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“This man is SICK”

That is the thought that keeps running through my mind.

I got into it with my ex-husband on Sunday and he said horrible, awful things to me. It was NOT unprovoked. I will own that I absolutely provoked him - by forcing him to have a conversation with me about real shit. He prefers to ignore me. He chooses to have as little interaction with me as possible, he doesn’t even tell me when he’s seeing my nephew, my dead brother’s son, which I find heinous. He doesn’t check on me, he doesn’t ask how I’m doing, he doesn’t talk to me unless I make him, which I find to be a problem because it’s not the co-parenting relationship I think is most beneficial to my children and I always want what’s best for them.

When they first started going to his home for the weekends, there was an incident where I went to pick them up around 730/8pm and when I got home and told them to start getting their things ready for school the next day and then get ready for bed they told me they hadn’t eaten dinner yet. So I was forced to establish a rule with Van that if I didn’t get a text message from him by 4pm, letting me know that he would be feeding them dinner that evening, I would default to picking them up at 5 so that I could have time to feed them and get them to bed at a decent hour. If he says he’s feeding them, I pick them up at 7.

A couple of weeks ago, I needed to pick them up at 4 and so obviously I knew I would be feeding them dinner but when I picked them up they told me they hadn’t even had lunch, so then that was an issue I needed to address with him. It’s a sore subject because the incident that incited our split was one morning when I got up early to clean and run errands, I was gone until noon and when I finally got home and hauled in all the groceries, I found out that he hadn’t fed them breakfast but had fed himself and him forgetting to feed them was something that had been happening for a while and I had had enough. I confronted him about it and the immediate result was him moving out and the long-term result was our divorce. It appalls me that it’s still an issue years down the line. It’s a very sensitive issue for me, I have trauma around it because my parents liked to have “party weekends” sometimes when I was little. They’d lock themselves in their bedroom and do coke and watch porn and fuck loudly and I would amuse myself and my siblings as best I could, but eventually we got hungry…and the day would go on and on and eventually I’d resort to sitting outside their room, hoping to catch one of them when they came out to use the bathroom and ask what was for dinner. It felt terrible and I never want my kids to feel like they're not even important enough to feed.

That was the start of our argument on Sunday but it went everywhere and nowhere. He’s the type of person where if you bring up an issue with them, they bring up something you’ve done instead of addressing their own behavior. If I tell him how something makes me feel, he answers with his own feelings. There is no resolving anything because no matter what I bring up, we have to deal with something else from weeks or months or years ago that he wants to bring up in response. It is incredibly frustrating because this isn’t something I can just walk away from, even though I know I can’t find a resolution. This is a person I have children with. He’s important to my kids. I can’t cut him off and not deal with the issues and I also can’t just let shit go when it comes to advocating for my kids. It is a tough tough place to be.

The worst thing he said to me was that he didn’t trust me with our kids. Which is…insane. There’s no other way to say it. If I didn’t trust someone with my kids, I would leave them there for 3 weeks at a time and not call to check in on them, which is something he literally just did. It makes no sense. Very little he said made any sense to me, except for the accusation that when I’m pissed off I say mean things and exaggerate. That’s definitely true. I own that. I know my anger is an issue and it always has been, which is why I’ve devoted so much of my life to working on it. I spend most of my time working on myself because I want to be better. I try to do everything to avoid even letting myself get to a place of anger because I know how bad I can be when I do finally get there. And exaggeration is basically my entire personality. It’s what I DO. I don’t present or defend my exaggerations as facts because I know them for what they are. But everything else???????????? It was nonsense. Unfortunately, I am the type of person that carefully considers criticism for truth when it’s made on me. I always want to see myself more objectively and be more self-aware, so I was not able to just immediately dismiss the things he said that didn’t make sense to me, I took it all in and I had to spend time picking it apart and processing it, trying to figure out where and how it was true. That shit hurt. Holy fuck, I was devastated.

As I took my time and slowly and meticulously went through it all again and again, I eventually figured out that it wasn’t true, it was just a miasma of accusations sprayed in my face in hopes I would inhale and be overcome by it, designed to hurt me and derail the conversation, which it did. He got me again.

This time will be different though. This time I finally SEE him. I have known this man since I was a child. He came to my 17th birthday. He taught me how to drive. He’s 11 years older than me and he has been manipulating me the entire time. He’s been mindfucking me. The older I got, the harder it got for him to do, and now I’m almost 40 myself and I’m not going to let him do it to me anymore. I see all of it for what it is. THANK. GOD.

Outside of him attacking me as a mother, the other big thing that really hurt me was him calling me a liar. I’m not. I am honest to the point that I wish I was more capable of dishonesty because there are definitely times in my life when it would just be so much easier to lie, but I can’t. I’m too fucking proud. I care too much about what my word means. I refuse to diminish any of my truth by diluting it with lies. Part, if not MOST, of that is trauma too. My dad used to tell people I was a liar so that nobody believed me in the event that I ever decided to speak out on what he actually did to us. Van knows this first-hand because he made sure to take Van aside at my baby shower and have a man-to-man (because they were closer in age than Van and I were) not about taking care of his daughter and future grandchild, but to make sure Van knew that I was a liar and not to believe anything I said about my family.

And so it makes sense. It makes sense that at 16 I set my heart on a man just like my father, to give me the acceptance I could never get from him. A man that would call me a liar to preempt the truth that I would tell. He doesn’t trust me with his kids because he’s scared I will tell them who he actually is. He calls me a liar because he wants me to doubt myself and my own truth. He had fun. He had a young, hot wife, that could cook him anything he wanted, that did nasty, freaky shit in bed, that liked to party, that would go out and work and spend all of her money on him and his kids without ever asking for reciprocity or respect and he could mindfuck me into behaving however he wanted me to, he could manipulate me into altering my reality within my own mind, just like my dad, so that nothing was ever his fault, I was so fucked up and as long as I never worked on myself, he never had to work on himself, and all was well…but then I grew up. I grew up and I worked really really hard on myself and I wanted an adult relationship, I wanted accountability, I wanted my efforts matched, I wanted accountability…and it all fell apart. Now he’s scared that I will tell my daughter that if a grown-up is interested in a 16-year-old that it’s wrong and the adult in that relationship is taking advantage. He’s scared that one day I’ll tell my son that when I was 21 years old and 6 months pregnant with him, I had to go pick his father up from a threesome that happened after a party he told me I wasn’t allowed to come to and that he was so drunk he kept kicking and hitting me from the backseat as I drove him home. He’s not worried about me lying to my kids, he’s more and more worried about me telling the truth and he has no control over me anymore so I won’t try to be deferential to him. He’s scared I will finally say to them, instead of him, that it’s wrong for him to forget to feed them and remember to feed himself. He’s scared I will connect the dots and realize and finally KNOW why Trin was mad at him for not “having her back” when she decided to leave home instead of blaming and berating myself as if it was all my fault, so that the truth of the matter, that all the work I put into getting her to college was disrupted by his need to undermine me with her six months from the finish line. I still have the texts I pulled from her phone, he’s scared because he can’t jedi mind-trick me into an alternate interpretation of the facts and he can’t stop me from telling people. The biggest threat to my father was me finally finding the courage to speak on what he did instead of protecting him and it’s all come full circle to the biggest threat to my ex-husband being me finally running out of reasons to “protect” him from the actual facts, and speaking out loud his actions, his choices, and the facts of our story. It’s so much more important for him to be seen a certain way than it is for him to actually be that way and the bigger of a threat I am to his self-projection, the more he hates me.

I finally, finally, FINALLY fucking get it.

I have been trying so hard to be a friend to him since our divorce. I bend over backwards to make sure he gets time with our kids and now I actually do feel dumb for it, but how can I regret it when it was coming from such a sincere and loving place? He doesn’t want to be my friend. He doesn’t care about me or what happens to me at all and that has been very obvious for a WHILE, and I didn’t understand why before because I was still holding on to the fiction that was built for me, but I do now - I’m no longer useful to him. He cannot control me or my narrative so the only thing to do at this point is to try and do everything he can to discredit me, even in my own mind. He was never interested in me as a person, he never actually cared, this has been purely transactional from the beginning and his old tricks don’t work so he’s got to actually be better or be seen for who he actually is and he can’t stand it.

Luckily for me, I have great friends. Not just supportive, loving, invested friends, but friends who are actually truly great people in their own right. I have friends that have seen the fires of hell and made it through. I have terrific people that will tell me hard truths with kindness and love. I have fantastic human beings that lift me up, hold me accountable, celebrate me and keep me grounded. These people talk to me and see me way more often than he does. These people connect with me on a level he refuses to. They may not have known me when I was a teenager, but they know me now, and they wouldn’t waste their time and energy on me if I was the dogshit person Van says I am. They’re great and they think I’m great so who gives a fuck what that sad, fucked up little man thinks of me? That’s the conclusion I came to, after all of the pain of processing. He doesn’t want to know me so he doesn’t try to know me so he doesn’t know me and his opinions are based on who he wants me to be to make his life easier.

It definitely feels like he’s beyond fucked up. He knows me and he knows what I’ve gone through and he’s trying like hell to exploit any weakness I have and get me back under his influence, like he’s trying to use the awful skeleton key my father built into me to manipulate and control me so that he doesn’t ever have to actually be a better person and it feels truly sick. Yuck.