WHERE IS THEIR MOTHER?!?

‘Do you want them?’, came the reply to my reluctant reply to her email that was not even initially addressed to me.

‘Bring them over and I will keep them permanently! They don’t need to be around someone who clearly doesn’t want them’, I shot back. The afternoon was already exhausting enough with all of the back-and-forth emails and text messages.

‘Please let your sister know she needs to start taking responsibility for her daughters. I am not their mother and I do not want the job of babysitting them perpetually and waiting on them hand and foot at the expense of my own children and my job and spending all my time, money, and effort on them for no yield’, she started her email to my sister.

‘Their father spends more time with Natalia than the girls do, and spends his days in phone conversations and emails with her and going to coffee houses to sit with her and leaves me the job of being both mother and father while he wastes every evening online’, she continued and I wondered where she got her information as I certainly have not been doing any of these things. Which I finally tell her in my reluctant reply. Oh, the paranoia!

‘I am tired. I work a lot. I do not get help all I get is hell for these girls being in my home. I want a break. All I want is for Natalia to be a mother and drive them around some times and spend time with them too. I wake up at 6am every morning so Saffron can go to track when she can just as easily stay at her mothers. I drive Seena to dance in the mornings, and when she misses the bus, and to tumbling and the girls go to the store and the mall and urban air everywhere else every single weekend and I am doing it all. Where is their mother?!?’, she ends her email. I am here, waiting for the past year and three months to get to have time with my daughters.

What I noticed in that message was plenty of ‘my’ and ‘me’. How many times have I begged to see my girls? How many times have I contacted the police department for help, only to be told there is nothing they can do? The court system will not help either as the girls are now seemingly old enough to make their own decision. As long as they are able to twist their father around their little fingers, things will remain the same. Without rules which are enforced, they will continue to push the boundaries.

I love my daughters and want them to be with me, but they do not even reply to my texts. Even the one I sent to them after I found out that their stepmother copied them on the email to my sister. I voiced my thoughts and said that was an unnecessary and cruel thing to do. To let the girls know that they are an inconvenience to her. That they are unloved and unwanted by someone in their own home.

The emails then went back and forth to all four of us adults as stepmother was trying to get sympathy for the situation of her doing. The plan to get me out of the children’s lives having started the minute she met their father in 2014.

I did not wish to get involved with the drama. I was enjoying the peacefulness, but the volcano erupted and overflowed. My email was long but necessary. I reminded her how she orchestrated taking me to court to take the children away from me in 2017. The entire process having taken close to a year. A year of stress on my new marriage and my health and mind as I wondered if I would lose my children. All of this proved useless as he, their father, decided not to heed the words of the court order and decided last year to simply let the girls decide what they wanted to do. As if it is their choice. A legal system which has failed and continues to fail all other parents in the midst of being alienated from their children.

‘Life is too short for all this drama. Either work it out or file for divorce. Then he will definitely have to do everything himself’, I ended my email.

Things were quiet for a while, with no reply from her. No doubt she was arguing with her husband as the girls were upstairs in their bedrooms. Then more words came from her letting me know that ‘He says your friendship is more important than our marriage…’, which I find difficult to believe since he barely acknowledges my existence.

I wondered how my girls were doing with all of this and knew how difficult it must be for them to have to be caught in the middle of such disfunction and abuse. Because neglecting the girls and exposing them to such drama is abuse.

I then decided to go to the grocery store with my son to get some snacks for the girls to take to them before the STAAR test that my older daughter has tomorrow. As we walked around HEB, my son exclaimed that he saw his sister. I did not believe him, thinking he’d imagined seeing her.

We walked up and down the aisles of the snack sections and finally spotted her at the end of one of the long aisles. He was right. What a strange coincidence. I told her I was buying snacks for her. She thanked me but said she was there to buy some herself, then continued on her way. I walked across the large store to get avocados and bananas whilst my son stayed behind to look for other things. Later, he found his father and sister at the self-checkout area and texted me to come up front.

Once I arrived, we had words but none that he wanted to hear. So, he walked away, saying ‘I’m taking myself out of this’. You’re the parent! You don’t get to take yourself out of this! I told him we can have the judge decide then.

After what I suspect was more arguing, came another email from stepmother. A compromise of sorts, with her as the intermediary speaking for him, stating that ‘he agrees to enforce that the girls go to [my] house every other weekend. He would like that Sage comes and sees him after school for a few hours on days that Sage agrees to. Does this sound simple enough?’.

‘Nothing is ever simple with you guys…’, I started my final reply of the long day and evening. Then I stated my thoughts about there being a lack of boundaries and rules for the girls, voiced my desires for the situation, and suggested all three of us get together to discuss any issues and see how things go from there.

We should always strive to try our hardest and never give up. Especially when it comes to our children. We are their example as they look to us about how to act and respond. Sometimes we fail and that’s perfectly fine. As long as we learn from our failures and vow to do better next time.

Though my thoughts today were long, and not at all what I intended to write about (as seen from the interior design magazines in the photo), I felt it important for other parents going through similar circumstances to realise that you are not alone. And sometimes, just the act of writing down your experiences can help you see things in a different light. Perhaps there can be another way, but only time will tell.