How do I handle Parent Alienation? Not well! I can’t even begin to describe the pain and sense of loss I go through daily. I ache for my kids. I miss everything about being a mom. I even miss doing their laundry! I was a stay-at-home mom for 16+ years and I was a good mom… a great mom.
I was so active and involved in every aspect of their school, sports, and social events. I loved my kids… and they loved me back. That is why this is so hard for me to understand. I was SO CLOSE to my three boys. This is so hard to wrap my brain around.
Still, after almost three years of battling with this, I don’t understand. I just don’t understand. Sometimes I just feel frozen. I think that this really can’t be happening. A mother should be loved and cherished and appreciated. Especially a mother that dedicated her entire adult life to being a good wife and a good mother.
I have been tossed aside. Treated with rudeness and disrespect. Forgotten! Erased! Yes, erased! It is like all the memories, all the good times, all the struggles that they had that I “fixed,” got them through, it’s all been forgotten.
All they can do is blame and find fault with me and everything I do. My kids have been told that they are broken now. That they come from a broken home and I should be the one held responsible for the demise of the family.
I miss their laughs, I miss waking them up in the morning with a kiss on the cheek. I miss movie night and vacations and having their friends over. I miss all the commotion and chaos. I miss the trips to Target when they are grabbing everything they can off the shelves. I miss watching their sporting events. I miss them coming to me when they need help. I even miss the battles at the kitchen table over starting homework and the tears over Geometry. The late-night announcements that a huge project is due tomorrow used to send me into orbit! I would give anything back for one night of that!
Divorce is hard enough. The idea of your weekend or my weekend still doesn’t make sense to me. I feel like I should be able to see and talk to my boys every day. I didn’t have children to be a part-time parent. I have to keep re-adjusting my expectations. The “new normal” was missing entire weekends of my kids’ lives. That was hard enough. Now the reality is, I barely see two of my kids and one of them not at all. It is hard to adjust to that. I can’t adjust to that. I don’t want to adjust to that.
When people ask how the kids are, sometimes I don’t even know. I don’t know what to say so I lie, I say they are great or I am vague and say, “oh you know, they are a handful.” I can’t bring myself to say, “I don’t know.” I haven’t talked to Johnny in two years. I don’t know how he is. How on earth can a mother not know how her child is doing or what he/she is doing? It makes me sound like a bad mom!
The funny thing is that my ex says I abandoned the family but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
THEY ABANDONED ME!
I can honestly say I have done everything I could to stay in their lives. I have fought and fought to see my sons.
