“We don’t want to take sides,” one of my friends said.
Her comment shocked and upset me.
I walked away and got into my car. People are very gullible. No, scratch that. People who have never gone through a divorce can be completely ignorant. They have no idea what they are talking about.
Instead, they have written responses and procedures.
IM is angry. I sit in stunned silence until I find myself speaking out loud.
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“There are no sides. There are children,” I tell myself.
I am a mother. I’m not looking for anyone to take sides in my divorce. I’m screaming for help.
I am in the fight of my life to protect my children from their father.
Yes, it is not normal to have to protect your child from a parent.
I remember the day my seventeen-year-old son looked at me in painful confusion.
He says: “Mom.” “I know Dad is mad at you but what about us? We live here too and we need to eat.”
My husband is dead set on punishing me for leaving him. He doesn’t care if our kids get in his way.
It will withhold food, health insurance, school supplies, transportation, electricity, and every other basic need our children need.
When our children are upset enough to confront it, it shocks them even more.
“It’s your mother’s fault she left me,” he says. “We can’t support two families.”
It is, of course, a bald-faced lie.
There is a lot of money.
Worse still, he was hiding all of our assets and business income during the years I exhausted myself trying to save our marriage. We’re not talking about a little money. We’re talking about an enormous amount of money.
I was upset and unhappy enough to want a divorce from my husband.
But I had no idea what he was capable of or who he was.
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A parent who can hurt his children to hurt his wife is evil.
There is no other word to describe it other than what my husband’s psychiatrist and marriage counselor diagnosed during counseling. My husband lacks critical empathy.
Empathy is a developmental stage that we receive during childhood. If you don’t receive this crucial developmental stage, you won’t give it back.
It creates a severe deficit.
An inhumane one.
My husband suffers from narcissistic personality disorder at the end of the spectrum.
The average person would think I went through a divorce. Albeit a long and very abusive divorce lasting five years. But I did not face divorce. I have been in the fight of my life to protect my children from their father.
Imagine how difficult it is for a child to process a father who will hurt him to hurt his mother.
They can’t process it.
They understand how strange and unnatural it is. They cling to the memory and faith of the father they once knew. At the very least, the father they thought he was before their hearts shattered into a million little pieces.
They had to accept that they had no father at all, except in a biological sense.
They had to grieve the emotional loss of the man they believed had loved and raised them.
A monster who didn’t feel anything while watching their suffering.
It wasn’t easy for my children.
Not only did they watch their father change, they watched their mother change as well. My stress level reached an all-time high with every foreclosure notice, repo man, and other unexpected financial abuse and bullying.
For five years I slept an average of three to four hours a night. I never knew what would happen next.
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Recently, one of my boys said, “You’re reacting to stress.”
Well, of course, I do.
But it’s not who I’ve been my whole life or their whole life.
It is the slander of an abusive man. I lived on an emotional battlefield for five years and then played the aftershock games of divorce.
I once read that it is not uncommon for those who have divorced a narcissist to suffer from some form of PTSD.
I believe that.
I don’t have PTSD but I think I have a mild version of something similar to it.
Divorce should not be an excuse for abuse. An abusive man should not be given a playground to wreak havoc on.
There should be preventive mechanisms in the family law system. Children should not be caught in the breakup of an adult relationship. not fair. They had never had a dog in combat.
They are innocent bystanders.
