What an ironic twist of fate that has it, that CAW would state one of the mortal wounds to our M is the deterioration of R with our children ... and now our unravelling M has come to be the avenue in which I now have a stronger bond with my daughters than ever before.
... but the road to getting here for D19 & myself turns out to be a very painful one. So painful, that for the last week, I've been contemplating whether I should/could share ... but for me to process the pain properly, I need to put it all down so I can go back and sift thru all this new information I've heard for the first time so I can figure out what to do and how to heal from has transpired.
Last Friday, was the first oppurtunity D19 & I have had to talk since CAW proclaimed she was moving out. For the past two years, I felt D19 & I have been working towards piecing the bond of a healthy father/daughter R back together again. So when CAW bluntly blurted that she had lost her first three children and they all blame it on me, I needed to find out if D19 still felt this way and so I opened a heart-to-heart talk starting with that statement. How little did I know what ground we would end up covering with that.
I started off by saying, how when I started my self-discovering journey two years ago, one of the first things I recognized within myself was that I wasn't a very good father. There were too many times that I pushed away my daughters in years past when they sought my attention and I just didn't want to deal with it. D19 while growing up was always considered Daddy's little girl ... whenever I was around, she always wanted to spend time with me, but for the most part, I felt smothered by it. By the time she became a teenager, how she viewed me had all turned around. She turned into a total rebel. She had gone from an "A" student to barely passing - never doing her school work. No longer kept her room clean. Constantly breaking rules and curfew. It seemed like we were always butting heads ... like oil and water ... until at 16 she moved out for good. For six months after that we avoided each other totally. By that time, I was putting all my focus on saving my M and learning to DB, including working on myself.
Anyway, I asked for her forgiveness. That I now deeply regret how I felt and for my resulting actions towards her at the time. There was a loonnng pause, as I could tell she was hesitating upon what she wanted to say. Finally, with a little encouragement from me, she decided to bear all. Yes, during her teenage years she hated me. Nearly every day deliberately, looked for ways to "get" back at me. Quote: "I did some awful things to you, but not for the reasons you think..."
As I've mentioned before, CAW & I battled for ten years to obtain custody of her two children from a previous M (D24 & S23). When we finally won in court, our home suddenly became too small. Temporarily all three kids had to share the same room while we look to sell our place to buy a bigger house. Ages at the time were D13, S12, D8. Each had a seperated bed to sleep in ... however ... D19 revealled that her SB (step-brother) would sneak into her bed every night and sexually abuse her. This went on for over a year. Due to a real estate crash in the region at the time, we couldn't sell our home unless we took a loss, which we couldn't afford. So we decided to build an addition instead, but before it was completed D24 & S23 decided to move out to Pittsburgh with their father.
D19 said she wanted to say something, but just couldn't and internally blamed me for what happened to her. That's why she started to defy me at every chance she could which led to drugs, sex (including a pregnancy & miscarriage) which I didn't know about and the cutting that I did know about. In the C sessions we arranged for her, she says all they wanted to talk about was school and her peers. She never felt they were open enough to allow her to bring up what happened with her SB. Since the time she has moved out tho, she said she's been able to work past it and knows now it was wrong for her to blame me. She broke down in tears while saying how sorry she was for blaming me and the awful things she did because of it. What ensued was a hug fest while we both cried.
After a while, she went on to say she knew the last part of putting this behind her was to apologize to me, and has wanted to for the last year, but couldn't find the strength to tell me her secrets. I had asked if she had spoken to her mother about any of this. She said she tried about a year ago, but CAW refused to listen, saying she could think of her son that way. I could tell D19 was hurt that she couldn't rely on her mother's support on this.
So there you have it! I'm still not sure if it is wise to pull these skeletons out of the closet for all to see here, but hopefully someone else can take the errs of my ways and use them to prevent their own tragedies from happening before they cause such destruction to their families. Also maybe now you might be able to understand better why I feel so undeserving of the praise you folks throw my way (and why I've been so quiet as of late), but I'm hoping you folks are willing to help me dig a deep hole to bury these skeletons in so I won't be haunted by them in the years to come.
