I've sat down to write this blog post multiple times and it is probably one of the hardest things for me to do and put into words. My throat starts to close up, I feel like I can't breathe, my eyes start to fill, my nose starts tingling and the pain becomes too unbearable so I stop putting the words down on paper. I try not to think about my son who was brainwashed by his father because to think about it brings up all the painful emotions and physical symptoms that I mentioned earlier. But even trying not to think about it doesn't mean that it doesn't pop up on its own at different times in different places. I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that I cry in the dark room at soul cycle at times or just recently I was watching a Miley Cyrus movie with my niece and it was as if a faucet opened in my tear ducts and just wouldn't and couldn't stop.
My son was brainwashed by his father. That's the simplest explanation. This was a child who was always a Mama's boy. The child that would call me a million times when I was out just to see when I was coming home. The child, that when he was going on the camp bus or on a trip, his last hug had to be to me. This was also the child that turned on me 365 degrees. My son was almost 16 years old when I filed for divorce. His father told him that if he took my side, he wouldn't get his business and would be living a less luxurious life. He told him that he would live as a pauper. Children should not be meant to take sides! My son, being at an impressionable age, and living the NYC private school life, where value is put more on material things than on things that mattered, turned on me. All the values that I had instilled in him were thrown out the window in a milli-second. To please his father, he stopped talking to my side of the family as well, aunts, grandparents, uncles, cousins. I didn't recognize my son. My daughter didn't recognize her brother. I'll never forget my ex-spouse's words to me in the hallway of my apartment, he said " I took (my son) away from you, I will take (my daughter) too." His children were just a means to an end. The end was to hurt me as much as humanly possible. What my ex-spouse did to my son is akin to someone joining a cult. I could never understand how people can be brainwashed and now I do.
I don't speak to my son. There was a ray of light for me on my son's birthday when he facetimed me, but his Father must have found out and put a kibosh on it. It hurts...more than I can put into words. A part of me wishes that I spoke more about his father during the divorce and explained the mental and at times physical abuse that I suffered at the hands of his father. But I wanted to protect my children. I wanted to do what was right. Unfortunately, I think that by protecting them, I did more harm than good.
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