The Friday Diary: It's Good Friday. Let's Start Over.

Easter is this weekend, and for as much as Easter has {to be brutally honest} never meant much to me {Sorry Easter, I'm a Fall/Winter holiday girl for life}, this one feels particularly symbolic.

You all know I've never been much for beating around the Too Much Information bush, so I'll just come out and say this {cuz this is the tree fort, remember?}: I had to get a restraining order against my dad this week, and have him forcibly removed from my home. Barred from further contact with me or my children. Legally banned from my home, work and their schools.

I had to get a court order that formally removed him from my life.

And I'm almost certain there is no going back from this.

Our relationship is irrevocably over as father and daughter.

As I remove one of the last remaining members of my family that I've still struggled to have a relationship with from my life, I feel oddly sad and disconnected. Like a free floating organism in the Universe that has no beginning, no history firmly rooted in the faces of its relatives.

In a weird way, there is freedom in that too.

I don't have to be defined by the dysfunction I grew up with.

I don't have to be the girl with the troubled home life, or the scary dad or the embarassing mom.

I can just be a girl who is related to people, of course, but who they are isn't a part of her story anymore.

It's not about their mark on her pages now, it's about her chapters, and however the hell she decides to write them.

There can be new characters, and new adventures, and I am not who he is.

I am light. I am not forced down, I am anchored down. By my love for my kids and the bonds I share with my chosen family. My village.

This Easter I'll be having some of my closest friends over - who all happen to be single mommies just like me - and we'll hide an absurd amount of eggs and fill colorful baskets with candy and surprises, and watch the next generation of us hunt for treasures in the perfect Springtime sun. We'll drink Mimosas and make french toast and eat and sip and laugh and chat because we have each other.

We can start over any time. Reinvent ourselves as much as we want.

And we can lean, ever so certainly, on each other.

I'll be spending Easter free of the people who have always tried to tell me who I was, and what I was, and how terribly insufficient I was, and instead in the company of women who know me, understand me, and see me as I am.

Flawed. Free. Happy. Trying.

Happy Easter.

I hope you find the freedom and the joy, and the new beginnings that you need.

And if you find an egg full of cash, it's from me. You're welcome.