I’ve been going back and forth about writing this for years. Do I really want to drag this up again? Not really. But I also know what it was like to watch my relationship with my daughter change and have absolutely no idea how to stop it.
So I am going to tell the story. Not all at once because there is a shit ton of “stuff”. This is the first installment in a series about what it is like to be a targeted parent. I am not speaking for anyone else, and I am not interested in rehashing the worst moments of my life. But I do want people to know what can happen when a parent tries to change the course of a relationship slowly and with malice. This is my story. Not my daughter’s. Not my ex-husbands. It is what happened to my daughter and me.
And it all started because I had the audacity to ask my daughter to finish her math homework.
It started so innocently back when my daughter was 7. My ex-husband and I had just gotten a divorce and we were co-parenting our 7 year old. At the time, she was a mama’s girl. We did everything together. We played, painted, traveled and went to Disney a ridiculous amount of times, but she had to meet all the princesses, so what else could I do?
I remember the first time I realized that something was not right. My daughter (who was in gifted classes from a young age) was doing her homework. I had noticed that after an hour she had only completed 2 math problems and that she was on her phone. So being the conscientious mother I was (am), I took it away. I left her in her room, to complete the rest of her homework, telling her she could get her device back, when she was done. I went back to the kitchen to finish cooking dinner, and unbeknownst to me, she had “stolen” her phone back and texted her dad.
I was blissfully unaware when I was startled by the opening of my front door. I went to see who it was and lo and behold it was her dad. He waltzed past me, ignoring my question of “Why the hell are you here?” and went into my daughter’s room. Then I hear his soft, disgustingly sweet voice, saying “honey, are you ok?”. And her response was “no, mommy is making me do my homework”.
I walked into the room and asked him to leave. She got upset and started screaming at me, as to why I was being so mean to her daddy, and I told him, if he didn’t leave I would get the police involved and then she lost it. She was so angry that she didn’t want to stay in my house. And I asked him to come out of her room, and told him that if he took her I was going to call the police because it was my time with her.
That was the first time I realized that he was trying to put a wedge between me and my daughter. I remember this scene almost as if it happened just yesterday (it’s been years). And I panicked.
I don’t actually know what made me panic. Maybe it was the way he walked into my house unannounced, using a key I had given him. Maybe it was hearing my daughter defend him when all I had done was ask her to finish her homework. Or maybe it was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
When he finally left I remember sitting on the floor shaking and crying. And I remember my daughter refusing to talk to me and crying on her bed. And I remember reaching out to people I trusted because there was something about that encounter that frightened me in a way I couldn’t explain. I thought these trusted people would understand, but they dismissed my concerns.
And I then began to wonder whether I was going to have to face this alone.
