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Taking the high road, the steep rough long high roadJan 07 '04 (Updated Jan 09 '04) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Don't make the children choose sides. They have the right to love both parents, regardless of what they did to each other.
January 2004: It is now more than three years since I left. I still have to deal with a lot of anger, from my ex and from the children, who now think Daddy is the nicest person in the whole wide world and I am the meanest. That's okay. When you only have your kids a few days a month, you don't want to tell them no to anything, right? Oh, the joy of ex's. It's better that they don't hate their dad. I know that it means I've done a good job of keeping my thoughts and experiences about our marriage out of my children's lives. They still know WHY I left, because they were there, and they know that things they witnessed were wrong. But I didn't constantly remind them after we left; I just did what I had to do to provide a better future for them. They have a better Mom now than they did, because I am a happier person. I have discovered that in their young lives, they never learned to be respectful to me. They are respectful to their father, his mother, other adults, but not to me. It took a while to realize that it is only because they never learned to respect me ... it was never modeled for them. They are not bad kids, but they only know what they've learned. That is why it has become imperative that they never see anyone treat me with disrespect again. There is a safe and wonderful love in my life, and there has never been a harsh word or hateful comment toward me, in front of the kids or otherwise. Never a raised voice or a raised hand. I can finally model the kind of relationship that I hope they will someday have for themselves. ~~~ Parts written in 2001: Divorce is an if-all-else-fails option, but abuse does not have to be tolerated just because you're told you must stay together for the children! News of my pending divorce shocked a few people in my family. I was hoping to wait until after the holidays to tell them, perhaps in January when I got my own place, but circumstances forced me to leave the week before Christmas. My family had just observed my husband and I acting as if nothing in the world were wrong on Thanksgiving ... how could it be OVER?! I guess I learned to be quite the actress. I didn't want my family to know what I endured at home, because I didn't want to be pressured to leave my marriage. I was highly (and at times blindly) motivated to make it work. I wasn't going to be a statistic, and I didn't want my children to go through as devastating an experience as I recall from my childhood. A life turned upside down... just because Mom and Dad don't get along? No, I was going to play the game, make it look like everything was fine at home when we visited my family on the holidays. What they didn't know couldn't be hidden from our children, however, and the final motivating factor in leaving was watching the effects of our home life on our beautiful, innocent children. Physical abuse is not the only kind of abuse that affects the children who witness it. Children need more than a Mom who loves them and a Dad who loves them. They need to see the way a husband and wife should treat each other modeled for them... it will stay with them their entire life! My parents were divorced when I was seven years old, and I only remember them yelling at each other, although I'm sure they didn't fight 24/7... that is still what I remember. That is ALL I remember. I remember thinking that it was my fault they were fighting, and I remember daydreaming about my parents reuniting for years after the divorce. I have since found that these are common feelings for children of divorce. I also remember that one parent had a lot of negative things to say about the other parent in my presence, and the other parent did not indulge in name-calling and disparaging comments in front of me that I recall. This behavior may hurt your relationship with your children in future years, when they are old enough to fully understand what was happening. It is parental alienation and it can be subtle or blunt, but it is always harmful. My children have so much anger right now, and it has been deliberately and methodically directed at me. They have been told things that are not true, and I cannot set the record straight without telling the children things they should never have to know. They have seen enough in their few years. For now, they will just have to be angry at me. When they are old enough to understand – then they can come to me for what they want to know. All I can do is to make sure that from now on I model the type of personal and relationship behavior that I want them to remember; not the type that I pray they are young enough to forget ...  |
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