This One Thing Still Gets Me Fired Up About Divorce

My children shouldn’t have paid a price for me leaving their Father

I’m an adult.

I made the choices I made. I may have been a naive, trusting, and inexperienced twenty-something but I made the choice to marry my husband.

My children do not deserve to suffer because of my mistakes.

Let me rephrase that.

Many children do suffer from our immature or poor relationship decisions.

But it shouldn’t be a long, drawn-out, overly abusive divorce. Parents should not be able to hurt their own children in order to hurt their spouse and/or leave them with nothing.

Yet the family law system allows it.

They make money off of it.

They permit the intolerable abuse of children at the hands of a disgruntled parent. The divorce system is filled with honest people being honest and dishonest people being dishonest.

It’s hard for the divorce legal system to know which spouse is telling the truth.

But there are ‘tell signs.’

The nefarious red flags of the divorce system.

The overplayed and overused tactics of manipulative spouses. The tools they use to get their desired outcome. I went through an overly long and abusive five-year divorce.

I can recognize this after this process.

Certainly, divorce experts can.

Why does it continue?

Why are children placed in the middle of an emotional battleground for longer than any child should be? Why aren’t there systems in place to expedite high-conflict divorces or deal with them differently?

As a stay-at-home mother, I made myself unknowingly financially vulnerable.

If I had never left my outside income my children would not have suffered for so long. My husband controlled all of our money and assets. I was an emotional captive.

I was a spousal prisoner.

I’m a strong woman raised by a resilient single mother.

I was helpless because an abusive and punishing man controlled me.

He took his anger out on me because I left him. My children were the unfortunate and unwilling participants in a relationship that had met an unfortunate end. They played zero part in this. They were completely innocent.

But my husband was able to use, confuse, and abuse them.

In order to hurt their mother.

Because all is fair in divorce.

Adults don’t fight adults.

Adults get away with bad behavior in divorce. Adults get away with manipulation in divorce. Adults get away with lying in divorce. Adults get away with cheating in divorce. Adults get away with stealing in divorce. Adults get away with illegal activity in divorce.

Adults get away with severe abuse in divorce.

Legal professionals say they’ve seen worse.

But my children hadn’t.

Before their Mother left their Father my kids had known adversity. They had seen their Father drink and behave badly and scare them. But they had never known a world where absolutely no adult could protect them from the man who biologically bore them.

They were innocent.

I made many mistakes.

I remained in a marriage that was broken. I gave a broken man too many chances. I said things even four walls shouldn’t hear while I attempted to save my marriage.

My children did nothing but fill our world with love.

The way only children can do.

I let them down despite being in the fight of my life for them. While my husband made money, wining, and controlling his objective…I made them my ultimate priority.

My beautiful boys.

My entire world, my entire life, my entire purpose.

I was in the fight of my life to protect them. This was my worst lesson in divorce. For all intents and purposes, I was my husband’s equal in divorce. Our children were not.

They never entered a dog in the game.

They were innocent spectators.

They showed up never deserving or knowing things may get out of control. They shouldn’t have been pitted against the two people who made their world go round.

They should have had the luxury of love.

Especially, when they needed it most.

My husband didn’t have the right to misbehave during the divorce.

That’s the unfortunate privilege and price we pay for remaining in a marriage too long. In believing our exposed bad behavior is a liability our children endure in our attempt to keep their family together. It’s bad enough we lie to ourselves to believe this before abandoning our marital dream.

We’ve made the shocking parental mistakes we never thought we’d make.

When we remained in a marriage that wasn’t working for too long.

Our children have already paid a price they should never have paid. At least then, we can rationalize that our marital mistakes were somewhat good-intentioned. We wanted to keep our kid's family together.

There’s no excuse for abuse in divorce.

There’s no excuse for overly long and abusively drawn-out marital dissolutions.

Children deserve adults who act like adults.

My children should not have paid the price for me leaving their Father.

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