I’m not joking or trying to make light of anyone who has gone through a genuine tragedy and suffers from PTSD, but I felt like I was suffering from it yesterday with all the news coverage of the icy weather and school closings. I’m approaching the anniversary of February 12, the Friday before of the big freeze that hit last year, and the day my wife pulled our kids out of school at 11:00 AM and drove them 110 miles to her mother’s and alienated them from me. Oddly, last year, I was grocery shopping at that time, stocking up for the icy weather buying a lot of ingredients to cook a lot of comfort food for the family. Yesterday, I was at the grocery store stocking up for this upcoming winter storm and it all felt eerily familiar as I was shopping for my children’s stay with me this weekend. Then, all the news talked about was the upcoming winter storm. Dreadful memories started to fill my mind, as well as a lot of anxiety and an immense sense of loneliness and abandonment.
At least this year I won’t have to suffer through the start of the winter storm isolated by myself, I’ll have my children. My ex will have to go through the storm alone (I’m guessing), though at least she’ll know the next time she’ll be able to hear and see her children again and the worst of it will only be a few days instead of an entire week full of power outages. I did send her a text saying if she needed any help or ran into an emergency regarding the winter storm, not to hesitate to reach out to me for any assistance.
As I mentioned, she didn’t allow the children to speak to me for four nights and then the fifth day was our son’s ninth birthday, and she had her mother grant me a monitored five-minute call on speakerphone with him. She also bought the children new iPads and created new accounts for them to keep me from being able to contact them, despite us buying them both new iPads a month and a half prior for Christmas. I thought she’d return with the children that Sunday so she could return to work and the children to school on Monday. Nope, without my knowledge, she enrolled the kids in online school to keep them away from me for another week. She did this despite the teacher writing on our daughter’s report card that she struggles with online school.
She did return the following week, but wouldn’t reveal the location of where she was keeping our children. She allowed a few FaceTime sessions and I could tell wherever they were staying didn’t look like a safe place. Through her lawyer, she asked me to leave the house for four hours so she could collect some clothes and belongings, but I refused to leave my own house and that amount of time seemed unreasonable. Through our lawyers, we worked out a compromise that during school, I would place her clothing in our SUV and I could have the children for a whopping two hours for dinner. The next day was the custodial trial.
At the trial, she told the judge I was controlling, an emotional abuser, and a manipulator. I refute every one of those claims and don’t understand why she couldn’t have told me she ever felt that way before or would want to resolve any of that with at least trying a single counseling session before going nuclear by filing for divorce or trying a separation and destroying a family. The first I ever heard of any of those claims was when she told it to a judge. She still won’t grant me a single conversation about why she feels that way or can provide an examples.
She told the judge she was withholding the address of the children because she feared I was going to do something to damage our SUV. I do not know why she would think I’d ever go to that extreme when I have done nothing remotely close to that before.
As I mentioned, I’ve been proactive in treating my depression (a lot of it caused because of her emotional infidelity), so I’m on antidepressants. And, you know I have a bad back and I sometimes take pain medication for that. She played those things up to make it appear I had an addiction problem. The thing is, I was always transparent in everything I did. So, anytime I took pain medication, I told her because I wanted her to know I wasn’t hiding anything and wanted her to know she could hold me accountable. She also claimed I was abusing Ambien. That didn’t help at all because the judge had several cases in which Ambien was blamed for causing some odd behavior. So, as a caution, the judge ruled that I had to take a psychological exam, go to anger management classes, and worst of all, only get the kids to visit me twice a week with no overnight visits. They only got to visit me on Wednesdays for two hours and on Saturday for seven. That’s right, a total of nine hours a week with no overnight visits. That was torturous. However, the judge also required for both of us to take a 12 week parallel parenting course and for her to reveal the address of the children before the evening. I also had to listen to the judge talk down to me after she told my wife to reveal the children’s address, stating if I ever step foot on property I’d be arrested. I was like, geez, that’s overkill, but I bit my lip and nodded my head out of respect.
It was also annoying hearing my wife claim she did most of the laundry, cooking, and cleaning. I did those things because I wanted to spend more time with her. I had the bandwidth since I worked from home, and I wanted to free up her time so we could spend time together as a couple.
I will say my evening ended on a fantastic note because I got to watch the latest episode of The Book of Boba Fett with my kids, and it was the greatest episode of Star Wars from a cartoon or series ever. I won’t say more because I don’t want to ruin anything, but was so happy I got to watch it with my kids because it made me feel like I was a kid again. So I was a kid, with my kids. But, I will be honest, I miss watching television and experiencing these moments as a whole family.