You are convinced that your child’s other parent, or a grandparent is bad, and the kids should know about it. Do they really need to hear what you have to say?
When facing the impulse to present a parent or grandparent in a negative light, do some serious soul-searching. Five questions help cut through self-deception, expose irrational motives that could be fueling your behavior, and focus attention on your children’s genuine welfare. If you review the questions before exposing your children to criticisms of their loved ones, you can avoid destructive communications. Read the rest of this article, and leave comments, on the Huffington Post.
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Whoever reads this will never know all the details. That, in my mind, is part of the difficulty of the Ontario legal system (Canada) to know how to approach a claim of Parental Alienation. I guess from my readings this happens mostly to men… Children who are alienated by the mothers. But here’s a story of a mother.
My Emma has been gone for 19 months… and I’ve often said, life will never present any bigger challenge than having had to live those 19 months almost exclusively without her in them…
So, my reply to this discussion is: I’ve been through so many layers and periods and forms of frustration and disbelief, it’s like the Eskimos and their words for snow… I have lived through hundreds of different levels of helplessness and frustration.
I am known/ have prided myself my entire life on being very (very) resourceful, but have fallen flat on my face hundreds of time, each time I’ve tried to go at this from a different perspective. What is the ‘THIS’ in question… to try to get Emma to hear me, to spend time with me. To be with me, even for short periods.
SO, have I? Should I ever have bad-mouthed their cruel-spirited inhumane father (to whom I have pleaded with every ounce of emotion I could muster dozens of times, asking him to do something to help my daughter return towards me and my family). It’s been going on for 19-months. 4 or 5 or 6 months go by, and I try again. I try to listen to counsellors, my mother, psychologists, psychiatrists, articles, lawyers (listening to them last, as it should be…), etc. and try a slightly different approach, and am able to maintain it for months often,… seeing the teeniest glimmer of hope.
Then, he somehow senses that I may be getting hopeful, sees that Emma is saying my name again, and he says something or has an argument with me (by email, I swear) but then somehow the girls (BOTH) learn about his plight, that I am opposing him somehow again, and Emma slides back into the fortress of his home, usually not to be seen or heard from for a minimum each time of 3.5 months (on average).
SO, I live in torture. But I will endure Torture (I guess) for the rest of my life… I won’t let her go. I need to psychologically, but I will not let go of her in my heart. I can’t. I just can’t. She was a huge (humoungous) part of my heart… and she doesn’t understand what she’s doing.
SO Have I ever bad-mouthed him in front of the girls? A few times, but more exactly… I just don’t know how to protect my youngest girl, who is only a year younger than the one that’s gone. She adores me now, but so did Emma… at some point before she left.
I have death with my depressions and anger, and they never disappear, I deal with them well, and now and then lose the tight hold I have on my brittle balance (of my brain and of my heart).
I am not sick, I am only a mother who has been killed inside, and continuously laughed at hideously by this man, when he knows I am dying from not having her in my life. He enjoys that.
BUT when Abby turned to me last week, and he picked arguments with me and transferred them to her older sister, and then I got shut-out again after almost 3 whole months of actually receiving text messages from Emma… I took a nose-dive, and he laughed and laughed at me… and at my despair, seems to make him stronger…
And just a few (I try to avoid, really I do) times I called him a cruel man towards her Mommy. I didn’t push it further, didn’t ramble on… just a few times, a short and very direct comment.
I don’t want to hurt Abby at all. I know I must not do that.
BUT, if you’d lived in my shoes, and losing the eldest daughter whom you were sooooo hugely proud of and fond of, and adored… and have not had more time in her life than her neighbours or his friends, or his wife’s friends have — you would need to admit that few of you would be stronger. I have been whittled done for more than 1.5 years now.
PLEASE PLEASE believe the saying of “Never judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.” You do not know me, but trust me… I was just a normal mother (no super-hero), but an entirely devoted one, at the very least…
I break, I melt, I want to disappear and not think about the fact that my life has become the worse nightmare I could ever have imagined… and after I break, I re-gather and re-build. This is my life now, unless I let go of Emma.
I promised her when she was a young girl, that if ever anything bad happened to her, I would NEVER EVER EVER in a million years let go, and never give up on her. I told her I would move mountains for her, a month before she left (not knowing what exactly was being concocted).
The mountains, as we all know, are nearly-impossible to move.
But I have to prove to Emma, someday, that I never stopped pushing against that mountain.
He has killed me in her eyes, in her memories, and now, as the months march on, in her heart… I’m vanishing.
Regards,
Joanne C.