“I’ll be over to pick up the kids to take them to a movie,” David, my soon to be ex-husband, said over the phone. In my naiveté I told the children that their father would be over tomorrow around 11 am to pick them up and take them to a movie. The two younger ones, Samuel and Ellen, were very excited. They were 3 1/2 and 5 years old. They got dressed early Saturday morning and waited patiently. They were talking about what they were going to do with him and what movie they wanted to see. At least as much as kids that age can discuss those matters. I knew they were excited and quite frankly I was looking forward to a little time to myself. I was going to sleep. “When will Daddy be here?” Samuel asked. “We are going to miss the movie,” he later complained when the time came and went for his father’s arrival. “He will be here. Something must have come up that caused a delay,” I said.
After an hour passed with no phone call and no knock at the door I realized he wasn’t coming. I should have said something to the children. I was a coward. Eventually Samuel just found something else to do besides wait for him. He went to his room and played with his matchbox cars. Ellen, who was three at the time, cried and carried on. I tried to get them interested in going out with me to a movie but they didn’t want to. Their hurt was palpable.
“How could you just not show up,” I shrieked into the phone when David finally did call. I was surprised at myself because I had given up on fighting with him over how he treated me but apparently I still had the energy and grit to fight with him over how he treated the children. “You are crazy. I never told you that I was going to pick the kids up and take them to a movie,” he responded. “Did I misunderstand him?” I asked myself.
I had just about gone crazy the last few months David and I lived together. We would talk, make plans or make a decision and then when things didn’t go as planned he would tell me he never said that. Now I started to doubt myself again. It was actually stronger than that. I felt totally disoriented again – a feeling I had all the time the last months of living with David. Was I going crazy? Was the stress affecting me that much? Why did I even bother to say anything to him? I knew that nothing was ever going to change with him. He would never admit he made a mistake or did anything wrong. But what about the children I wondered.
Most of the time when David did show up he would take only one or two of them. “I simply can’t handle all three of them or I simply can’t afford to take all of them to the movie,” he would say. One very radiant child would leave with him while the other would crumple up in a ball on the floor and cry. I was left with a shattered child whose pieces I tried to put back together. (Jessica, the oldest never really wanted to go with her father.) That is how I came to view my children. They were shattered into pieces at a very young age and the rest of their lives have been about putting those pieces back together. The pieces never fit back together perfectly but at least, now, all the pieces are back and in some kind of reasonable order.
“We don’t want to take a bath. We want to go live with our Dad! We want to go live with our Dad!” Ellen and Samuel were chanting. I was somewhat accustomed to hearing this by now. It had been several months since their father, David, had moved out. This chant accompanied just about every request I made of the younger two to do something they didn’t want to do. I gave them a bath silently, dried them off and got them into bed.
It wasn’t hard to be a better parent than their father, David. I have often wondered if that is one of the reasons, unconsciously, that I chose him. Eventually he just went away altogether. That is what I had hoped for but not until after he had made our life a living hell for quite a long time.
