My husband refuses to give me money for food or school supplies. He’s angry I am leaving him. He forgets the years I begged him to care. Or how I pleaded with him to work on our relationship.
Family and friends arrive with food.
“I know dad’s mad at you,” says my son. “But what about us? We live here too.”
Recounting his words overwhelms me. My sweet, sweet boy. I had no idea I was throwing him into the fire. I thought I was freeing him from it. I thought I was making our home peaceful and safe again.
Kids understand two adults who no longer get along. It’s painful but children are smart. They eventually wrap their heads around this. I know. My dad left when I was five.
They don’t understand a parent who will hurt them to hurt their mother. As my son innocently noted, don’t ‘we’ (children) have meaning above and beyond you?
Absolutely.
You deserve parents who make this abundantly clear. Non-negotiably clear.
You are our whole world. Our everything. The beings who gave our life meaning. Who made our world sweeter, funnier, deeper, happier, and lovelier. Too many good words to utter.
How do you explain people weaponize children and money in a divorce?
How do you say, daddy wants to win? Or sometimes a mommy? Big people teach little people to make good choices. To be honest, kind, and nice and to share. To be confident enough not to bully. That winning isn’t everything but good sportsmanship is.
How do you rationalize what your child cannot? The parent who taught them right from wrong now blatantly contradicts it. You can’t. They learn the parent they believed loved them above all else, doesn’t.
For one very simple, troubling, and unnatural reason.
They love themselves more. They love winning more. They love being in control more. They love indulging their own feelings more. They love retribution more.
Adults are supposed to protect children.
The level of immaturity and insecurity it takes to use, confuse, and abuse children to gain what one wants is unfathomable. It’s despicable, unconscionable, and unforgivable.
What’s more unimaginable? They are permitted to get away with this. A mother or father can elongate divorce for years. Make it combative. Make their own children suffer on an emotional battlefield.
No one stands up in between fighting for world peace, climate change, hunger, and the other unimaginable atrocities of mankind. Much harder causes to conquer.
Shutting down the weaponizing of divorce is child’s play compared to these.
Yes, I intentionally used a pun. To jolt the otherwise anesthetized. To invoke emotion. To provoke outrage. To encourage change. To promote the absurdity of children suffering divorces that last for years because two parents can’t arrive at an amicable conclusion.
More often than not because one of them is an extreme personality. A difficult, controlling, unyielding, and uncompromising individual. A person who is used to getting their way. And has no ability to compromise.
Divorce abuse has become the status quo. Divorces that last for years aren’t shocking. Bad behavior isn’t disquieting. Consequences are essentially non-existent.
We can’t blame the egregious offenders. They don’t care and they won’t take accountability. We can blame society for accepting this as a norm. We can hold the confident, mature, otherwise healthy adults for allowing this to continue.
I can’t erase my son’s memory.
I can’t undo his father’s actions.
He and his brothers know their dad is capable of anything.
No food. No worry. No concern. Among the disconcerting things that followed. No health insurance, no transportation, no electricity, and more. Not once, not twice. Not for a day, or a week, or a month, or a year. For years.
I can’t restore my son’s father. I can’t make him the man a little boy once thought he was. I can’t find the guy who made him think he hung the moon. Who threw him over his shoulder, who tossed him a ball, and who made him believe he was his whole world.
I want to. But I can’t.
Because that little boy sat in a bare kitchen and went to school with no supplies.
Because his mother chose divorce over the battleground of marriage.
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This post was previously published on Hello, Love.
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