Ohana Means Family...Or How I Coparent with Nick and Jenifer...

One year ago, give or take a few days, I had my first experience "coparenting" my children with Nick and his new family.

That is how I viewed Jenifer and her kids-as Nick's new family.

We spent the day at the Ohio State Fair because Betsy had been selected to take her 4H project to be judged. It was a surreal day to me, looking back-watching the man that I was still married to walk in with his girlfriend. I had met Jenifer once before, just her and me. Which was a surreal experience as well. But this was the first time that we had spent the day all together. For me, it was awkward, wanting so badly to figure out how to best handle the sudden change in my life, and at the same time feeling like I had been kicked to the bottom of a well that I could see no escape from. I had nothing inside of me to give to anyone. Least of all my children, who I love more than I can ever say. All I knew clearly was that they needed their parents, and I was going to have to figure out a way for that to happen.

One year later, here we are. Back to the fair because Betsy is awesome and was selected for 4H project judging again. This time as a family-as one family.

Jenifer and I have become friends in a way that I didn't really imagine could be possible when I met her. I expected that we would learn to get along, and maybe even to parent my kids together in a do-your-homework, go-to-dance-recitals-and-softball-games way. I hoped that maybe one day I would think that Jenifer was my friend in a casual way.

Instead, we have become something quite more than friends, something that doesn't have a proper name to it. We are partners together in raising these kids. She is happy to help in the parenting areas where I am so at sea, she backs up my decisions, she respects who I am as their mother.

It's such a strange thing, being glad that our lives dovetailed in the end of my marriage and the beginning of theirs. Very few people seem to understand it. And yet, it is true with every beat of my heart. It's one thing for me to hashtag a picture "coparenting," and it is quite something else to live it. It takes a strong woman to allow me a place in her newly created family, and it's something that Jenifer doesn't get enough credit for.

I was a stepmother for 15 years. It's a tricky place to be, a parent to a child who is not yours, who lives most of the time with another family. I was so young when I became a stepmom and I had no idea what I was doing at all. I know what it's like to fall in love with someone that you are just intoxicated with and then have to deal with this whole other family that existed before you got there. It's hard. It's far from romantic. But from the day Jenifer met my kids, she has loved them as her own. I am beyond grateful for that.

My therapist pushed back on me this week about this. Do I really expect that someday when and if I ever meet someone and fall in love again, that this person will just be on board with the fact that I consider my ex-husband and his wife and her kids my family? The answer to that is yes. Yes, mythical boyfriend of the future, this is my family. This is my circus, these are my monkeys. We don't do everything together-the girls and I do things, and the girls do things with Nick and Jenifer individually and as a family and every other which way-but we do some things together as a family. The fact is, strange as it sounds, we love each other. In the DivorceCare workshop they have an entire section related to reconciling. What I took away from that is not that it will ever be possible for Nick and me to reconcile our marriage to return to what it was. But I can, and hopefully have, reconcile within my heart our new normal, our new reality. Accepting what is in the past is past, and enjoying my life today as it exists.

Is it always easy? No. But it gets easier every time we spend time together, figuring out how best to do this, learning which of us is good at what so that these children feel like they got the best that all of their parents had to give.

Is it weird? Probably. Is it unique? Possibly. Is it crazy? I don't think so.

It's us. It's who we have become. Ohana means family. Forever.