What can I do? I raised my 3 children by myself for 6 years, before re-marrying my ex-wife. Ten years ago, she god hooked on heroin, tried to commit suicide, abandoned the kids, became involved in various credit card and chech fraud schmes, stole a car, among other and dissapeared. 5 years later, she seemed to be gettign her life together, and I thought she had changed. She slowly reverted to her old selfish, reckless, dishonest, manipulative, and controlling ways ways. We separated when she met a man 12 years younger and abruptly took the kids and moved in with him after having an affair under my nose for about 2 weeks. She explained this to the kids, to my horror, by telling them that I had physically abused her. She made a false child and spousal abuse charge, and got a temporary protective (restraining) order, but we settled out of court. Immediately, I began noticing a big change in my children. My 10-year old was acting out, swearing at me and insulting me. She began to provoke me and to defy me openly if I tried to send her to her room or something. She began to threaten to have get my children taken away from me, to say things like “stop trying to rape me” if I sat next to her on the couch.
I began to date a woman and after about a month of dating, I introduced them to her. The kids seemed amused and not at all threatened at the time, but gradually, they began to resent me having a girlfriend. She and my middle child began making outlandish demands of me. Their mother encouraged them to make a list of demands, including that I not spend any time with my girlfriend while they were in my custody, which was 3 days a week, every weekend, and that they never wanted to be around her again. They also confronted me about things that had happened while their mom was gone, accusing me of keeping them from her. The truth was that I didn’t even know where she was 80% of the time, and she never came to visit them, and only asked me to bring them to her every once in a whille, about 2 or 3 timea a year, on average. I reacted by basically trying to split my time between my girlfriend and them, my girlfriend havign monday-thursday night and saturday night and afternoon, and them having the rest of the time. Then I left the country on business. when I got back my estranged wife had filed for a protective order alledging all sorts of crazy abuse on the children, and repeating the previous allegations as well. Then she got my kids to say the same things to social services, and because of this, they gave me supervised visitation for 6 months. then two months later, my youngest daughter made a new abuse allegation against me, and my wife tried to have my visitation firther restricted.
Now I’m out of money, trying to fight her in court. her boyfriend’s wealthy family is apparently financing her lawyer, and I’ve gone broke. The kids re-canted many of the abuse claims 3 times to psychaitrists and investigators, and so forth, but I still have tremendous problems with my youngest. She acts as if she hates me violently, for no reason, except that maybe I have a girlfriend. My son and othe daughter deny making any charges at all when I ask them, but I know they are lying, and that social services is not. Even so, they seem to be angry at me and hurt, as If I’ve abandoned them. I really feel like I’ve lost my younger daughter. I don’t think she loves me anymore. I don’t know if I will ever have anythign resembling a normal relationship with any of them, and may end up only seeing them in a little room with a one-way mirror, like a prisioner.
I moved in with my girlfriend after losing custody and gettign only supervised visitation. I feel guilty about that now, even though my kids aren’t around, they seem to resent that fact. It also doesn’t help my case, but we both needed to save money, and I really needed her as a support, and I was living with her half the time anyway. I asked her to marry me a little while later. My lawyer wants her out of the way, but she’s all Ive’ got right now.
I can’t put things back the way they were, the way my kids want things to be again, but I want to try to undo some of the damage.
She did a whole lot of criminal stuff, but was able to get away with a lot of it because I paid off all of the checks she forged and all the bad checks she wrote, and I didn’t turn her in for the fraud she committed against me when we were together, or for using drugs around the kids, and I didn’t turn her in for trying to track down her roomatew and kill her or something, and when we weren’t together I tried to press charges,a but the cops wouldn’t listen because we were still married, and when she stole the car, she got away with that because the place went out of business after committing business fraud and destroying a lot of their records. Even when she did go to court for assaulting me and lying to the cops, they gave her the federal district court equivalent of probation before judgement, so it looks as if the case was dismissed, even though she was on probation for a year. Also her cousin never turned her in fro robbing her She has a shoplifting conviction.
