"When your son questions things tell him his mom is going through some things that she has to work out. It's going to take a while and in the mean time I am here for whatever you need."
Above, I mentioned the comment my son made on Saturday. Sunday evening my wife came over to pick up our daughter and take her back to the apartment. After they left our son went out to play with some neighborhood kids. About 15 minutes later he runs inside and tells me, "Dad, Sienna's mom just asked me where's mom and Lily. I lied and told her they went to the grocery store. I don't want her to know mom and Lily moved out." Then, he stares at me like he's looking for some sort of reassurance or agreement that the lie he told was 'okay.' I really didn't know what to say to him, and before I could think of anything, he asks, "What else was I supposed to say?!" The only thing I could think to say was that lying is never good, but that I understood why he said what he did. Really, it's not a 10-year old boys' responsibility to tell the neighbors, "Oh, my mom and sister don't live here..." That's an adult responsibility. So, on one level I felt a sense of guilt because I wasn't there to answer the question for him. On another level, I felt anger at my wife because she made the choice to move out, and our children should never have been burdened or made to pay for her self-centered actions. Deep inside I felt hatred towards DJ. Early this year, when I snooped, I discovered many e-mails from him encouraging/pressuring her to move out, sending the pics of his divorce papers to my wife, and so on... Crisis or not, part of me doesn't get at all how an otherwise extremely smart, educated woman (my wife) allowed herself to be so thoroughly manipulated by someone who lives literally 12,000+ miles away from us, and who she hadn't seen, spoken to, nothing...in 20+ years. That's something that's going to take me a very lonnnngggggggg time to digest.
