I was the one that left. Did I want to leave- no. Did I have to- yes. I tried for so long to make my marriage work, but looking back it hadn’t been working for a long time. My ex-husband was rude and selfish and volatile and demeaning and controlling and stole a little part of me and my joy everyday for nearly ten years.
The turning point for me was becoming a mother. What I could stand for myself, all the yelling and conflict and tension, I couldn’t stand for her and I began to fantasize about disappearing almost daily.
My Bipolar flared up after giving birth. While pregnancy was an amazing experience for my body and brain (those extra hormones were just what I needed), giving birth was traumatic, I lost a lot of blood, and tore requiring surgery during the birth. With my mental health background everyone at the hospital and my own psychiatrist were worried about post-partum depression, but I actually experienced post-partum mania which is less common but is an issue for women diagnosed with Bipolar disease prior to giving birth, and my doctor should have known that. He somehow was not aware of that and did not recognize the signs of mania and put me on an anti-depressant which made my mild mania leaving the hospital much worse once I got home. Luckily my mom was helping us a lot initially.
Maybe we could’ve been ok after my daughter was born but two major things out of my control happened, (one preventable and one not): 1) my mother-in-law stayed with us for an extended amount of time right after the baby was born when I mentally and physically was not doing well. And lack of compassion, wow this woman didn’t understand kindness and compassion at all. Some of the early and really intense verbal abuse started while she was staying with us and it never let up. Now looking back this situation it could have been preventable and I could’ve put my foot down about her not coming to visit, but I wasn’t strong enough at the time.
The other non-preventable situation was: 2) Covid hit when my daughter was six months old. This was undeniably divine intervention and showed me more than anything that my marriage was falling apart, had grown abusive, and I needed out. I lost my job during this time period and my ex-husband just could not handle it. That coupled with him working from home and being cooped up together all day, every day with very little outside interaction was a recipe for disaster. We started watching horribly violent, dystopian shows like Ozark and Handmaid’s Tale and they both became a sort of escape for me from my horrible situation. If joining a violent drug cartel or becoming a sex slave seem like better solutions than the one I was in currently that was worrisome which I started to realize.
Another huge factor to our break-up was another woman, a friend of mine who inserted herself into our situation and marriage and would not back off even when she was asked to multiple times. Everything I have read about narcissism calls this type of person a flying monkey and I believe it was another situation of divine intervention to help protect me and my daughter, and another situation to show me how much I urgently needed to leave. While the relationship my ex-husband initially had with this woman wasn’t technically considered a physical affair it could be argued it was an emotional affair as he was disregarding my opinion and listening to her and requesting her advice on everything regarding my daughter, and it was getting worse over time.
So the three people in charge of decisions in my daughter’s life when she was a newborn were my ex-husband, his mother, and this woman friend who had inserted herself as a baby “expert” in our lives. I as her mother had very little say and that coupled with the verbal, emotional, and financial abuse from my ex-husband all while I needed to recover mentally and physically from child birth was too much, and my parents recognized it and helped me leave- initially by helping me move in with them and then helping me file for divorce and proceed with that process which would have been very hard for me to do on my own.
I wouldn’t have had the strength to do this without my parents, honestly. That coupled with a few times and situations that really felt like God was speaking to me and helping me make my decision to leave easier were monumental in it working out for me to leave when I did. This was honestly the best thing for both me and my daughter, especially looking back now. She didn’t suffer years of prolonged verbal abuse and she and I have the best relationship since we have gotten to build and grow our mother/daughter relationship and love solo without the negativity of my ex-husband involved. I am the most thankful for that!
While co-parenting has not been easy at all, and it truly never is in high-conflict divorces, this past fall I set a tight boundary by limiting all communication to a co-parenting app and it has been helping considerably with the blow ups, verbal abuse, and toxic aggressive texting. I wish co-parenting could be easier at least for my daughter’s sake. I know she can still feel the tension and while she has a safe environment away from negativity and negative talk regarding the situation with me, I am not sure that is the case with at my ex-husband’s house. Hopefully we can get to a place where we both have moved on and the hurt and disappointment of the situation isn’t so hard and raw.
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