The impacts of divorce on children has to be one of the biggest fears about divorce and Andrea clearly was afraid for her children when she returned them to her ex under temporary orders. After the custody evaluation, they were returned to her as the custodial parent. Her ex was granted limited parenting time and even that from what Andrea says, is rarely drama free. On one occasion, when she was returning the girls to him for his first two weeks of summer vacation, her ex wasn’t ready for them and he had received some correspondence from the custody evaluator. He was angry and the situation quickly escalated into him attacking Andrea and Andrea being advised by the police to leave and to take the girls elsewhere overnight.
The challenge that Andrea has is how to protect her children from their father and how to give them the life skills to excel despite him. Here’s Andrea:
When my girls were with him during the custody evaluation, he didn’t do any homework with them at all. My middle daughter, it means something to her to get an A. My littlest daughter, when I tried to get her to do extra work in third grade, said to me,
“You know mom, you either pass third grade or you don’t. You know that, right?”
That’s the spirit. I was like,
“Yeah, but I didn’t think you knew that sweetie.”
You have to sit down with her to get her to do the homework. If you don’t sit down with her, she’s not going to do it. Well my husband didn’t do any homework with her for those eleven weeks and she had come from a different school because she’d been here with me, so when her grades came out, they weren’t great. They actually weren’t as bad as I was thinking, they were like B’s down to a C-, but from the way he described them, I thought they were going to be much worse because he was telling her she was so stupid she’d have to repeat third grade. So I got a tutor and the tutor worked with her twice a week, the teacher worked with her once a week, I worked with her all the other days and she did great by the end of the school year.
My husband is an abuser. One of the girls came back from one visit with a broken arm, from another visit with a sprained shoulder, and he freely admits when she had gotten the sprained shoulder, that he had thrown both of them across the room, but she was being “sassy.” The CPS worker, when she was out here last time said to me,
“He’s their dad and he’s going to get mad at them, I can’t be coming out here for every little bruise.”
I never called CPS, the emergency room doctor had called. The appointment doctor had called, their counselors had called, their teachers had called. It does no good. My kids now don’t want me to tell anyone because all it does is make him mad.
My middle one is working with a therapist she adores. She’s a really strong woman who’s empowering to my kid. Up to this point, everyone’s been like “Well, how does that make you feel?” This woman isn’t afraid to use big words and say,
“That is bullshit, he shouldn’t make you feel like that.”
It’s empowering to my kid to have a grown up be mad and be on her side.
I’ve spent the whole last year building these kids up. When my 12-year-old came back to me, she was sixty-nine pounds going into sixth grade. She wasn’t even on the growth chart. She’s so skinny because my husband was so weird about food with her and telling her how fat she was. The court ordered her to an eating disorder clinic. It took me probably six months to get her to where she would eat more than three things and would eat something if she hadn’t seen me make it or wash my hands. Children only have so many things that they can control, but food is one of them.
My kids have made great friends where we are now. Everybody’s happy and they really haven’t had any fallout from the divorce. There weren’t any tears when I said I was leaving. There’s tears when they have to go visit him because he’s abusive. He calls them fat, he calls them stupid. He pushes them, he hits them. So my biggest accomplishment is that I got us out of there. Everyone is happy now, everyone’s safe now and I feel like I hung the moon.
The Divorce Coach Says
I try not to wish that my children grow up faster but I think if I was in Andrea’s shoes it would be hard for me not to. I’d want them to be older so they would be able to have more say in their custody arrangements, I’d want them to be older so they would be better able to withstand their father. And even without being able to push a fast forward button, you know these girls are wise beyond their years and have seen more than I hope many kids.
Andrea’s story here reminded me of Sara who shared that not only did she have to learn to trust her ex’s parenting decisions, which is doubtful in Andrea’s case but Sara also realized she needed to teach her kids about making good decisions so they could tell their dad for themselves what was working for them and what wasn’t.
Andrea and her girls are fortunate to have so many people around them pulling for them and supporting them. I hear what Andrea says about her daughter’s therapist and how empowering it is for her daughter to hear another adult tell her that her father’s behavior is wrong. I think it’s easy for children to grow up with this view that adults have all the answers and then it’s confusing when your father, of all people, is mean and unkind to you. It does makes you realize the difference that a believing adult can have on a child.