In support groups I belong to, I’ll occasionally see comments– from men–complaining that women ‘vilify’ the husbands they’re divorcing as suddenly being terrible fathers just to get custody, when they had no complaints about them before, and I have thoughts.
Because this is exactly the kind of narrative my own ex would spin.
Looking back, it was ridiculous how terrified I was after he left thinking that he would take my children from me– this sudden stranger who seemed to have all the power and zero concern for anything outside of himself. I thought because he was the one with an income, he’d be given full custody if he wanted it.
I had a friend literally cackle when I told them this. They pointed out, “ Oh, he didn’t leave you like this so he could go be some single dad. He wants to have fun! This girl he’s cheating on you with is not going to want the burden of raising his kids. Neither will he. “
Some part of me wanted them to be wrong.
I wanted my husband, despite what he had done to me, to be the father that would fight to be with his kids as much as possible.
When we were dating, we would talk about the type of family we wanted to have. The type of parents we wanted to be. And it was not the type of parents that raised us.
He wanted to teach his kids about science and introduce them to video games and Star Wars. He wanted to teach them about music. I wanted to raise them to love books and art and stories. I wanted to take them for walks and pick flowers. I wanted to make homemade Play-Doh and bake cookies.
We wanted to make good memories.
We didn’t let our misaligned hours stop us from being a family. I moved around birthdays so he could be there. I planned any ‘weekend’ adventure for his days off instead. He worked second shift, so I made it easy for us to spend quality time together.
But my youngest has autism.
We didn’t know that yet. Only that something was different with her. I had suspicions when she was in infancy that grew more pronounced as she became a toddler. Her sensitivity to sound, to the feel of water. The way she couldn’t sleep without me and would wake so often in the night I had to start sleeping with her.
Then the meltdowns. They were shockingly bad. And unpredictable.They were the biggest red flag indicating there was more to all of these behaviors. She was becoming a minefield. We started avoiding more and more outings- unless we were feeling particularly strong that day. We would joke, “We need to talk about Daughter.” Because of that movie with Tilda Swinton.
He wasn’t there for most of the meltdowns, but he was there for me at the end of the day when I would be crying that I must be a horrible mom, that I was failing her, and I didn’t even know why. That reassurance, that soft place to fall, helped. Having him home a couple of days a week to split the parenting with me, helped. Having a partner I believed was just as worried as I was, helped. Because being lost together is a whole lot better than being lost alone.
I can say this now with authority.
The meltdowns got worse. Eventually, even her sister, who was her favorite person in the world, was subjected to the volatile, abusive nature of them. One day, he was there to witness a real doozy. I told him that as bad as it had been, I was glad he was there for it.
I remember trying not to cry as I told him how worried I was that when she started school, she was going to have to “talk to somebody”. For some reason I couldn’t say ‘therapy”. I thought that needing to put her in therapy would mean that there was no maybe. Something would definitely really be wrong.
His response was, in hindsight, platitudes. Soft, kind words. “We’ll get through this,” kind of words. And I ate it up. It was all I had, so I took those words and swallowed them as though they could sustain me. His words were always soft then. Before.
If only I could go back and tell myself about how long the waiting list for child psychologists ended up being, how years later I’d sit in an office and listen to the results of her evaluation, trying to keep my emotions in check. How there was no one there to hold my hand. No one to tell me, “We’ll get through this.” Maybe then, I could have at least tried to prepare myself for what was coming.
Because by that point, it was just me. He had gone so far away from being a reliable person, let alone a co-parent, that he was no longer a soft place to fall, but a dangerously sharp one. And becoming that person really started just months after that meltdown, when he would start his affair with his coworker. Soft words became cowardly actions. A hacking away of our lives together. And in the light of that betrayal, hindsight became a lightning rod of clarity.
We give so much grace to the men who we think love us and would do anything to protect their family, even if they aren’t perfect. Even if they weaponize incompetence and stay out late drinking with coworkers instead of ever once waking up to help on the school run. Even if they won’t get a license so you have to do all the driving for everyone for years. They show up when it counts. Right?
When they’re home, they tuck the kids in at bedtime, and you believe that really matters to them. That’s what’s really important. You trust his man, you trust his intentions as a father, even if his execution may be rocky.
Because he’s there for you, for them, when you need him.
But when my husband wasn’t there to teach ‘his girls’ about music and science, when he walked out before they were even old enough for Star Wars, when he wasn’t there for any more bedtimes and never tucked them in again, I gradually started to realize that when he was there for us? It was because I put us in front of him. I made it easy; I made it so all he had to do was show up. And he very clearly took that for granted.
He once called me on his ‘parenting time ‘, a time that was also meant to be my parenting break, to tell me that he wanted to bring the girls back early. The custody agreement was based on what he said was his availability, so he only saw them for maybe 4 hours, twice a week, but he wanted to bring them back early because they were being ” aggro” with each other.
It took everything in my very being to not say, “Yeah parenting’s tough, huh?”
But I don’t stop caring for my kids even when they aren’t with me. I’d often heard about how poorly their father dealt with any sort of issues, particularly with my youngest, so I cut my mental health walk short so he could bring them back. Gradually this became the norm until his ‘parenting time’ became less and less, and along with it, the little time I had for myself to catch my breath.
His leaving negatively impacted the way I was able to parent in such a big way. The betrayal was– and still is–crippling, and the loneliness and isolation of being the sole parent is amplified when there are special needs involved. I have to spin so many plates, and sometimes they shatter because there just isn’t enough of me, which throws a heaping of guilt onto the pile too.
And if at any point in the last five years I would try to tell him I was struggling, he would make it about him, his girlfriend, or just tell me that I was “playing the victim”. Instead of being the dad he’d once wanted to be, his children faded into the background of his new life with his affair partner. I can’t help but think that the father he wanted to be was the one that would have stayed, so we all lost out on him.
There is a memory seared into me of my littlest, just six, crying in a princess tent alone.I had never heard her sound like this before or since. The pieces were falling together for her at their own chaotic pace as she tried to understand what was happening around her, that her father wasn’t coming home.
She literally could not mentally digest it. Couldn’t make it fit into her safe idea of the world she knew. The look on her face, the way she shook; she looked so hopelessly lost. I felt it too.I sensed something breaking in her, and I didn’t know how to stop it. All the hugs and reassurances that I threw at her, all the love, just fell into that chasm of her grief and panic as she repeated that what was happening just felt wrong, so very, very wrong.
In the end, I could only hold her and tell her I was sorry.
About four years later, she asked me in her detached sort of way if her daddy had really wanted kids. Because she thought it seemed like maybe he did, but then changed his mind. She was ten and always so logical.
Sure, there’s some women out there who make up things to make their ex look bad. I’ve never been one of them.
I’ve never had to vilify him to anyone.
