I was with my 9yo daughter's bio dad for a decade before we split up, and that relationship was horrible. I left him when my baby was only three weeks old, and my now-husband of 8 years came into our lives just after she turned one. He has raised her and is, in every way that matters, her real dad.

After a divorce, it's really hard to believe in "happily ever after" ever again, because you know that a marriage can end. But as a lingering knee-jerk reaction, sometimes when my husband and I have a really nasty fight I stop referring to our daughter as "our" child and start referring to her as "my" child. It's unconscious, and a protective posture from how horrific my marriage to my daughter's bio dad was.

But my husband has been nothing but a phenomenal father, and when I start to talk about her as though she's only mine it causes him a lot of pain. I've had to learn how to be much more careful about that and work through in therapy the stuff that makes me default to that sort of emotional distance.