@jesseastmids I can understand your pain and don’t agree it has anything to do with your Mother. Your Father’s choices / behavior traumatized you. To you, then a young girl of 10, he rejected and abandoned you. 10 is a very difficult age, old enough to be fully aware of what was going on, yet too young to ‘deal with’ all the very painful and difficult emotions alone. No one helped you to process all this, not your Mum and not your Dad.
You know your Dad left your Mum, not you – but that’s not the point is it? He left. The way he left was unbearable to you. When you tried to express this (in the form of a childish ultimatum) rather than try and help you deal with your emotions and pain (which involved acceptance and empathy about how you felt about the situation), he fulfilled your worst fear: he rejected and abandoned you again. Your Mum seems to have also not recognized your emotional pain or tended to it, instead she placed responsibility for this on a 10 year old – allowing you to deal with it the only way you knew how – to remove it because it hurt. A 10 year old should not have that responsibility, it is too much for a child of that age to cope with.
My DD is like you, in that she didn’t cope with our divorce. She could not cope with all the changes in her life, the introduction of a new family overnight – it was too much. She was only 2 at the time and while I never told her that ex left for OW, cohabited immediately, was married and had another child within 12 months of leaving, she worked it all out over time. Her pain and difficulty spurred her to seek answers, answers I refused to give – instead I encouraged her to embrace and accept her new life. With time, she pieced it all together and reached the conclusion that her father had an affair – the timing was too fast for it to be anything else. My ‘’hiding the truth’’ as my DD puts it did not help, and ultimately caused great difficulties between us. I was dishonest in her mind, I denied her the right to know the truth. I did what I thought was right.
DD has had emotional issues from age 2.5 onwards. The many therapists & social workers who have worked with her have explained to me that she was deeply traumatized by her Father’s actions, his insistence that his young daughter should be happy about this new life he presented overnight,
his inability to tend to her emotional needs, his inability to help her integrate into her new life, and ultimately his unreliability as a father given he has without fail placed his own needs ahead of hers. Years of social workers working with ex have failed to prompt any change on his part – despite the escalating difficulties court ordered contact have caused DD.
Adults have the right to be happy, however, in my view parents should put their children’s needs first. Leave an unhappy marriage by all means, but tend to your children’s needs before you tend to you own wants. Some adults are incapable of this. They want their ‘’best life’’ and they want it now.
I will tell you I tell my own daughter: Your Dad loves you to the extent he is able to, in his own way. It is nevertheless love. Parents are not perfect, love is imperfect and we do not always get what we need from those we love. None of us is perfect. A lifetime of anger will not change the past, whereas forgiveness sets you free to enjoy your future. Try and have the best relationship you can with your Dad.