I lost track of the number of martinis I drank last night, so that tells you a little about how my birthday went. At one point, I vaguely recall saying that I needed a second hand to keep count, or maybe I meant a second hand to drink with. Honestly, I don’t know. As you might expect, this morning my head is pounding. My heart, however, is happy. I received exactly what I hoped for on my birthday, and a gift I never dared to dream that I’d receive.

You see, my “house guest” is someone that I never thought I’d sit down and share a drink with again. Someone I certainly didn’t think I’d be having over for dinner, much less entertaining for several days. Someone I could never in a million years have imagined spending time with and enjoying. In fact, if anyone suggested at this time last year that my husband, both of my kids and I would be hanging out with this person and having a blast in the process, I would’ve assumed that they had too much to drink.

My house guest is the father of my oldest child, a man who nearly 10 years ago almost destroyed my life in a nasty custody battle concerning my daughter, and who at one point I’d given serious thought to running over at high speed. Until a few months back, we kept our interactions concerning our daughter very separate and very chilly. We had to. He had, unfortunately for all involved, married one of those women who does not understand the difference between being a step-mother and being a mother, and who entered my daughter’s life when she was an infant with a very clear mission to erase my involvement in my own daughter’s life. She nearly achieved her goal, too.

One day this past winter, I learned that my daughter’s father was divorcing the step-mother. Frankly, it wasn’t a shock; I was surprised it had taken so long. He’s since said that even his parents shared my relief that the step-mother would be leaving our lives. So did our daughter.

It’s amazing, but he and I have had more parenting discussions in the past six months than we’d ever had in the past twelve years. We’ve talked on the phone for an hour at a time, not merely about our child but about all sorts of things – his job, my 3-year-old son, his divorce, books we’re both reading, etc. It’s been interesting to re-discover who he is, and to see him re-discover that same person, too. But the one who’s been truly benefitting from this is our little girl, who’s not so little anymore but who needs her parents now more than ever.

Due to the tension between our households when the step-mother was actively campaigning to be rid of me, our daughter lived with the burden of monitoring the things she said about me at her “other home” because the step-mother would inevitably probe for more information. My daughter had to go to pains to refer to me over at her other house not as “Mom,” but by my first name because the step-mother insisted that she was the only Mom in her house. Birthday and Christmas presents I gave to my daughter, phone messages I left for her, gifts and toys that a parent ordinarily gives their child “just because” – all of these things had a habit of disappearing at my daughter’s other house. In fact, she grew up being appallingly protective of me – and of her own privacy – because even a child can figure out what’s happening when it’s so blatant, and when it goes on long enough.

Sadly, my daughter’s father was the last one to figure it out. Oh, I’ve let loose at him for having allowed the step-mother to get away with as much as she did for as long as she did. I’ve pointed out that even if he didn’t want to listen to what I’d said about the step-mother, if he’d listened to his own parents, his friends, his own child, he would’ve spared us all years of grief and anger. But what spouse doesn’t try to ignore the bad stuff about the person they married and hope for only the best?

I’ll give him this: when his eyes did open, they opened completely. He was the one to make the break with the step-mother, and has spent months admitting to everyone who’d been trying to warn him that, in fact, they were right. He’s even apologized to our daughter for not having seen what she’d been going through, and for not having done something about it sooner. Their relationship has become amazingly solid and she is now blooming with all of the happiness and joy that a girl her age should experience but which she was afraid to express all these years. Yesterday, I got to glimpse an even deeper joy within her that infected me, too.

We all have those “Big Moments” happen to us, certain times in life are so profound we hold on to them in our minds with vivid clarity and know, even as they are happening, that they are changing us and will change us for some time to come. Mine came when we were at the North Shore, walking through a parking lot outside the restaurant where my daughter’s father bought us all lunch as a treat for my birthday. I walked between my son and my daughter, their hands wrapped in mine, as their fathers held on to their other hands. We were one big chain of lives that, through choice and circumstance, have become forever entwined. We are a family, and we are just now realizing this.

For my birthday, my husband gave me something I’ve been wanting for ages: forty-eight hours of personal pampering at a hotel where I’ll stay all by myself, with room service, total control of the t.v. and no child banging on the door when I try to go to the bathroom alone. It is every mother’s fantasy, and I’m looking forward to June 21 when I get to have mine come true.

But the father of my daughter gave me something I never realized how badly I needed by closing the door on many painful years from the past while opening a door for all of us to have a much happier future. It, too, is the fantasy of every mother who has children from different relationships.

More than that, however, he has given my kids – both of them – a precious gift to take into their futures: the knowledge that family isn’t limited to people who live in the same house, and that all differences, no matter how bitter, can be set aside when people care enough to do so.

It was a wonderful birthday for me, and if yesterday is any indication, it’s looking to be an awesome year.