I went to an open house on Sunday and ran into a person I used to be friends with whom I hadn't seen in 15 years. She's a great friend of my ex-wife; during the time I had visitation with my children, hers was the house they always wanted to go to on pre-arranged sleepovers with her children instead of on scheduled weekends with me.
Whenever I encounter townspeople from way back when, I always ask them about what they currently know about my three children (now adults) because I haven't had any communication with them in almost a decade. The divorce, you know.
This woman answered all my questions, bless her (in contrast to my children's mother, who stonily kept silent when I encountered her on a street two years ago and asked her about my children's welfare). It turns out my two older sons have recently broken up with their girlfriends so that tells me they're alive at least, I infer, and the youngest one got married a year ago.
2 comments:
I'm glad you allowed anonymous comments. I know your x-wife. I googled her when I learned she would be teaching my child. My immediate fear was that you were perhaps mentally/emotionally unstable and feared you'd show up in her classroom to do something unimaginable, so I read your whole blog to evaluate what kind of threat you'd be, if any.
When I first met Sharon during open house she conducted herself as one would the first time meeting students and parents. I looked at photos around her desk of her children and wondered what the real woman was like behind the teacher's facade. It really wasn't my business, but my mind kept wandering as I listened to her speak. I studied her face and eyes, her mannerism, and wondered if she'd perfected her radar in the past years to see which parents googled and found your blog by the way they studied her in the first meeting, at parent conferences, school activities...
I'm sure she reads this blog. I'm sure your sons read it. How could they not? How could the women they choose to be with not read it, if only for the sake of evaluating your mental/emotional stability to know what kind of family they're getting into? If they happen to come across my post, without casting judgement upon you or your ex-wife, I would hope they familiarize themselves with what narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder traits look like. They should look for the usual predatory signs, the typical tactics of silence, demonizing the other, aligning people to take sides, managing and monitoring relationships through guilt and obligation, and just keep an open mind about how people with these kinds of emotional issues and personality disorders seem to hide behind certain professions and religion, and understand the catastrophic results of their behavior. They should look at co-dependency and learn what a covert narcissist is, and should ask themselves if their mom or dad exhibit covert narcissistic behaviors. I would focus on covert narcissism if I were them.
If I were the adult children of these two parents I could not live with myself if I did not investigate this in its entirety (court records, interviewing friends of parents on both sides, looking at court records). As I grow older, marry, have children, I would consider it an abdication of responsibility for my children not to know the truth about where they've come from and what potential for healthy relationships with family that are available to them. You cannot learn the truth from one side of the story, ever. It just is not possible. And if you find yourself feeling guilty, or it being a betrayal of loyalty to one parent to attempt to discover more information without their knowledge, that points to something very serious about your relationship with that parent. One can read books (Susan Forward), find a therapist who specializes in personality disorders will save you a lot of time, and/or google information about covert narcissistic traits, narcissism, co-parenting with a narcissist, and borderline personality disorder as easily as they could google someone's name and come across a blog.
What an interesting comment, Anonymous. Thank you for stopping by. I read up on covert narcissism and in my opinion I was reading about someone I thought I knew for two decades before I woke up to that person and my awakening changed my life, albeit devastatingly so. I think I learned in what I read today that the only thing to do is to get away from the covert narcissist, and that is what I did with no regrets. I regret losing my children to the covert narcissist though. And believe me, these people find plenty of "professionals" who will help them in their manipulations, especially in the domestic law arena where there are lots of vulnerable children so easy to manipulate to become their foot soldiers. What's interesting to me is that PAS (Parental Alienation Syndrome), which is so prevalent, well defined and devastating, especially to its victims the children, cannot pass the hurdle into being classified as a disorder and make it into the manual but I'm guessing that covert narcism is a disorder in the latest edition.
http://infoselfdevelopment.com/covert-narcissism-know-your-emotional-abuser/
Fascinating (and chilling). What always struck me as telling is that my ex used to put her return address on the few necessary letters she ever sent to me as her first grade classroom, not her residence. If I was the dangerous rageaholic alcoholic that she falsely painted me as, your concern about having a child in the classroom that she used as a return address to me would have been well conceived. I always thought it ironic that she described me as fear-inducing and dangerous even as she put her solemn charges at risk if I were in fact dangerous, which I'm not. But she never cared about anyone but herself in my opinion, as evidenced by what she did to our children in extra-judicially depriving them of their paternal influence, and their Lamberton family association, for life.
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