball with a happy face on it.

She grabbed the ball saying, “When I’m mad, I can squeeze my ball.”

My preschool-aged daughter was reciting the lesson her play therapist had taught her. When my ex-husband and I first separated, my daughter started to regress. She was having accidents and lashing out. During the whole year of our separation, my daughter went through myriad emotions and rough periods, just like my ex-husband and I did. The therapist suggested ways to cope when she was mad or sad. Squeezing the ball was one of them.

“Why are you mad?” I asked.

“Actually I’m sad because Daddy isn’t here anymore.”

Daddy isn’t here anymore. My ex-husband and I may be moving on, but everywhere my daughter looks in our home, once all of our home together, she sees her father’s ghost.

Her father may have her three nights a week in a new place, but my daughter still grabs the little red washcloth hanging in the shower that he liked to use and tells me, “This is Daddy’s washcloth. Well, this was Daddy’s washcloth when he lived here.”

I have been determinedly, outwardly positive about our divorce and co-parenting from the start, even when I’m not feeling it. Even though some days, I feel like a wreck. Some people suggest it’s crazy to keep that up. Strangers tell me that if my husband remarries one day, I won’t be so positive. As if on that day I will wake up engulfed in flames of fury.

If that bitterness really arrives, I’ll do my best not to let it matter. How I feel is less important than what the little girl folding her father’s old washcloth needs.

I think of my daughter who asked her father the other day, when he was picking her up from my house on his weekend, to please come upstairs and lie down on her bedroom floor just as he did one year ago when he was still living here.

I think of my only child who showed up to a play date and announced to my friend, “I miss my Daddy. Divorce stinks.”

I think of that tiny girl who has accidents after two years of being diaper-free. Who furiously refused to leave my house on Christmas Day just so my ex and I would be in the same room. Who has regressed again since the holidays.

It doesn’t matter how hard this is for me, or how hurt I feel. I don’t get to stay angry forever because it’s not about me. It’s about her.

I had my moments to cry. To scream and stomp. And sure, it’s O.K. if I want to vent in private. But she didn’t ask us to divorce. She didn’t ask two totally incompatible people to get married and make her.

My daughter is watching me. One day, if I do this right, that little red washcloth in the shower won’t haunt her anymore.