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One for when you're ready - re leaving kids » alexandra_k

Posted by Damos on September 19, 2005, at 1:03:12

In reply to Re: The long, long one. » Damos, posted by alexandra_k on September 16, 2005, at 20:35:31

Hey :-)

Again, I'm not going to ask you to go anywhere or think about hard stuff. It's just about adding another perspective to what you've said about your dad.

I've spoken about M and the miscarriage before, but not much about J her son. When I met M J was 4 and we just hit it off so great, it was like he was a missing piece of me. In the years leading up to M and I actually getting together we used to hang out a lot and J was always a big part of that so we'd got pretty close. When I moved out after the miscarriage J was around 9 and he asked me to take him with me. I was 23 and so not in a good place. The weekend I moved out he was with his father and so I didn't get to see him to say goodbye. When I next saw him he was around 14 and the first thing he said to me was "You didn't say goodbye", and then a few months later he begged me to let him come and live with me - which just wasn't possible. When they moved to Western Australia in 2001 I went to see them off at the airport and J hugged me so tight I thought I was going to shatter into a thousand pieces. He also told me he loved me. A few days later after they'd got settled I got an email from M saying that since his father had left them when he was 3, I was the only man J* had ever hugged, and other stuff about how she could tell how much he loved me.

Well, he's now nearly 27, never finished school, has no real friends, an alcohol problem, symptoms of depression, and major self esteem issues. And I carry an enormous sense of guilt and shame over it all. Which isn't helped when he says stuff like "I always knew you loved me". I've told him how I feel and he says it's okay cause he understands, but it doesn't change anything about how I feel or what happened in the years I wasn't there - much of which probably doesn't bear thinking about.

Everytime I see him I can see the hurt in his eyes, hurt I can never undo. I see myself there too, a self that's pretty hard to like, and it makes spending time together hard. But I try cause I love him. I made the only choices I felt I could at the time, but it doesn't make things any easier.

For some people the responses to physical and verbal violence aren't as simple as 'Fight or Flight', for some they experience a kind of 'Freeze', where the emotional response to what's happening is so overwhelming they can't do anything except just shrink way down inside themselves and hope that it'll somehow miss them.

Alex, your dad probably made the only choices he felt he could at the time too. It's very likely he didn't believe he could get custody of you, and at the time that may well have been true. It's also possible he didn't think he was strong enough to fight your mum. It's also possible that once this choice had been made that guilt piled on top of guilt. He'd see you on those occasions and you'd just be as good as you could be and he'd just feel worse about his choice, so he'd pull away further and see you less and less cause it was too hard. Then when you ran away and stuff that would have just added to it even more, and to have faced you then would have meant facing himself and the consequences of his choices, actions and inactions. So later when put on the spot by your p-doc he would have had to deny abandoning you. He would have had no choice because otherwise his whole world might've collapsed around him. Denial was/is probably the only way to live with the weight of it. And then again, maybe he just didn't think he was capable of looking after you. I don't know and I may well be wrong on all counts, but he is the only one who can ever know the truth. It's hard to accept that our parents are only human and suffer from the same frailties and failings as any other member of the human race, cause we see and need them to be so much more.

Is it possible to forgive and forget? Honestly, I don't know. Is it possible to get to a place where the picture isn't so starkly black and white, where there is more depth and shades of grey? Yes. I believe it is, even if only for your own benefit. A place of possibilities, where what happened isn't all down to and held by you. A place where colour can emerge, like those black and white photographs you see where the flower of the rose is coloured red. Sometimes life can be like watching movies over and over; you can get to a point where you know the main (your) story so well that you actually start seeing more of what was happening in the background.

Hope this helps a little.

 

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