Don’t Stay For the Children

I pray you’re right. I try so hard to maintain low-no contact but the FW emails his false accusations damn near daily and I am soul-level tired. Why can’t he leave me the F alone? Even so, I give curt, no-emotion responses. It is exhausting. I am planning to call a lawyer to see how frequently do I legally have to respond to his BS. I am sick of sending the same emails , “I respectfully disagree,” or “I disagree with your characterization and assessment of the situation.”

I too have been there, done that. I am so glad my mother divorced my abusive father. Now that I am in the same position as my mother was, my daughter is very pleased with our situation. She has gone no contact with her dad, whom she says she views as my ex-husband. Every time we do something like go on holiday or out to a show, she mentions how much less stressful it is without him. She knew long before I did that something was wrong. She was always asking him if he loved me and he refused to answer “because he didn’t want to lie to her.”

For the record, four years on, he constantly texts me asking for recipes, sharing holiday photos, sending photos of stuff clearly linked to shared memories. He insists he hated his life. His actions show him trying to reproduce it with schmoopie. His sister says there is nothing between them but the kid they conceived during my marriage.

Whatever.

Being the parent of children with special needs is daunting but public misperceptions can make it hell on a stick. Even if a child is a walking miracle and defying original prognosis, this may not be considered “doing well” by normal measures and it’s easy for ignorant bystanders to ascribe any lack of perfection to the woes of being from a “broken home.” What’s more, having a child with a disability– especially if that child has expensive medical complications– can make escaping abuse like defusing a bomb. Most people don’t understand the added risks and complications of a contentious divorce when there are special needs children involved but it would help if they did. Personally I felt like I was walking a tightrope with perils on all sides that not many other people could see. All sorts of ducks had to be gotten in rows before I could make my intention to leave known because of the risks to my disabled son. One of the biggest risks is that, if financial difficulties in divorce somehow disrupted my son’s treatment protocol which was largely out of pocket, it might conceivably shorten his life.

There are also aspects of caring for disabled children that make it harder to plan or even think and make disability parents easier to intimidate. Like a lot of disability parents, I clearly had PTSD from witnessing my son’s awful descent into illness and from wrangling with schools and doctors to get him proper education and treatment. One of the tactics that stonewalling schools and medical systems use to get parent advocates to feck off and back down is to float not-so-subtle hints that the parent could be charged with wrongdoing on whatever feeble grounds. For instance, pushing doctors for expensive testing or medical treatments they don’t personally favor or don’t get kickbacks for and pushing schools to make constitutionally guaranteed allotments for medical conditions can be cast as “Munchausen.” This has happened even when conditions are officially documented and leading medical authorities recommend the tests or treatments.

There are also pitfalls in the case parents are disabled themselves. Custody can be taken away on the grounds of parental disability or illness alone. I had all sorts of typical carer injuries that I’d never gotten treated because of lack of time and resources but didn’t dare claim temporary disability because of how this could compromise parental rights. I was already chronically sleep deprived from years of middle-of-the-night kid health crises and then, during FW’s affair, I stopped sleeping entirely. If FW so much as raised his voice, I’d have to sit down to keep from fainting. Consequently, I lost so much weight from stress that I was banned from donating blood at one point. The weight loss and fainting spells fueled some of FW’s DARVO charges to get me to stop asking whether he was cheating: he cast me as a “dangerous parent” because, according to him, the fainting and weight loss = eating disorder= crazy unfit parent.

Dirty politics in special ed and turf wars between medical specialties also made me more susceptible to claims like this. For instance, I’d put my son on a special diet which, though it’s also recommended on an NIH website for my son’s condition and my son was obviously thriving, the diet was deemed “experimental” by insurers and competing branches of medicine which, at the time, preferred drugging affected kids to kingdom come instead. Add to this the pressure from schools to drug the daylights out of disabled kids to make them easier and cheaper to manage and the whole thing was a powder keg. Furthermore, just a year before FW’s affair, the junk food industry began feverishly promoting a dodgy new “eating disorder” in the media dubbed “orthorexia nervosa” or an “obsession with healthy eating” which, if extended to children, could be turned into grounds for criminal “Munchausen by proxy” charges against parents. This triggered buzz in disability legal advocacy circles about losing kids to the state on charges of “gluten free stir fry” or “kombucha.” The school had complained in writing that my son’s home-cooked lunch was too elaborate to be eaten in the twenty minutes allotted for school meals and that being deprived of “fun food” like pizza was causing problems for his socialization. Never mind the modern epidemic of child obesity and cardiometabolic disorders, I sensed I was a sitting duck to be accused of problematic parenting and FW counted on it.

I thanked God when the “orthorexia” nonsense fizzled after proponents were found to have ties to the junk food industry and pesticide makers and the DSM rejected the entry. I did a hail Mary when the lid came off the opioid crisis because it kiboshed doctors’ and the DOE’s aggressive campaigns to sedate kids for drug maker kickbacks. But before D-Day, I felt like Anne Boleyn about to get my head and parental rights lopped off. Again, because FW knew how vulnerable I felt to any intimation of “unfit parenting,” he played on it. He was so demented and self-absorbed during the affair that I doubt it would even have occurred to him that even floating hints of child endangerment during custody disputes can trigger the involvement of child protective services which may decide to take custody from both parents and that, if this happens, disabled children will likely be institutionalized.

Another risk factor in having disabled children institutionalized are reportedly APs. A disability lawyer I’d previously done research for warned me that she’d seen several cases where side pieces and OWives incited FWs to get full custody of disabled children in order to avoid child support payments, then campaigned to get the child tossed into an institution on state waiver. I argued that FW would never allow such a thing to happen but my friend said to “never say never’ and basically never to underestimate the blackmailing power of a greedy floozie over a middle aged cheater in the throes of cirrhosis-related mental decline.

Once I started suspecting an affair and the DARVO assaults began, I kept having a vision of a sink hole opening up in the ground and swallowing me. I was so worn down, overwhelmed and stressed that I didn’t know where to find the strength to fight back. I had a gut sense that I couldn’t stir up the wasp’s nest before I was ready to firebomb it. I started digging up dirt on FW through his work contacts and was surprised to find a couple whistleblowers. On the advice of my lawyer friend, I hired a private investigator to get solid evidence of that dirt and “asset dissipation,” then retained an attorney. In the end, the evidence painted a terrible picture of FW and his AP which pretty much forfeited any potential claim he might make against me. When all the affair expenditures, the lying texts, FW’s texted accusations and the timelines were added up, FW looked like a horrible parent, made worse by the fact that his son is disabled. The AP looked so bad on paper that FW dumped her and sent a cease and desist. I get the sense she probably voluntarily scuttled away for fear of having the whole world find out about her. Without his barfly cheerleader exhorting him to crush me, FW lost steam. He joined AA, got into therapy and started doing a Pickme dance of his own. That bought me time to start figuring out finances since FW had taken control of everything while I was occuped caring for the kids. That brings up another risk in divorce involving special needs children: even more than traditional SAHMs, caretaker parents tend to lose access to and control of finances because they’re too overtaxed to even think about those things.

FW folded so quickly in the face of the facts that I’ll never know if he really intended to actualize any of his hinted threats. After Day-Day, I had a showdown with FW in which he complained I was treating him like a domestic batterer and I said point blank that he met all the legal qualifications by threatening to take my children away if I didn’t heed his every command. He gasped and said he’d never put our children at risk and he never “intended” to threaten such a thing. I pointed out that he was so skilled and practiced at gaslighting and terrorizing that it had become reflexive and no longer required any thought or conscious intent to do it.

These assholes think that coercion being “subconscious” or an action being merely a “bluff” somehow exonerates them. But if you wave a gun at a cop, it doesn’t matter whether it’s loaded or not. You’ll get shot. I think what abusers lose sight of is that the very Achilles heel that might make their victims particularly easy to con and intimidate might also be the reason that victim fights like a cornered animal. My kids and my son’s medical vulnerabilities are my Achilles heels. Maybe what I did to protect their interests was overkill but FW should have guessed I’d hit him with everything.