How NOT to Treat Kids

This is going to be a blog entry that talks quite a bit about my personal life, so anyone not interested in that can move along. It involves my divorce.

When my ex-wife and I first got together, we were going to change the world! We were going to redefine marriage and redefine parenthood. Well, I don’t know if we did that or not, but we sure wound up with the standard-issue ugly divorce.

Let me come clean right off the bat and say that I did something stupid. I lost my temper with my kids. This is not an excuse, but I had come home from a crappy day at work and discovered that the kids had broken a piece of furniture. I swatted my son on the butt with a dowel from the broken piece of furniture, and then went to swat my daughter’s butt – except that she put her hand behind her and I whacked her on the wrist instead. Of course, I immediately regretted it, but that’s not something that you can take back once it’s done. I asked her if she wanted to go to the doctor to make sure that it was okay, knowing full-well that I faced legal consequences for doing that. We did and she was, thank God, fine. In fact, she was playing with her brother in the waiting room as if nothing had happened.

The upshot of this is that I was charged with misdemeanor domestic violence and pled guilty. I wound up on probation.

Years after this, my then wife decided to leave me. How did she do this? She said that her mom had bought tickets for she and the kids to visit her in Alaska. Nothing unusual in this. I didn’t get along with her mom, so they would always make that trip without me. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t really ready to visit Alaska at all at that point. What haunts me to this day and probably will for the rest of my life is that the last thing that my son said to me as they left for the airport was “I want to stay with you, dad.” I told him that everything was fine and to enjoy his visit. I wouldn’t see my son for a year and a half. When I did see him, it would be for about fifteen minutes, and I wouldn’t see him again. That was in 2001.

After they had been gone for a couple of days, I discovered that my wife had returned and – there’s no other way to put it – ransacked the apartment. There was no division of property, she just came in, took what she wanted (including CD’s that I had owned before we got together and about half of my collection of dragons, including a cauldron with a dragon lid that a friend had given me and I have not seen one like since).

Here’s the kicker, though, and where the title of this piece comes in to play. When I started talking to her about joint custody or visitation, she used my guilty plea of domestic violence to tell people that I had “abused” my step-daughter, and we all know what that means. She flatly told a few people that I know of that I molested my daughter, which is utter and complete bullshit. When I contacted a lawyer, she told me that because of my guilty plea and because neither of the kids were mine biologically (I always thought my son was until she insisted on a paternity test), I would have to be prepared to give her a $5000 retainer and that the entire case would probably cost $10000 to $20000. As I stated in an earlier post, my day job is electronic sales. I simply don’t have that kind of money. If I sold everything that I owned, I still wouldn’t be able to come up with the retainer. And I would have to be prepared to fly to Alaska “frequently” for court appearances.

The upshot of this piece is that, because of her lies and manipulations, my children were taken out of my life. She knew that she couldn’t hurt me with her absence, so she hurt me the only way that she knew that she could.

So two things.

Guys, if you marry a woman with kids, ADOPT THE KIDS. If you don’t, you lose all legal rights in a divorce.

And women, NEVER lie about your kids. EVER. Especially about molestation. It does irreparable damage to the kids, and makes it harder for people who actually HAVE been molested to be believed.

I wanted to get that off of my chest because, even though I try not to spend too much time missing my kids, I have been thinking about them and missing them a lot lately.

Thanks for listening.

Peace.

Randal