But that was a stretch for a silver lining because it was also a not-great thing that they never gave up.

And it couldn’t be denied, I hated it (rephrase: disliked it intensely) when they put my sister forward to appeal to me in a sisterly/generation-sharing way.

Making this worse, I had to divide my time with my daughter, giving some of it up to her father which was never fun, but especially unfun during the holidays.

In a perfect world, my baby would be with me all the time.

In a perfectly perfect world, my baby’s daddy would not be a liar and a cheater, and we’d all be together all the time.

It was not a perfect world.

This year, I sensed it was going to be even worse because her dad had a(nother) new woman in his life, and from what I was getting, she was all in to win Corbin by showing she could be the best stepmom in Denver.

That happened a lot (the new woman and her wanting to win Corbin by using Juno) and it always involved messing with Juno’s heart. And then, when Corbin dumped her (and he would eventually dump her), part of Juno’s heart would go with her.

It hurt my baby girl.

It hurt to watch.

It also hurt because I was powerless to do anything about it.

In the beginning, I’d tried to talk to Corbin and warn him about introducing his girlfriends to his daughter too soon.

He not only didn’t want to hear me give him advice on how to father, he didn’t want to hear from me at all.

Though, even if he didn’t want to hear from me, he spent a lot of time making sure I heard from him on a variety of subjects that had to do with co-parenting (and other topics).

This regardless that Juno was eight and for the most part, we had it down (and topping that, he never listened to me and did his own thing anyway—it was like he was going for maximum frustration, and as usual with Corbin, exceeding all expectations).

And I didn’t need any of this right now.

It was career day for Juno’s class and Juno loved me. She thought I could do anything. As such, she did not get that her mom—who had been a stripper, but was now a featured dancer at a former strip club (even so, you could absolutely still describe what we did as exotic dancing, we just no longer bared all)—was not the person teachers wanted talking to their kids about their future career prospects.

But Juno thought I was cool.

Juno thought I hung the moon and that my besties, Lottie, Ryn, Hattie and Evie were the stars (all of them also dancers, except Evie, who used to be one, but now she was a student).