I’ll See Your Divorce and Raise You an Abuser

I am reading this book entitled “When Dad Hurts Mom”, the byline for the book is about helping your children heal the wounds of witnessing abuse and it was the first book that jumped out at me from the search through the card catalog at the library.

Yes. I said Card Catalog, but you and I both know that the days of flipping through actual cards in a cabinet have gone the way of the dodo. Yet, I can’t reprogram my brain to call it whatever the sign at the computer stand at the library might have said; though I have a vague recollection that the word catalog was on the sign, but I digress…

This book jumped out at me because of the title. Dad did hurt Mom. It is something I have to keep reminding myself especially when I am feeling low, and wondering why it seems like I am having such a difficult time processing through this divorce. It has been almost two months since it was official and I don’t feel any better than I did last year this time when the inkling that something was severely wrong and I needed to do something about it came into my head.

Seeing how it has only been two months since I knew it was official, and only a month since we escaped his clutches, I haven’t even begun to deal with the fallout that is the emotional state of my kids. I wish I could hit a pause button and just catch my breath. Maybe spend a month under the covers hiding from the world and just rest? I think that would be awesome. Maybe. It’s my ostrich response to this bog I find myself in alone.

It talks about isolation in the book. I am still isolated. I have moved in with my brother because frankly I can’t afford to make it anywhere on my own just yet and I would live in a cardboard box before I moved back in with my mother (love her, but I’m not touching that topic with this entry, she is a whole other discussion…).

So here I am, living with my bro, who for all purposes is estranged because I kept him out of my marital issues, mostly due to shame since part of me knew that my marriage was fracked up and he would have told me so, and victims of abuse don’t tend to want to hear about what they know to be true…but that’s a whole other ball of wax.

I am still coming to grips with that, because being that I am still in the throes of acknowledging that I was in an abusive relationship, and that I was abused emotionally, verbally and physically, I don’t even fully understand why I made and still struggle with making the excuses that kept me bound to that man. However, that brings me back to my earlier point that my suffering didn’t go unnoticed. Time isn’t going to stand still and stop my children from growing up, and time seems to be working against me now that they are older.

Part of me knows that I haven’t been the best mother. I have not shown my daughter or my son good examples of how a woman is to be treated, of how adults are supposed to comport themselves. I am not even sure I fully understand it myself. In the midst of the worst of the marriage, I had morphed into a harpy that I didn’t even like and I look back and think this is the only memory my children have of me and I am freaking out. It’s like I have eight thousand years of mistakes to attempt to undo and only ten seconds to fix it in. As a teen and pre-teen, they feel like they are slipping away from me every second, getting further and further away from being reachable and I have to help them and I don’t know how. I don’t even fully know how to help myself.

These articles I read, and the books I read make it sound so easy, touting such helpful phrases as “give yourself a day to mourn” and “rethink how you respond to things”… this is really not helpful. To start with,  I love my brother, but he’s a bit of a pill. He wasn’t really a “kid” when we were growing up, he was the boy who was more old man than the old men we grew up around, reading business magazines when other kids were playing outside, and studying some boring book on global economy when I wanted to play tag or hide and seek.

Let me just say, time has not loosened him up any. We were polar opposites growing up. As adults we respect each other, but he fails to understand any of what I am going through, there is just NO WAY I can describe it to him that would catch him up on the garbage I have lived through for 14-15 years of my life. There is no way. It’s too monumental. Too ugly. Too bizarre. Too melodramatic. Too much. He’s also a man. I’ve got serious man-damage at the moment. A lifetime worth, once you pile the ex on top of the damage my dad did before I kicked him out of my life, it equals up to: I really can’t talk to my brother about my emotional turmoil. I am still getting used to living with my brother.

My poor children barely know their uncle and here we are forced together so soon after Escaping New Jersey, I can’t even comprehend what state their minds and spirits might be in. He isn’t used to being around kids, much less a teen and a tween (I don’t even think he remembers what it was like to be that age, I am not certain he was ever that age, haha) so there’s a lot of growing pains there. He’s lived alone for a long time, here we are encroaching on his personal space, I feel bad about that, and I work hard to ease the transition. The kids are still dealing with being abandoned my their father, my leaving the marriage, their move to Texas, saying goodbye to yet another set of friends, and having to deal with all that so fast after finding out that the reconciliation of their parents was a sham. It’s too much!!!

Hence the book.

This divorce is not the typical divorce. This is the atypical case. I mentioned before that I tell people I am divorced and they want to offer me sympathy. No sympathy is needed here thank you very much. Divorce on my terms was the best case scenario for me. Reading the afore-mentioned book, and according to the statistics, I am a survivor. My problem is I don’t feel empowered like a survivor. I feel abandoned instead.

That’s why I was hitting the library. I had to find something other than the books on divorce that attempt to guide a person through the after-divorce relations that exist when there are kids involved, but those don’t really address the issue of what to do when the man you divorced was a manipulative, narcissistic abuser who thinks the failure of the marriage is all your fault and was destroying the emotional fabric of the children you have together, who don’t understand that their father was a manipulative abuser and that his inability to parent them properly isn’t due to some deficiency on their part, or because of your bad feelings toward their father, but instead entirely due to his malfunctions, therefore he can’t respect you enough to adhere to adult rules of civility when communicating with you NOW. Ugh.

Those books were written for the people who divorced for entirely normal reasons. Even the ones who got divorced because of adultery I would consider more normal, this adultery wasn’t even normal because of the fact that he was an abuser, so any damage he inflicted was compounded tenfold through his manipulative nature. I can’t have a rational conversation with an irrational man! Where is the calm mediation when you are getting yelled at by a lunatic over the phone over some crap that isn’t your fault and you can’t control, especially when you are a time zone away? Eh? Where’s the chapter on that in those books?

I want to have a normal divorce. Trust me. I would love to be able to just proceed as adults, living separate lives while being tied forever to the other due to the shared genetic material in the progeny we created together. That would be fantastic! But I can’t have that kind of relationship. I was married to a personality disorder. There’s no talking sane to crazy. There just isn’t. Disclaimer: I am not in any way not claiming that I don’t have a touch of crazy, but I at least know and am willing to admit I have problems. Just saying… Try living with someone who thinks there is NOTHING wrong with them and it’s you and only you that has issues. That is true frustration. Want to feel completely powerless and useless? Live with my ex.

The best line I have come across so far to describe what I am going through was found in Chapter 12: Abusive Men as Post-Separation Parents and it said “A woman whose life is being constrained or made painful by a controlling or abusive man… has to hold onto a vision of a life without coercion, to know that freedom is possible.” Lord, help me.

That is it right there. I don’t feel free.

Freedom from mr horrible was what spurred me to choose moving halfway across the country. It was a moment back in New Jersey, I had just confronted him about going through with the divorce and I told him that I was through pretending that things were going to work out, and that I knew he had gone back on everything he had promised me about “reconciling” and had started cheating again with his married-other woman from work, so not to expect me to behave like his wife, because as far as I was concerned, that ship had sailed.

After I said that he changed. It was like the veil was lifted from my eyes and I saw what he had been doing all along before. Mind you, in the first place it took a lot of courage on my part to confront him about this. I had massive issues I had to overcome just to not get manipulated into not going, or worse, doing it on his terms. So suddenly after this conversation, he starts asking me to tell him everything about what I was going to do. What were my plans? Was I going to get a job and if so, what job, doing what, making how much? Where was I going to live?

He began making plans for me and for the kids, this was days after my conversation, it was like he couldn’t wait, he was divorced as of that moment. He questioned my every move but flew into a rage if I called him at work for any reason, especially if he was on the phone with his other woman, and would cuss at me and accuse me of everything under the sun. It was in that first week after I told him I was leaving for sure that I knew I had to change my original plan of trying to stay nearby for the kids, so they wouldn’t have to change schools or move again. Frack that.

Moving was my only option at that point. If I could have moved farther I would have. If I had had the wherewithal to put an ocean between us, I would have. I was lucky to get to Texas. When I first broached the move to Texas subject to him (because I needed to coerce compliance out of him so he would sign the custody agreement to allow me to move out of the state as per the law in NJ–that’s why it pays to have an attorney, otherwise I would not have known that) his first reaction was, “You can’t move to Texas, I have never been there, I don’t know what it’s like. Connecticut I like, I’ve been there. I know where you’d be, and I know where your mom lives.”… Really?

What does me moving to Texas have to do with him, and what does it matter that he hasn’t been there? That was my A-HA moment. If I didn’t have confirmation before, I knew it in that moment for sure. At the time I was just throwing Texas out there really as a tease because moving that far was too daunting for me to seriously consider it, I was just trying to get him to agree to let me move to my mother’s house in CT (dodged that bullet…sorry mom)  so had posed the question with the least likely place first so as to make my actual intent the lesser of two evils from his point of view, but when he made that comment, it was like something snapped inside of me and the me on the inside, whom I had suppressed all those years, snapped then stood up and said “Oh, HELL NO! No, he didn’t!”, head shake, finger wiggle and all. That’s what made me decide to move to Texas.

No matter where I lived, as long as I was still on this planet in custody of, I hate to use this word, OUR children (bleh!), he would attempt to keep his claws dug into me, into my psyche and into my life into perpetuity. (That’s a lot of into’s) Seeing as how colonization of another planet is not possible and I can’t leave planet Earth, and because unfortunately the delightful state of New Jersey couldn’t find reason to not at least award him some visitation rights (he gets to come visit them here, thank God he’s too cheap to have asked to fly them out to come visit him) because emotional abuse isn’t actually domestic violence in their eyes, I guess, and when he did physically abuse me, it wasn’t often enough, nor was I smart enough to have called the cops to have it documented (oh well…), so I can’t just cut him out forever and pretend he doesn’t exist, therefore, I have to actively maintain his ties to my children, the least I could do was move as far away as possible to create a big a physical boundary between us. I apologize for that ridiculously long (probably run on) sentence. 

I’d like to find the book that addresses the protocol for my situation, while at the same time how to deal with when my children say to me that they miss their daddy. I try telling them that I understand that they do miss him, and I would like to help, but they tell me that I don’t understand, and how could I when I hate his guts?

How do I undo the damage I did when I was going through my darkest hours and it looked like the marriage was going to end on an explosion, the anger and hurt driving me, the rage driving him last year, all the shouting, and the ugliness–they seemed to understand why I was trying to get a divorce. Then he bamboozled me, and manipulated me into attempting a reconciliation, the kids thought we were getting back together and that show lasted almost six months, long enough for them to forget the horror of the summer prior when I feared for my and their safety. So when we told them we were going to get a divorce for sure, and I had to mourn again the leaving, this time coupled with the added insult of the faux-reconciliation to the pain of the divorce, the knowledge that I was lied to and manipulated AGAIN, I wasn’t in a good place.

From the time we told them, to the day I left it was a total of 8 weeks. So my leaving and official divorce happened in a blink (partly because I listened to my attorney and didn’t throw out the divorce filing when he suggested we reconcile, I just didn’t mention that tidbit to him until the end) and suddenly I was finding myself on the verge of being homeless and having to pack up and sort through fourteen years worth of possessions ALONE. Why homeless?

Well, as soon as we announced the divorce to the kids, which was a few weeks after I confronted him about finalizing the divorce, he announced he was moving out and quit paying the rent on the house we lived in and I would have been evicted had I tried to stay any longer than the property manager had given us to vacate. He found an apartment for himself and my ex-stepson, and as soon as his personal stuff was in his apartment, he didn’t lift a finger to help me or his kids.

In fact, before he moved out, he didn’t help me pack. Sorting through all those items, deciding what I could afford to take, what had to go, what I needed to sell to have money to move–because until the courts made him pay the support/alimony he had cut me off financially even before we were divorced on paper. Still legally married he wouldn’t even give me money for groceries or gas. Not once he knew I was waiting on a court date– it was the worst emotional buffeting I have ever been through. It was equal to and worse than all the emotional damage he inflicted because with him not there to go through the items, his leaving me to do all of that alone was equivalent to him telling me that none of the marriage mattered. None of the memories mattered, our life together, that was all nothing to him.

Did I lash out in my moments of crazy? Sure. I was freaking out, and I didn’t handle it well. I was tired of burdening my best friend with my woes, and my complaints. I had a therapist by now, but let me tell you 1hr sessions a week is NOT ENOUGH. I couldn’t talk to my mother. Every time I opened up to her, I would end up comforting her because she would start crying, and somehow it would become about her and how sad she was and the pain she felt on my behalf. Ok, I want to be the one being comforted so talking to her was tedious. I quit opening up to her and kept it as banal as possible so as to avoid entering that vortex and yet still having another human being to talk to.

I don’t talk to my brother about feelings. I need him to be Switzerland, especially around my kids, and I know he is probably pissed off anyway that his sister is going through crap anyhow, so the less I tell him the better (one person talking crap about the ex, as much as she tries not to, esp around the kids, is enough in my book). So who did that leave? No one. Nobody. My poor children.

Fast forward two months and here I am. Reading this book looking for some answers, and in lieu of an answer, a direction, the inkling of a plan to arm me with the tools to repair the damage done to my children. It’s for them that I left. It’s for them that I am writing this blog. Better here than in their lives. They have enough to deal with without having to deal with their damaged mother and her inability to keep her feelings trapped inside. I’ve never been good at keeping stuff bottled up. It’s going to come out some way or another, I would prefer now that it be in positive ways and not as it has emerged before. I would like to one day wake up and not want to drive an ice pick through his eye socket repeatedly. I would like to be able to not be driven into a downward spiral of simmering rage at the mention of his name, the reminder of a memory that recalls his face, or coming across his likeness in a photo. I would like to find my happy place.

My brother likes to play poker. I think he’d probably kick my ass at the game, so I haven’t offered that we play together for fun… I see my future as a game of poker, and the stakes are high, I raised the bet with “the ex”, the ultimate trump card to jack up any hand of divorce. The prize is the heart and souls of my children. I am playing against the clock. I am determined not to lose this one. I certainly do not intend to play fair, and will probably break many rules. Reading the books, perusing the library, googling for answers online, that’s all part of finding out what the rules are. I’ve gotta know what they are so I will know which ones I need to break.

Time is not going to stand still for me, no matter how damaged I am, I can’t afford to play by the rules.