Uncle Daddy, Buying Kids’ Love??

It’s really time we stopped tip-toeing around the truth. When men leave their families for a new fling, with very few exceptions it’s nothing short of abandoning their responsibilities to relive their glory days as teenage boys. And the “women” who find that attractive are disgraces to their gender, since they’re celebrating a male who has welched on being a dad, a husband, and an actual man … It really says as much about the women who fall for males who act like this as it does the guys, doesn’t it?

Notice I don’t say men. Men don’t run from commitment. Men don’t make promises and then look for the easy way out. Men don’t look their firstborn daughter right in her eyes and then scream at her that she isn’t as important as the new girlfriend they’ve known for 6 months. That’s a boy who doesn’t know right from wrong or doesn’t care. That’s not a man.

My father and grandfather are (and were) good men, honest and true. From them I learned that challenges aren’t something to run from, but to tackle and try to overcome. I was taught that when you make a promise, you work on it and you grow in it … You don’t run when it gets hard. My ex-husband was abusive. He called me names, he told me over and over how worthless and unloveable I am. He raped me, more than once. And I *still* tirelessly toiled to try to make our marriage work. I took that seriously, even when I had every right to have left.

My ex-husband left the family we’d built for almost 20 years to run around like a teenager in heat, abandoning his children in the process, and his girlfriend actually thinks that makes him manly? It makes him the biggest piece of immaturity that I’ve ever seen in my life. It makes him selfish and it makes him cold to the needs of anyone other than himself.

Yes, that includes you, soon-to-learn-girlfriend. Actually, he’s already giving orders and you’re jumping, so you’re already learning. It’s pretty amusing to watch.

My children’s “father” now sees them only every other weekend. I’m not complaining about having full custody, because I shouldn’t ever be separated from my kids just because their father is a faithless cheat. But he does: zero school prep. Zero appointments. Zero scheduling appointments. I do: every school morning, every appointment, every scheduling of appointments, all homework, all broken hearts and bad days. I’m the parent in the trenches.

He’s the Uncle Daddy who brags about all the toys his girlfriend bought and throws a party every other weekend, calling that parenting.

I’m sick of it. I’m sick of parents who leave just to be a boyfriend or girlfriend with no responsibility.

don’t deserve these kids.

The User Gets Used

I was watching a video tonight, one of those inspirational videos that pop up on social media so often lately. I have a few I follow and really get blessed by, and this one in particular was no exception.

The topic was not allowing oneself to be used by others. It goes without saying that I’ve allowed myself to be used so many times, to the point where I served up my life on a silver platter for a false friend to gleefully dismantle, leaving me standing in an empty room wondering where everything I’d worked so hard to build had gone.

But you can’t exactly blame the thief when you let them in the front door and served them dinner. That blame falls squarely on me, for allowing myself to be used. My inner voice was screaming the entire time that it was a sham, but I wanted so badly to believe in the fairy tale I’d been sold that I wouldn’t listen.

Not that my allowing myself to be used means I’m at fault for what was done to me. That was evil, and that blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the one who planned and executed it. Karma will come … Actually, it’s been coming.

But back to being used. In this video I watched, they said if someone leaves your life and you’re in a better space afterwards, that tells you that they were using you while you put forth all of the effort. I’ve looked back on the 3+ years since being manipulated right out of my own family, and in every way I’m in a better space: physically, emotionally, spiritually. Those 2 years of misery, which were sold to me as a way to “save me from the emotional abuse I was going through” were actually more abusive than the abuse I had been going through for so long. Through gaslighting, isolating, lies, being ignored, being screamed at, and then being promised things would change, I was reduced to a shell of myself, in 2 short years.

You tried to destroy me.

But you couldn’t.

Out of curiosity, I thought about how you’ve been doing since you threw me out of my own family and tried to take everything from me. It’s interesting, because you speak all the time about being so stressed, so tired, so unable to have fun anymore. Your health has gone south. That husband you think you stole from me, who is actually a serial cheater and couldn’t be loyal if his life depended on it? It seems he’s got a drinking problem and can’t even hide it, as person after person sees him at the liquor store almost daily, buying a bottle.

I guess no one is bringing anything to the table anymore, because it looks like you’re both using each other. Karma is fascinating.

You only ended up taking a faithless cheater, an abusive spouse who treated me so poorly that I turned to you for help as my friend. You took my home, my life that I had built for almost 20 years, and my hopes for the future.

But I have full custody of my children. I have a new life that I’ve been building. I have real friends who build me up and reciprocate the friendship I give. I have family surrounding me. And that’s all the future I’ll ever need.

Who do you have? Who can you really count on?