Dear Ex-Wife

It is now approaching 4 years since I have come into the life of your daughter. I have stood by the sidelines and held my tongue and my reaction to disturbing events as I felt it was in the best interest of all the parties involved. I consider myself an independent thinker, confident and well balanced woman. I have always tried to live my life with positive thoughts and interactions with those that are in my life. There were times in my life that I had friends or relationships which I realized were a negative force in my life and I had to learn that I had the conscious choice on who I allowed in my life. In those situations, I had to end interaction with those negative forces.  Unfortunately, I am unable to remove myself from interaction with you because I have fallen in love and committed myself in a partnership with your ex husband and helping to raise his daughter.

There is so much I want to say so in finding this site, I hope I can finally find some release for my pent up frustrations and anger towards you.  I struggle regularly not to allow myself to feel such anger and resentment with you and how you treat your ex husband, daughter and me. I strive to find compassion and empathy for you and not to succumb to my ego. Unfortunately, I am a woman that does not like or allow people to mistreat me or the ones I love.  It’s hard for me to sit on the sidelines and not speak up.  So here it goes:

I think you are an embarrassment to the female race. You are emotionally immature, consumed by anger, bitterness and jealousy and you have absolutely no idea how damaging your tactics are with your daughter and ex-husband.  You are manipulative and emotionally retarded.

For the first couple of years, I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you were still dealing with anger and hurt and disappointment because your marriage failed.  I understood that you would need time to come to terms that your life as you knew it with your ex husband was no longer to be. When you screamed at me and created a scene in front of my son and total strangers at a public gym and later in another event at the fire station, I felt empathy for you.  When you created a scene on a transition at the airport by rejecting taking your daughter because you did not feel she was excited enough to want to go with you, I was crushed and crying inside when your daughter emotionally broke down not understanding your behavior and rejection of her.

But a year later when you showed up at my house and physically tried to enter my home without permission, I was fearful for my safety and my son’s.  I am still angry that you made me feel unsafe in my own home. Your manipulative spin on the events with outside third parties was infuriating to say the least. But deep down, you and I both know what you did and what happened that day. You can try and dismiss and claim confusion but we both know you were obsessed with knowing what my home looked like and how I live my life. You were bound and determined to fill your emotional curiosity.  When you showed up and would not leave at a  home that we were trying to buy and make a offer on,  I was perplexed and annoyed of your disrespect for personal boundaries.   When you come to my son’s bus stop and sit in your car to watch me, I am annoyed that you feel you are entitled to be so intrusive.

I have approached each of these situations refusing to allow you to see the turmoil in me and also refusing to allow you to affect me.

I have witnessed you personally accuse your ex of not providing clothes for your daughter, not putting her in social activities, claiming he does not provide for her financially, alleging he is trying to take your daughter away from you, accusing him of not sharing information on medical and school ,  and accusing him of caring for my son over your daughter.  The truth is none of this is an accurate depiction of the facts. There are so many fathers out there that have abandoned their children financially, physically, and emotionally. This is not the situation with your ex. He is the most compassionate, giving, patience man I know. He over provides for his daughter, continues to try and collaboratively co parent with you, and tries to focus on positive interaction and the future.

I find that whenever you are depressed, stressed, or anxious over your own finances or home life, you use him as your venting bag.  It’s infuriating to see you attack him regularly. I am convinced that you have such low self esteem that you have to attack and make someone else miserable to make yourself feel   better. I ask him all the time why does he allow you to talk with him like that. He says, that’s why my marriage ended and I am so used to it that it’s not worth my energy to engage in it. I am often jealous of his ability to completely disengage and detach himself to your verbal abuse.  He approaches your actions with complete compassion. I can only pray that one day you will eventually find god in your life. I can only pray that one day you will learn to love yourself enough and those in your life that you will begin to appreciate how blessed you really are.  At this point, I am not too confident that will ever actually happen but sometimes we just have to believe in hope.

The most mind boggling thing for me is I see you so angry and bitter and hateful towards him but at the same time, you will do anything to have attention from him. You call regularly 4-5 times a week finding miscellaneous reasons to talk to him. You show up at his work.  You text him mundane thoughts or comments at 4 and 5 am, unsolicited.  You create situations with your daughter as a pawn so he has to interact with you, and constantly disregard his requests for you to stop bothering him. What is that about?

His family and he constantly tell me that you are just mentally ill, there is just something off with you. I am not completely convinced of this yet. I find you manipulative and strategically intrusive at times.  I believe that you are still living a fantasy by trying to still maintain that husband-wife relationship. I believe this because you literally have never acknowledged my existence.  You continued to wear your wedding ring when he and I were engaged. You told third parties and him that you were ready to get back with him when he and I were engaged, living together and established in our minds and those in our lives as life partners. You continually ignore my calls or emails when events concerning your daughter require collaboration and insist on interacting only with your ex.  I sincerely believe you mentally figure that if you do not acknowledge my existence then I really do not exist in your mind. It’s quite sad really. Lady, I’m not going anywhere. Your ex-husband is my soul mate. I hate to break it to you but despite the turmoil you create, we very much love each other and the blended family we have created with our children. AND, the children very much love the family unit we have created. It was them that insisted we seal the knot in marriage even though each of us were content and happy as life partners.

The hardest thing out of all of this for me is the repercussions I see in your daughter. No matter how I personally feel about you or that I do not believe you should really have the custody time or joint authority in decisions concerning your daughter’s school and medical issues, I do believe your daughter has a right to a positive and good relationship with her mother. A few months ago, your daughter actually asked me if she could have her own lawyer. I asked her what do you need a lawyer for?  She said she wanted a lawyer for herself so she could stop your behavior. Your daughter is only 9 years old. The sad part is that you have absolutely no clue how much you are pushing your daughter away from you.

The first of this year after saying negative things about her father, your daughter jumped out of your car during a transition and screamed at you to move back to Texas and stop being her mother.  When we asked her what happened, she said that she told you to stop accusing her father of bad parenting with her.  I have to wonder if you thought anything about this explicit expression of how your daughter felt and what she has to be around on your time. Are you so consumed by your own emotional needs that you could not identify how much you are hurting your daughter?  Did her outward display have any effect on you?

What you do not know, is when your daughter called you later to apologize to you for her statements that came from me. I told your daughter she has every right to feel angry or upset about the situation but I also told her that you were her mother and how she handled that situation was wrong. Trying to verbally assault you and hurt you back in the same way that you did to her was not appropriate. Although it’s hard to do, I strive to show her to accept you for who you are but to learn by what she sees and make her own decisions on what type of person she wants to be.

The other day, our family was discussing family member’s birthdays. I asked your daughter what your birthday date was. She had no clue and was not sure. I was stunned by that and it made me realize that there really is not much of an emotional connection between the two of you.

I want to believe in the mother-daughter bond. I want to believe the deep down all mothers will protect their children and be concerned for the physical and emotional development and take the high road when needed. I no longer have such faith in you as a mother.  What’s sad is that your own daughter has developed some of your social deficits in modeling behavior.  You are selfish, lack any ability to establish healthy friendships, intrusive and disrespectful even to total strangers, lazy and you are a hypochondriac. Your own daughter has very little friends, we constantly work to teach her social grace and manners, she has begun to lack a passion for her school work and she has developed unhealthy neurosis about her own health.

Your Ex and I strongly believe in a positive and collaborative coparenting relationship. I have worked very hard to do this in my own life with my son and his father. I am so tired of your constant double standards. You accuse us of not sharing information with you but you refuse to do the same and many times we have to go to the school office directly to even get the report card of your daughter. You accuse us of keeping medical information and claim we are going to arrange medical procedures without your permission but regularly you make appointments and actually do medical procedures with your daughter without even discussing or notifying her father.  Some of them are questionably inappropriate. You complain that your ex has never pursued social activities for your daughter. But the fact is, we put her in soccer, organized and arranged her only birthday party, planned some play dates and tried to recently put her in girls scouts. Regularly when there are social activities that are on your time, you refuse to take her and accuse us of encroaching on your time. What we find frustrating is that these activities are craved by your daughter and she would love for her own mother to share those things with her.

The sad part is we know that you are a diagnosed manic depressant. We know that you mentally do not handle social situations well and it causes anxiety. Unfortunately, because you hibernate your daughter from others on your time and limit her interactions with other kids, we are seeing some serious deficits developing in your daughter.  We also know you do not know how to discipline her or handle her outbursts. We also have some knowledge of the negative comments you make about us and I can only imagine what she encounters on your custody time. Unfortunately, at this age, she still does not know how to make friends. When she is put in social situations, she struggles to share and play nice with other kids. She disengages with kids and even with us.  She is 9 years old and still cannot learn good eating skills. She gets food in her hair, does not use utensils, and has to be reminded to chew with her mouth closed and talk after she is done chewing.   In public, she regularly regresses and acts like a toddler by talking baby talk, crawling on the floor and struggles to act her age. This occurs regularly when she is with you for an extended time such as a vacation.   Unfortunately, it is so hard to prove this for the courts. It’s so hard to prove the mental deficits your parenting is creating in your daughter. So we navigate and do the best we can around you.  You insist that she needs a private school for a good education because you feel she lacks passion.  The fact is you for 2 years have taken her out of school for 9 days and made her tardy for same amount of days but you had the audacity to claim it was our fault because we would not agree to put her in a private school and she is in the public school system.  The fact is YOU are teaching her not to commit to her studies and make her way in the world.  It is so frustrating and infuriating.

I do not share the common belief that most people believe that no matter what you should always maintain a relationship with your parents and family because they are “blood”. I do not share that belief because there are many parents out there that are abusive and have no business having children. Thus, it will be interesting to see in 10 years when your daughter has her own independence and control of her life as to whom is in her life, if she will maintain a relationship with you. I would never encourage her to detach from you but I will tell you I will not support it either. I will be silent on the subject and allow her to make her own decisions.

Sometimes, to get through the weekly struggles and cycles with your daughter, I want to believe that she had a guarding angel in her life that brought me to her. Sometimes, I find we have a deep connection and she reminds me so much of myself at that age-low self esteem, lack of confidence or independence.  It took me years to carve out the type of woman I wanted to be and to learn to love myself and that it was up to me and not others to create my wonderful livelihood. But I did it and perhaps now it is my time to give back and to teach someone else what I learned.   I tell myself that it is my role to give her another level of guidance and love as a human being- to show her and influence her on how she can be another type of woman.  I am not sure how much influence I will have on her but I hope I can show her that you can be an independent, well balance woman and you make a choice on if you want to be bitter, resentful, and to see yourself as a victim. I hope I can instill in her that above all else love prevails. Just love, just put positive love and energy out in the world to make it a better place. I believe wholeheartedly that it comes back to you ten fold.

In the end, your interactions with us are passive-aggressive tactics that are only hurting the most important person in this situation, your daughter. I do believe as she gets older she is starting to figure some things out about you. She is starting to realize that there are always 2 sides to the story. Sometimes, it’s hard for me because I see her model your behavior in our household and it’s like living with a mini you. Resentment grows at times with that, but I vow to myself to let it go and just try to show your daughter mutual respect and unconditional love and hope at the end of the day she will find the right way to live her life and interact with others. And she just might have the chance at a happy, healthy life for herself.

My Best Friend of 30 years asked me the other night, why do I put up with all this constant drama? She wanted me to know that I still have choices in my life because she can’t even comprehend how I handle all this junk. I said to her that every marriage has a white elephant. Whether its addictions, or bad inlaws, infidelity, or spoiled children. But at the end of the day, I would have never married your ex-husband until I came to terms with what my life might involve. I told her that I look at relationships like a scale, if there is more good then bad then you stick it out. For all the crap that we deal with, really at the end of the day it’s only about 10% bad. Your ex-husband gives me absolute unconditional love. He is the best step father I could ever have for my son and he makes up for the negative deficits in my son’s own father has with his relationship with my son. We have so many similar belief systems. We have fun just playing and he influences and teaches me things about myself every day. Everyday, I am a better person for having him in my life.  I would never trade that or any future experiences for anything in the world simply because of another woman. I would never let you take away someone good in my life-then you would win. Frankly, I deserve him. I have had my history of bad men like all women have. I also told her that I go onto this site sometimes when it’s really bad and I see so many women that actually deal with even worse antics with ex’s and it can always be worse.  You just have to let go of your ego in the situation and love.  Keep the ones that you love and that love you close as ever and just live.

 

 

 

~ by Stepfamily Letter Project on November 1, 2010.