He actually called to apologize this morning and said he stayed up late last night thinking about it. He admitted a lot of things to me and actually does see where I'm coming from now. I feel better and more relieved than I have since BM flipped her s*** and he got custody of her.

He mostly admitted that he had sort of been in denial to himself because that's what feels natural. He explained that he would have felt like a bad person for not accepting their partner's kids as they would their own. He even admitted to being a hypocrite during that period in his life, because he said that he did go out of his way to make her boys feel included and do fun things with them, but he never actually "looked forward" to it. He didn't dread it by any means, but it never occurred to him that he never really got as excited about having them along as his own DD. Then he admitted it was true, it was impossible to claim that you can love someone's kids as your own when you break up with that person and then never talk to them or even really think about them again.

The reason he was looking through that Facebook album was because I got him a digital photo frame for father's day and he was looking for some pictures of him and his DD to put in it. He ended up keeping the pictures of just him and his own kiddo but otherwise deleted the album. He also deleted a few other albums of their group trips to the zoo and a Ranger's game. I didn't ask him to delete them by any means. In a tiny way it bothers me that he kept the albums but for the most part, I accept that it was from a period in his life when his DD was littler and he wanted to keep those pictures as memories because she deserves to have pictures of herself growing up. But even in the fact that he still had the albums, he admitted that he didn't often go back and look at them and fondly remember the other woman (or her kids for that matter).

Then he really opened up and admitted that he just would have felt like a bad person if he didn't view her kids as his own, because after all, isn't that how the world tend to view blended families? We should all just get along and love each other equally? He told me he actually kind of felt like a bad person after he realized he had never truly looked at her sons as his own and dropped them like hot potatoes the moment things went south with their mom only to never really think about them again. So now he really does sort of know how I feel. And it's LIBERATING!

On a side note, we don't plan on having kids of our own, so thankfully there will never be that tense, "our" kid(s) versus "your" kid scenario in our house, and I think that will help keep a lot of the drama down.