Under a Big Umbrella

[HaWho]

Ciluzen - it must be hard on your kids. Their whole lives they remember things being a certain way and then poof, it all changes. And obviously they really must see all the changes in their father.

So, as for my kids, there were similarities in how they handled this in the beginning. In the height of replay they both became super clingy, we all co-slept for quite some time and they were needy, in general.

S11 was most worried about divorce. It scared him. He asked a lot of questions about that. I heard him once ask h about divorce. H told him divorce was no big deal, just a quick piece of paper was all one needed! (He was ice cold and the TOTAL opposite of what he used to say/think about divorce.) S11 (who was 9 then) came and lied to me, with his lip quivering, he told me that h had said he would never get a divorce. That about broke me in two. It hurt the most that I could not promise s that we would not divorce. H was such a mess then. (He still is but in different ways now.)

The most residual weird "thing" s11 has is that anytime h goes anywhere, he interrogates: "where are you going?" "When will you be back?" The second h opens the hall closet to get his coat, s11 starts the questioning. H does not seem to pick up on its root cause.

(The coat closet is a trigger for me, too. In the height of replay, h would get his coat and just leave without saying a single word. He literally looked like a zombie.)

With S13, it's more complicated. When h moved downstairs s asked a lot of questions. On the advice of an IC, I told him h wasn't sleeping well and so, not to wake me, h slept down there. S13 was just 11 at the time and is quite perceptive. He said h abandoned me. He knew h was off his rocker from the get-go.

At first I tried bobbing and weaving around his questions. But he was persistent. One day, out of the clear blue he asked: "is dad having a midlife crisis?" And I told him the truth. Over time I explained a lot of the psychology behind it. I know he figured it out from certain tv shows that were portraying men in MLC. H met so many of the cheesy stereotypes.

S13 remembers h before this. He feels the loss. Sometimes he'll say: "remember when dad used to do x?" Sometimes it's like we're talking about a dead person.

He sees that his friend's dads are different. Well, actually, that his dad is different from other fathers. My h's father walked out on them and was a deadbeat. H told the kids this before MLC. S13 has said: "dad is just as unavailable as his own dad was to him. The only difference is that he still lives here." Ouch.

There have been times s13 and h have had discussions where s13's logic is significantly more refined than h's. I am pretty sure s13 went off and did a massive amount of reading on this. And he is a kid who does better when he knows the ugly truth.

H is slightly better with them now than 2 years ago. But he's no where near the father he was before all this.