I have been scheduled to write an article about divorce for a long time and for a long time I have studiously avoided it. It’s a painful topic for me. But what better time than the aftermath of the holiday season to man up and take the plunge?
My views on divorce are different from the sentiments I usually hear expressed, be it at ground level from my divorcing friends or in the media. That’s probably because my case was atypical in that I took on the role usually occupied by the man. I left my ex-husband. He kept the house. Since we had recently moved to his hometown, most of our friends had been his friends first and largely aligned with him, even the people I counted among my intimates. I became alienated from two of my three children. I felt marginalized. My behavior became unstable, ranging from angry to supplicating and all points in between, while my ex-husband preserved a stable home for the kids. I yelled, screamed, begged, pleaded, cried, talked, wailed, demanded and commanded my children to be there for me in the way that I needed them to. In the face of my overwhelming neediness, my children, quite properly, couldn’t. I tanked. Completely.
Then the real trouble began. I had two children who didn’t want to be around me much, and yet I was expected to pay substantial amounts of money to ensure that their lives were comfy and cozy, for private schools and gas money, car insurance and clothes and iTunes downloads and cell phones and walking around cash. You know, the bare necessities of life. All of this was to be done willingly, without question and with good cheer.
Did I resent it? Of course I did, I resented the hell out of it. On the one hand, I felt like I was being treated like crap and on the other hand I was supposed to just shut up and fork over the dough. I started to think that maybe I had discovered the answer to something that had always mystified me: how did all of those great dads turn into rotten, absentee, sullen non-parents, seemingly overnight? I have a pretty good guess. Like me, they felt like they were being viewed as an ATM machine and nothing more, and it did not sit well.
What was my reaction? For a long time I wanted to walk away from my kids. I was so hurt and in so much pain, if I couldn’t make them come back to me, then I wanted to leave them like I thought they had left me. I wanted to withhold the money. If they were going to withhold any form of positive regard for me, then I wanted to withhold the only thing I had left that mattered to them—money.
I didn’t do it. For the sole reason that I had three or four very good friends who literally sat on top of me and said DON’T DO IT. They said, “No matter what your children do or say to you, leave the door open. Tell them that no matter what, your home is always their home and you will always love them and be there for them. And above all, do not withhold money. They will equate that with withholding love. Do not do it.”
I had wise friends. They were one hundred percent right and at some level I knew it, even if I didn’t want to hear it. I did what they said, kicking and screaming all the way. I had to follow the AA principle “fake it til you make it,” because with such deep feelings of abandonment, what I really wanted to do was lash out, to hurt my children back, to punish them for what I perceived as injuries so grievous as to be mortal wounds.
Because I did not give in to the impulse to strike back, I have my children again. I did a lot of damage to the relationships with my neediness and my instability, but that is past now, and my children have learned a valuable lesson in watching me come back to health from the dark places. I got lucky; my children came back to me relatively quickly. If they hadn’t, I would be writing a different piece, with a lot of talk about patience and the long view…