I've been talking to my aversive emotions. Most of them look like ghosts. Sadness looks like a bubbly cartoon ghost, drawing attention to the ways in which I betray myself. My exhaustion is just a little slip, a faint flicker, dejected because he's simply doing his job of continually asking me to slow down. My fear is a young girl, swaddled in a blanket.

But my anger is harder to see, harder to grasp. She's hidden somewhere. I can feel her buried in my organs, burrowed deep in my aching muscles. I can feel her energy simmering beneath the surface.

Anger is buried in a story that women are not allowed to be angry. And yet, she's female. I can feel it. She's primal. She's ancient.

I feel her explode when I get a message that I have to return to court to rehash child support for the second time.

When Nic and I initially separated, I didn't ask for anything. I didn't fight over our bed or the toaster. I left every single thing except my clothes and plants and poetry books in our house and simply asked for what was fair— half the time with our beautiful babies. I didn't want to extract anything from him. I just wanted out.

I can feel myself reaching toward virtuousness in that statement and maybe it's true. Maybe I'm trying to be good. Maybe I'm trying to seem better than him. Maybe I'm angry that, when he eventually moved out, he dumped every mug and old picture frame he didn't want on me, but I didn't argue for the scalloped baby blue mirror I bought for our home, the one he yelled at me for buying in the first place. I didn't ask for the fluffy white blanket my parents bought me one Christmas that still lies across his couch. I didn't want to argue. I didn't want more points of contention, more conflict. I wanted to be done. I wanted what I thought was peace.

Yes, I wanted to be virtuous. I am naming it here. The amount of restraint I exercised. The morality I believed I brought to the situation.

Three and a half years after we separated, after a conflict about education for our girls-- something I am willing to fight for— I filed for child support. Nic absolutely refused to entertain anything other than public school education, mostly because it would carry a financial obligation. I wanted to stop begging for emotional support and receive it financially instead. I wanted the freedom to find Melby a good therapist, to take the girls on adventures, to enrich their lives outside of school if I couldn't do it within the educational system itself.

Naturally, he was furious.

I went through child support services because it's impartial. It's a state calculator. Income versus income plus custody time and nothing emotional. It took many, many months and when they arrived at a number, he refused it. It is due process to do so, and so we went to court. That process incited a lawyer to rerun the numbers, which, comically, had him owing me more money than initially quoted. After a laborious back and forth, we agreed on some number vaguely in between those two numbers, with him refusing to pay arrears, as is standard.

The negotiation was exhausting. The commissioner we spoke with separately quite overtly named that Nic talked circuitously and endlessly. Still, somehow, we settled it.

The first hearing was online, which somehow made it even more surreal. We sat there for hours listening to the unraveling of other people's lives one after another after another. A slew of custody disputes, restraining orders, and financial squabbles. Grief spilling awkwardly through the screen.

I dreaded seeing Nic even there, flattened into a glowing rectangle on my computer. At one point, the commissioner offered to bring us into the same virtual room together and I refused. The thought of directly facing him felt unbearable to my nervous system then. I wasn't ready.

Yet again, I felt exhausted and sad. I wanted to feel triumphant. Relieved. Empowered. But instead, it all just seemed to peter out energetically. It felt like Nic wanted to extract as much emotional labor and pride from me as humanly possible. Like he needed to remain in control for as long as possible.

He makes three times as much money as me. I carry nearly all of the invisible labor for our children. I enroll them in extracurriculars, pay their field trip fees, volunteer in their classrooms and donate when teachers ask, plan birthday parties, find medical care, schedule appointments, get haircuts, help with science projects, sign up for conferences, and communicate with the school.

Virtuousness (yet again) aside, I am the mother of his children. However he feels about me, I carried our babies in my body and care for them half the time tangibly and emotionally, ceaselessly. How could he not want to care for us all? I feel like I'm begging to be seen. To have all my unseen labor acknowledged. To have someone say yes to me. I see you. You're working hard to love your children well.

For one month, it was settled.

Until yesterday, when I got notice that he had reopened the case. He's arguing to return to the lower amount that was initially stated. That is TWENTY SIX dollars less than he is paying now. Less than 0.1% of his monthly income. It is a latte and a piece of quiche. A third of a tank of gas. A power move. A stab at returning to some semblance of control. A way to continue manipulating and exhausting me.

My anger emerged then. I felt her flare. I felt her explode from every organ where pieces of her lie dormant, suppressed.

I am angry. My anger is ancient. She's female. She's primal. She's hot and passionate and, I'm just beginning to realize, she's justified.

I'm angry because I've been violated, emotionally abused, and manipulated for years. I have the wherewithal now to remove myself from situations like that when they appear in my life, but I have no choice but to engage with Nic because we have children together.

I certainly complain about him to my inner circle, but publicly shaming him has never been my style. He has his own stories. We all do. His story is that I cheated on him, abandoned our family, that I'm erratic and manipulative, that nothing was wrong with our love and I insisted on finding problems where none existed. I heard from people I didn't even know at our girls' school that I had been unfaithful. The horror of that deeply untrue rumor circulating made me feel physically sick and yet I was still quiet. I wanted to keep the peace and what good would it do, I thought, to defend myself?

I've spent so long trying to keep the peace that I've abandoned the part of myself that knows when peace is no longer peace at all, but silence, suppression, self-erasure. Anger bubbling beneath every hidden surface is not peace.

I'm angry. I'm so fucking angry.

I'm angry I have to have one more engagement about this whole fucking thing with him. I'm angry about the sap on my time and energy. I'm angry I chose him. I'm angry he's the father of my children. I'm angry I have to spend the rest of my life engaging with him. I'm angry for how long I didn't express my anger, how it ate my insides, churned my stomach, depleted my body. I’m angry at how I still fawn around him sometimes, how I still cower, how I still long for approval. I'm angry at myself for how long I ignored my very real sensations and experiences in the name of being good.

It's not peace. It was never peace.

And yet, I'm also not angry he's the father of my children because my babies are my babies and there is no other version of them I would want. I choose these girls. I choose this lifetime. Even this trajectory. I can feel the ways it is forcing me into deeper and deeper presence with myself.

Because he's not always ugly. He's warm and funny and deeply enjoyable until suddenly he isn't. The air changes. The ground disappears beneath me. There is no accounting for when it comes.

So I'm learning to stay with myself.

I got that notice and I felt like my whole body was being consumed by fire. I screamed in my car. I raged. I let it consume me for a moment. I needed to feel that heat instead of continually pushing it away.

And then I remembered what I always tell Bonnie when Mel insists on pushing her buttons: "Take your power back."

What she wants is a reaction, your energy feeding her longing for engagement. And the same is true for Nic. He feels his power over me waning. He is no longer my master. He can no longer tell me how to sleep or eat or speak or dress or move through the world. He cannot define me anymore.

I think that is part of what my anger is trying to say. Not destroy him. Not punish him. Not even escape him, because I can't. We are tethered together forever through these children we made and love beyond reason.

My anger is asking me to stop abandoning myself in the name of being good, to stop confusing silence with peace, to stop believing endurance is the highest form of womanhood.

Anger, I am realizing, is not the opposite of love. Sometimes it is love. Love for myself. Love for the small animal body that knew for years something was wrong while my mind kept trying to override it. It is love for my daughters, who are watching me closely and learning what a woman does when she is diminished. Whether she disappears or whether she remains. It is love for two young women, who are building their prototype for love, and I refuse to let it be what their father and I created.

My anger is ancient. She's female. And she is finally done confusing self-erasure for peace.

I don't want to disappear anymore.

This next hearing is in person.

Something in me understands that I need to walk into that room.

Not to fight him, not to perform strength, not to finally say the perfect thing that will make him understand what he has done to me. Just to stand inside myself while he is there. To let my body learn that I can survive being seen by him without abandoning myself in the process.

I think that is what taking my power back actually means. Not becoming hard, not becoming cruel, not winning. Just remaining fully here, fully mine. Even in the presence of someone who once made me forget I belonged to myself.

So I will go back to court. I will sit across from him again. I will feel the heat rise in my body and I will let it move through me instead of swallowing it whole. I will answer the emails. I will fill out the paperwork. I will continue building a life that is steady and joyful and deeply my own.

And then I will come home to my girls.

I will cut golden kiwi at the kitchen counter and listen to their stories and sign permission slips and braid hair and make snacks and keep becoming the woman I was always trying to save underneath all that silence. I will allow myself to be at peace.