Hello everyone I am a bit stuck. I divorced my husband (the father of my son) in 2016, after we had been together since 2003. When we met I had a 5 year old girl, and I was struggling with my mental health. I realised too late that my husband was a narcissist. Almost immediately we moved in together after a whirlwind romance and I wanted to leave then realised I was pregnant. I have no family because my family were abusive, so I cut off contact.
Gradually my husband started showing creepy behaviour. He stared at other women and girls and then he started making comments (which he played off as innocent) to my daughter. For example, he said she looked hot in her school uniform (she was 8) then when I was horrified, said he had meant to say cool not hot - really head effing stuff. He said I was imagining everything and I basically had a mental breakdown that lasted years, and all through my son's babyhood I was a wreck. In addition to his weirdness around my daughter he was bullying to my son when he was a baby and he humiliated me in front of his friends (I had moved to live with him and had no friends around).
Please don't give me negativity for not leaving - I wish I had left. I had no job, no family, no friends, and always kept believing if I was better he would get better. That I was making him like that. On the surface he was charm personified, couldn't do enough for anyone. But I lost count of the ways he abused me. He stopped short of violence, though screamed in my face when I was pregnant and couldn't sleep and told me to 'put a cock in it' when I was postnatally depressed and weeping, shoving my head towards his crotch. And after my son was born his bullying and cruelty towards me increased. I finally left when I realised that I wasn't imagining it. He was making my daughter's life, and mine, dreadful - then making out it was my fault. He used to abuse me secretly, then act all hurt if I lost my temper with him. Classic narcissist behaviour.
I hate this man. He ruined my life. And worse he ruined my daughter's life. When she was 16 she went of the rails and was abused by an older man, and her relationships since have been abusive. Until recently. We have worked together on the healing and she has had a lot of therapy. I would give everything to give her a different role model but I failed. I recently found her childhood diary which says 'my step father is a pedophile. He gives me the red flags my teachers warned me about'. But I have no real evidence. She has no real memories of this, though we have talked about it.
My son continued to have a relationship with his father because - everyone including my therapist told me - he was entitled to that. Except for his horribleness when my son was little - which meant I always got up in the night, and I never left my children alone with him, protecting my ex's sleep because he was worse when he was tired - he has been overly intensely proud of his son. And he has done nice things for his son financially, as well as taking him places, and providing him (via his family) with an extended loving network. Whereby I had nothing to offer him.
So though I cut off my relationship with him, my son has seen his father regularly ever since he moved out. His parting shot to me was that it didn't matter how much I loved my son or gave to my son, his son would love him more.
My son is now 18, and though he gets on very well with his sister, he understands that his father wasn't kind to her. He understands that his dad can be a narcissist and he has struggled with that himself sometimes. What makes me furious is that though my ex moved out and left me with 2 kids with mental health issues (my son dropped out of school at 8 because of bullying leaving me to homeschool), he is charm personified again. He did nothing at all to support the kids growing up and now he is on call for my son with his bags of money and his new relationship (and, revoltingly, a new step daughter).
Because he wins people around - and claims to now be in weekly therapy and a new man - I feel like he got away with everything. By contrast I am sidelined as a crazy person. My ex used to pretend he and I were best friends in front of everyone until I told him never to communicate with me. And now my son has decided, at 18, to move in with him and his new family. And I am bereft.
I have always carried all of the pain and the secrecy of my ex's behaviour as he would pretend to be lovely in front of others and then cruel when the door was closed. And so this feels like an extension of my childhood experience. I can't decide if I should tell my son what happened, and I am trying to examine my motives.
I want my son to know that his dad can be a creep because what if my ex is perverted around his own children, I never want anyone to go through what I did, what my daughter did. And I want him to understand why I wasn't in a good place sometimes when he was growing up. But this isn't my son's burden to carry either. And I don't want my own sadness and resentment to be the underlying reason I tell my son what his father is like. What would you do?