L
Liberanosamalo
Guest
Again. YOUR MOTHER IS A WIDOW. For those who have never gone through divorce, you may not understand this. We lost our spouses. We lost their financial help, their love, their companionship just as if they had dropped dead. But it was worse than that. WE ALSO LOST: all our memories with that person, which are now viewed through a 20/20 hindsight that makes us question everything we used to believe. We lost the ability to reminisce lovingly about them and keep their picture on the coffee table like a ‘real widow’. We didn’t get a big insurance payout. People avoid us like the plague lest they “catch divorce too.” Our children lost their family security and stability. They lost respect for a parent who may have gone completely over the bend. Trust was lost. The Courts step in and further degrade the “widow” and make her have to scramble for things that belonged to her for decades. And the worst part is the “dead body” doesn’t get buried in a clean break. The widow has to see the corpse walking around laughing and loving and sharing his new life “beyond the grave” with someone else at her physical and financial expense. As disgusting and unrecognizeably rotted he may have become to her during the divorce, he lives in an alternate world where outsiders do not see him as she does now. He is still the hero, or the nice man down the street. She and her children are the ones who quietly suffer from his abandonment.
The “widow,” for her own sanity, needs to believe that her children have not bought into this lie and taken his side like the grandma. When that happens, the widow loses her children too in a way. So she lets them know each new outrage. Talking to her children about what is really going on is sometimes the only honesty she has in her life at this point. To paper that over and tell her that topic is off limits could prevent her from moving on eventually or it could have even worse consequences, like spiralling depression or suicide. She’s been thrown away like garbage for all her years of love and service. For her children to back off now would multiply that to the breaking point.
This issue attacked the heart of the family, and it needs to be dealt with as a family, the same way an infection in the body cannot be separated from the whole body. A good doctor treats the whole patient. The children will not improve their relationship with their father by making their mother feel worse. (and yes, it’s vice versa for when the wife runs off with the cabana boy. I know that.) These adult “children” are also facing the prospect that “daddy” may start a new family and they will join the mother’s grief as she watches him treat wife #2 with a generosity or compassion she may not have gotten. They may see their father treat children #2 with a level of attention and generosity he never showed them. That hurts! This IS their business.
Because the children are mourning their father too. And their illusion of family stability, their image of their father’s character and their plans to have a Grandma and Grandpa experience for their own children. Daddy and his new Ninotchka have messed up everyone here. And only an insane person could view it all and be okay with it. Stress is the feeling that happens when one’s mind has to override the body’s desire to wring someone’s neck. And daddy is blissfully going about his new life while everyone else reels in shock and horror.
The “widow,” for her own sanity, needs to believe that her children have not bought into this lie and taken his side like the grandma. When that happens, the widow loses her children too in a way. So she lets them know each new outrage. Talking to her children about what is really going on is sometimes the only honesty she has in her life at this point. To paper that over and tell her that topic is off limits could prevent her from moving on eventually or it could have even worse consequences, like spiralling depression or suicide. She’s been thrown away like garbage for all her years of love and service. For her children to back off now would multiply that to the breaking point.
This issue attacked the heart of the family, and it needs to be dealt with as a family, the same way an infection in the body cannot be separated from the whole body. A good doctor treats the whole patient. The children will not improve their relationship with their father by making their mother feel worse. (and yes, it’s vice versa for when the wife runs off with the cabana boy. I know that.) These adult “children” are also facing the prospect that “daddy” may start a new family and they will join the mother’s grief as she watches him treat wife #2 with a generosity or compassion she may not have gotten. They may see their father treat children #2 with a level of attention and generosity he never showed them. That hurts! This IS their business.
Because the children are mourning their father too. And their illusion of family stability, their image of their father’s character and their plans to have a Grandma and Grandpa experience for their own children. Daddy and his new Ninotchka have messed up everyone here. And only an insane person could view it all and be okay with it. Stress is the feeling that happens when one’s mind has to override the body’s desire to wring someone’s neck. And daddy is blissfully going about his new life while everyone else reels in shock and horror.