The Hardest Part of Co-Parenting With a Narcissist

The hardest part isn't what most people think it is.

It’s not the court dates, though those will hollow you out. It’s not the manipulation or the gaslighting or the way they can make you feel like you’re the unreasonable one, even when the evidence says otherwise. It’s not even the exhaustion of being the only stable parent, of holding everything together while they light matches.

It’s this: making sure your child never feels that half of who she is somehow isn’t good enough.

My daughter doesn’t want to see her father right now. And I understand why. But I have never, not once, allowed the truth of what he is to become the story of what she is. Because she came from him. And if I let her believe that part of her origin is something shameful or broken, what does that do to how she sees herself?

I think about how small she is. How, if someone were constantly telling you how bad one of your parents was, it would seep into you, not as information about them, but as something you start to believe about yourself. That you are somehow made of bad material. That part of you, at the root, is unworthy.

I never wanted her to carry that. Because I love her. It’s as simple and as consuming as that.

So the decision to protect her relationship with the idea of him, even now, even with everything I know, has never really felt like a decision. It has felt like the only possible thing. Instinct dressed up as strategy.

But I wouldn’t be human if I told you it was easy.

There are moments, fleeting, honest moments, where I have wanted to tell her everything. To say: I believe your father should never see you again. That he doesn’t deserve you. That he violated every unwritten law about what a protective parent should uphold. Those thoughts exist. I’m not going to pretend they don’t.

But I would never use my child as a pawn. And that line, that refusal, is perhaps the clearest difference between what I am doing and what he has done.

She is not a weapon. She is not leverage. She is a small person trying to make sense of a world that has already asked too much of her. My job is to make that world feel safer, not to hand her my pain to carry alongside her own.

What I don’t talk about as much is what this costs me. Not as a mother, as a person.

It’s soul destroying, if I’m being honest. We are in a legal battle that could be overturned in a split second. His rights could be restored. And if that happens, everything we have fought for, every court date, every document, every carefully held boundary, could count for nothing. She would no longer be protected from someone I believe to be a predator. And I would have to live with the feeling that I failed at the most fundamental thing a mother is supposed to do.

I know, rationally, that failing and being failed by a system are not the same thing. I know that leaving no stone unturned is not the same as having control over the outcome. I know all of this.

And knowing it doesn’t stop the feeling.

There are quiet moments, the kind that come late at night when the noise of holding everything together finally settles, where I sit with the weight of how much of this is outside my hands. Where I have done everything right and it might still not be enough. Not because I didn’t try. But because some things are greater than our little family, and require institutions and systems and other people’s judgement to keep her safe. And sometimes those institutions fail.

That is a specific kind of terror. The kind you can’t explain to someone who hasn’t lived it.

What I hope, when I imagine her grown and looking back, is that she understands this: I did everything in my power. I left no stone unturned. And if the system ever failed to protect her, that failure was not mine. It was not hers. It was never hers.

I hope she knows that every choice I made, including the ones that cost me the most, came from love. Not perfect love. Not fearless love. But the kind that stays. The kind that carries the knowing so she doesn’t have to. The kind that lets her be whole, even when I am quietly breaking.

If you are doing this too, carrying the weight of knowing, protecting your child’s sense of herself while the ground shifts beneath you, fighting battles that should never have been yours to fight, I see you.

This is some of the hardest, most invisible work a person can do.

And you are not doing it alone.

With All The Love In World

Saski xx