You can either let the moment define you or you define the moment. This is a nice trite saying but it can have meaning. You can either carry around the baggage of what has happened to you and dump it on unsuspecting souls or move on. My piece of advice is this, getting a divorce and going through the swing of emotions (yes, even for us guys) can only be shared by others with the same experience. It is similar to experiencing the death of someone close to you. Either you have experienced divorce and you can directly relate to it or you can’t, you just nod your head during the important parts.
Try this link, died laughing >>> http://keboch.wordpress.com/2008/04/22/nothing-like-divorce/
My experience is moving on past the ex is easy. After she carved up a bit of your inside, its easy to go forward. Its the other parts that take a bit of work. There are the children and the compexity of how to be with them without her. My ex has not given up hope of us “co-parenting” as she continues to suggest. However if she bothered to understand one single iota about me, she would realize how different we really are but as I discovered in the last parts of our failing marriage, she lacked the ability to really empathize with anyone else – this problem was not exlusive to me. The following is a great example of what I mean:
I spoke with my 16-year old daughter before Christmas. We had the sex talk between her and I. I talked openly and frankly about sex with her. The use of condoms and other aids to ensure she didn’t get pregnant. My thinking at the time was, “She is bound to have sex no matter what.” My daughter related to my conversation because I treated her like an adult because this is a very adult decisions every teenager is faced with. My final comment to her was “once you have sex the first time, you can never take it back, that moment is gone.”
2 weeks after Christmas I got a call from my daughter. It was a tense conversation. She had sex and missed her period. Okay I was a little amused, not at the predicament my daugther found herself in, but one for ex. You see, my ex, is a bible thumping, god-fearing, ten commandments, the world is black and white, Catholic. I couldn’t have thought anyone was more unprepared for this than her and yes it amused me.
My second thought as the amusement quickly went away was how my ex was going to torture my daugther. The fire and brimestone speaches, the damnation, and of course, how could you do this to me. What I hadn’t counted on was how my ex kept me as far away from this as possible. She restriced my daughters to calls to me – what I mean my restricted was she didn’t allow my daughter to talk to me. I found this interesting and contradictory because my ex said she would never get between the relationship I had with the children. Like all things I had learned about my ex, all rules would be broken when the need arose in her line of thinking.
My ex went as far as to tell my daughter she was a virgin when she married me. I nearly fell off my chair when I heard this. Convenient lies to bring my daughter in line at the time. My ex was no virgin when she married me. Then to top it off, she (the ex) left me a message, telling me to not talk about my (our) sex life with my daughter.
It was and still is a control thing for my ex. She was trying her best to control the entire situation including me. As I negotiated with my ex to meet with my daugther to have a conversation about her current predicatment, my ex reminded me, very clearly, of the reasons I had left her. She had a long list of items I could not talk about if I was going to see my daughter. It was manipulation at its best, she had me by the short hairs because I needed to talk to my daugther so I broke 2 cardinal rules I had told myself I would never break, and these are:
- I would never speak directly to my ex.
- I would never go directly to my ex’s.
This was to keep myself a safe distance from her manipulation. I broke these rules not for myself but for my daughter. My ex maximized on that moment to exert her control over me. It was one of the most difficult moments since our breakup. However, this was a normal course of action for my ex. She even had her sister over there as they plotted on how to control my daughter. Phones were removed and the computer was taken away. For me, I thought this was incredible naive of both of them, the horse was already out of the barn. The part I really feel for my daughter was the grilling and interrogation she went under. The yelling and screaming by my ex and her sister. Nobody should go through this and I was reminded at that moment how I had lost this battle in court. My children would be greater victims of abuse than I was.
I met with my daughter and offered her these words:
- “You don’t owe anyone an explanation for what happened.”
- “Whatever decision you make, you will live with it for the rest of life.”
- “Unfortunately, the family you live in, they will never let you forget what you have done here. You will be branded with this mistake forever.”
My daughter asked me how I could be so calm about what had happened. I explained to her that no amout of punishment was going to help the situation, the best outcome was that my daughter had made an adult decision to have sex, and now she was faced with the adult decision of what to do next. This was punishment enough in my books. My compassionate handling of what happened to my daugther is easy to explain. My ex and her family would torture (no I am not overstating this) my daughter for years about this. It was unfair and unjust but thats the way they are.
My daughter in the end, chose to have an abortion. My own personal opinion was that my daughter should have an abortion but I kept the opinion to myself. I just gave the facts to my daughter as she made her decision. This prompted a 2am voicemail on my cell phone from my ex. Tears and rage in my voicemail as my ex said my daugther had killed a human being. Great, just great, I thought, there is an unstable structure if I ever saw one.
When my daughter had the abortion I wasn’t told. My ex kept me in the dark (although if she is reading this she would tell you otherwise) – its important for my ex to keep up appearances as the injured party or victim in all of this. To make matters worse, my ex flew to Toronto for meetings and my daughter went through the abortion alone. I couldn’t believe this, after all the speech making in court my ex had made about the care of the children.
When I finally manage to have lunch with my daugther I told her one thing, “I am proud of you, you made a very difficult decision and you stuck by it. You don’t owe anybody an explanation.”
As for my ex, I abhor the way she handled the situation with daugther. Utilizing punitive measures such as taking everything away from my daughter and her contact with me was unconscionable. It brought back all the reasons I left her and I realized now my children were taking the brunt of it. Hard to sleep at night knowing this.
