Um, yes, you DID leave me.

Sometimes I hear people using terms and phrases and, as Inigo Montoya puts it so aptly in The Princess Bride, “you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Today’s post is an effort to clarify one such phrase. The phrase that needs clarification is “I left your mother (or your father), but I didn’t leave you.” Now, I’ve heard this little chestnut all my life and it’s always used for one parent to justify the crushed soul of his or her child following a divorce. Please allow me to clarify this term.

“I didn’t leave you” is a baldfaced lie. It’s quite simple and children understand even when adults do not. As a child, if I am sleeping in MY bed and Mommy (or Daddy) is sleeping in her bed and you are sleeping in some other person’s bed then, by definition, you have left me. If two people are in the same location and you walk, drive, fly, or camelback ride away from that location, you leave them both. You cannot leave one without the other.

Now, I realize that you might be feeling guilty and have some inner need to assuage the guilt you have accumulated by ignoring your marriage vows or, in the case of the new unmarried “modern arrangements”, ignoring your parental responsibility, but please don’t confuse a five year old by saying, “I’m not leaving you, I’m leaving X.”

Children aren’t stupid. If you aren’t here and they are, YOU LEFT THEM, and they are very unlikely to ever forget it and it is going to color their experiences throughout life, especially their relationships with the opposite sex, FOREVER. Now, if you can live with that, fine. If not, find some other way to explain away your extramarital dalliance to your children.

Sorry to be so harsh, beloved. Must be the pollen. Yes, that’s it . . . pollen.

So wash those green toes and remember who loves y’all.