“I wasn’t unloved. I was temporary in his attention system.”
I said those words to a friend over a bookstore playdate last night, and as they left my mouth, the air in the room seemed to change. It was the first time I’d been able to articulate the specific, hollow ache that has defined the last year of my life.
For five years, I lived in a whirlwind of beautiful, intentional chaos. I am an entrepreneur by nature; I build things. I see a vision and I execute. And for a long time, Papi and I were building the ultimate masterpiece: a family of five boys. We were the “adventure family.” We were rough-and-tumble, always moving, always outdoors, always loud. From the outside, and from deep within my own heart, we were a fortress.
But then the walls didn’t just crumble; they were dismantled. Now, I sit in a house that feels half-empty, reeling from a separation that ripped our boys apart. While I have MJ, Matthew, and Jack in the same beautiful relationship as always, the complete absence of Jasper and Mateo is a physical weight I carry every second of every day.
How does a man who was 100% involved, who kept those boys moving and loved our life with such ferocity, simply… shift?
I’ve spent a year looking for the “why.” And the answer I found wasn’t about a lack of love. It was about the nature of neurodivergent focus.
The High of Being the “Special Interest”
In the beginning, and for many years throughout our relationship, being loved by him felt like standing in the center of a spotlight. If you’ve ever been the focus of someone with an intense, hyper-focused personality, you know that high. It’s intoxicating.
I wasn’t just his partner; I was his mission. Our family was his project. He was all in—every weekend adventure, every dirt bike trail, every bedtime story. When I was his “special interest,” I felt seen in a way that most people never experience. He knew my coffee order, my business goals, and the exact way to make the boys belly-laugh until they cried.
But unfortunately, I confused intensity with devotion because they look the same in the short term. Sometimes, we think that if someone is consumed by us, they are committed to us. But consumption is about the consumer’s appetite; commitment is about the choice to stay focused even when the hunger fades.
The Whiplash of the Fade
The transition from being the center of someone’s universe to being a peripheral character is a slow-motion car crash. You don’t notice it at first. You tell yourself he’s just stressed, or that the “chaos” of five boys is finally catching up.
But then come the moments where you realize the light has moved. The questions about your day stop. The enthusiasm for the family adventures starts to feel scripted. You find yourself performing, trying to be “interesting” enough to lure the attention back.
As a driven entrepreneur, my instinct was to “fix the ROI.” I worked harder. I organized better. I tried to be the perfect partner and the perfect mom, thinking if I could just make our life more “optimal,” he’d find his way back to the focus he once had.
When that didn’t work, I acted like a child, begging for attention. I asked for more help, for him to be more involved, to do more tasks. From being present during morning routine to lure him out of his office, to being involved in meals and cleaning, it was all a façade. I didn’t need him to do tasks, I just needed him. I needed his attention, his focus, and what I thought was his love.
Watching that attention fade is a specific kind of whiplash. You are standing in the same room with the same person, but the soul-level connection has been replaced by a polite, distant “auto-pilot.” You realize you haven’t been replaced by another person—you’ve been replaced by indifference. And the said truth that lives in the deepest corners of my heart? I would have preferred the former; it would have been easier to reconcile in the pain.
The Impact on Self-Worth: “Why Wasn’t I Enough?”
This is the question that keeps me up at 2:00 AM, even now. If I was the same woman he was obsessed with five years ago—the same hardworking, career-driven, boy-mom adventurer—why wasn’t that enough to keep him engaged?
When you realize you were a “season,” it shatters your sense of value. You start to view yourself as a product with an expiration date. You wonder if your worth was tied to the novelty you provided. And the most painful question, “was I ever worth loving at all?”
But here is the hard truth I’m learning: Your “enough-ness” cannot be measured by someone else’s capacity to stay focused. He was a sprinter in a marathon. The fact that he ran out of breath doesn’t mean the path we were on wasn’t beautiful. It just means his internal engine wasn’t built for the long haul of the mundane.
I have to admit, the first 6mo of my healing journey has been very self-absorbed. I had to dig deep and find every hurt I’ve carried since childhood. I had to clean out every blood y wound and dissect it to figure out what first pierced my skin. Then I had to painstakingly pick off every scab and create a new scar, one that focused on self-love and soothing my own soul, something I am so grateful I was able to do.
Understanding the Pattern: Explanation vs. Compatibility
In my journey to heal, I also had to look at why, after everything that has happened, I still love Papi like no hurt was ever there. Ignoring the actual cruel acts that happened when we separated, and trying to understand the man under it all, I’ve delved deep into neurodivergence and different attention patterns. I’ve looked at the way some brains operate on “novelty, challenge, and urgency.” To a brain wired that way, a long-term marriage and a settled family life can eventually lose the “dopamine hit” that fueled the initial intensity.
Understanding this was a breakthrough for me. It allowed me to see that his withdrawal wasn’t a calculated act of cruelty; it was a symptom of his “attention system.” He moved on because that is what his system does. It finds a new “special interest” and quickly forgets the old. So, while I fought with everything in my body to keep me and our family at the peak of his focus, his yearn for something new saw this as an attack, like he had to protect himself from the very thing I was trying to save.
And as much as I’m ashamed to admit, I allowed that dynamic to go on for way too long. I allowed myself to act out of complete despair, begging for a man that no longer wanted me. I kept telling myself it was worth fighting for, that love would prevail and our family would be worth it. But in the end, I wasn’t worth it, not to him, and definitely not in that state of mind.
Building the New Understanding
Even with understanding, I still had to learn some very painful lessons:
- Explanation does not equal compatibility.
- Neurodivergence doesn’t excuse the acts of cruelty that happened after the breakups
Knowing why he left doesn’t bring Jasper and Mateo back to my dinner table. Knowing why he checked out doesn’t heal the trauma of the boys who are still here, wondering why their family was halved. Knowing why he had to leave us doesn’t return the money stolen from my business. You can understand a person’s psychology and still recognize that their behavior is destructive to your soul.
“We can’t build a life on an explanation. We can only build a life on accountability, repair and focus.”
Healing Without a Villain
People want me to hate him. It would be easier, wouldn’t it? If I could just paint him as a monster, I could tuck my grief into a neat little box labeled “Anger” and move on.
But life isn’t a movie. This is the man I built a world with. He is the father of my three of my five heartbeats. He is the person who used to hold my hand through the beautiful chaos of our “before.”
How do you heal without demonizing the other person? You accept that two things can be true at once:
- He loved us with everything he had for a season.
- He did not have the tools or the temperament to sustain that love when the “special interest” wore off.
I am mourning the loss of the amazing family we created. I am reeling from the separation. But I am also the CEO of this new, smaller version of our life. I have to be the rock for MJ, Matthew, and Jack. We still adventure. We are still rough-and-tumble. We are still moving.
The New Focus
I am learning to turn that intense “special interest” focus inward. I am becoming my own special interest. I am investing in my business, my health, and the three boys who are currently under my roof, while I fight with every fiber of my being for the two who aren’t.
I am no longer waiting for the spotlight to swing back my way. I am building my own light.
The grief of being someone’s obsession and then becoming optional is a long road. But I am discovering that I am not a “season.” I am a constant. I am the architect of my own joy, even in the midst of the most heartbreaking chaos.
“I don’t need him to be the villain to let him go.”
I just need to be the hero of my own story.