Someone to You

As I predicted, after beginning to post, I was threatened and told to take my posts down by one of the offending parties. I have insisted that I will not. However, their bullying has given me pause and I must process how to proceed. But make no mistake: The story will be told. I will not be silent. Through everything, I have been amazed- stunned- utterly shocked- by how much attention and grace and help the OFFENDERS are given, while the victims must hide in the shadows and be silent. Almost nothing makes me angrier. While I believe in grace, in second chances, and in healing, I do NOT believe those things should take the place of justice, valuable consequences, and protection for victims. As I sit here and want nothing more than to tell you everything, my blood boils. To the person who has decided to share my posts with the offender, I want to clearly say you are aiding and abetting a pure criminal. This person has lied more times than I can count and chosen themselves over ...

My oldest son was 9 years old the first time he clicked on a pop-up ad that took him to a thinly veiled p*rn site that was disguised as a video game.  His dad saw what he had stumbled upon and told me he put protections in place so that couldn’t happen again.  Later that year, when he was ten, a kid on the bus home from summer school showed him how to type in the word b**bs on google search, hit “images,” and see anything your mind could imagine.   He didn’t tell anyone that he had discovered this and continued using an old iphone we had given him to play games on.   Unsupervised.   I naively thought my then-husband (who is a computer programmer) had secured our internet- because he told me he had- that anything there was to worry about would be filtered out.   But I also thought it wasn’t even close to time for me to worry about any of my boys looking at p**nopgraphy. That would come later, at ages 15 or 16, right? I was so wrong. I will probably typ...

Part of this story is about me. It just is. For so long I felt selfish sharing my feelings, so I pushed them down and tried to ignore them. That is a recipe for disaster.  When Adam tried to drown his brother, John was upstairs doing the bathtime routine with them. He had stepped away to sort out pajamas, heard the laughing, went back in, and saw the scene. He immediately rescued Isaiah and took Adam to his room, then came downstairs to fill me in.  Just days before, we had an argument about Adam that went the way all our arguments went:  Me: Hey, I see this issue.  John: I don’t see that issue. You are wrong. And if you’re right, it isn’t my fault.  Me: This isn’t about fault. I want you to help get this issue fixed or at least worked on.  John: You’re crazy. You always overreact. Everyone sees you overreacting. You just need to relax. There is no problem. This constant denial and lack of help was slowly making me lose all hope. I was beyond frustration ...

If you missed it, I am telling our story in a series of entries on this blog. If you didn't read the first, please go back and do so.  This story begins and ends with gaslighting. I didn’t know what that word meant before a few years ago. And it fits perfectly with what I have experienced with my now ex-husband, who we will call John. Gaslighting is basically lying to make someone else doubt their own reality. So when you tell someone a story and they say, “that didn’t happen” or “you’re remembering it wrong, you always do this!” that is them gaslighting you.   Or you say, “I feel hungry” and they say, “no you don’t, you just ate!” Your feelings are minimized, your thoughts are wrong. In my case, it really started when I became a mother. We adopted our first child- our oldest son, who we will call Adam. The adoption process was long and arduous, but the minute I saw his picture the first time, I knew I would devote my life to raising him. Holding him the first time was t...

Two years ago today, I filed a legal petition for full legal and physical custody of my children. My world had come crashing down in ways I couldn't have imagined. At the time it happened, I couldn’t talk about it much because I was feeling so overwhelmed and so dumbstruck with the events that I couldn’t form my thoughts into coherent or helpful sentences. Then later when I did share, the words I used were turned against me in a way that has hurt me immeasurably. I have never been scared before to share the truth of my life with the world. I firmly believe we can all learn from each other, and that words are the only way to affect real change. So having my voice taken from me has also been traumatic. I realize that by speaking now, it’s possible I will be misunderstood and hurt again. But without sharing what we’ve been through, it feels like the bad guys have won, the world will never get better, and I am powerless to change any of it. When the newer version of Aladdin...

Once upon a time, there was a king who appeared benevolent, who ruled a great land. However, passiveness was his overriding trait, and when his subjects mistreated each other, the king did nothing to protect them. In fact, the bigger, richer subjects often stole from the younger, poorer subjects, and the king stood by and did nothing. One day, one of his poor subjects fled to a neighboring kingdom to seek help. She ran straight to the castle and asked to see the queen, the ruler of this bordering nation. The queen came at once to hear her grievance. A rich subject was coming to the girl's farm daily, stealing her chickens and cows, and her family was starving. He had even killed the family's beloved sheepdog. The girl had repeatedly asked the king to help, and though he vowed to do something, he never acted to stop the rich criminal. The queen's heart was so broken by the story, she vowed to take over the weak king's land so she herself could protect the subjects. The q...