So what of the second aftermath?

It’s taken me a long time to write this post and I’ve gone back to it a few times.  

It’s been quite traumatic to write as the events are so recent and still very fresh.  

I imagine it will also divide opinion.  

I have already written about my first aftermath.  The aftermath following my own separation.

My second aftermath was when I met the man of my dreams.  And in those dreams, not for a million years did I envisage the hell he would unwittingly bring with him.

The 5’4 brunette shaped hell.

The person who has left me struggling desperately with feelings of hatred and rage.

I made peace with the feelings I had towards my ex husband long ago.  I let go of all the anger and hurt.  At least consciously.  Subconsciously it doesn’t take much for the pain and hurt to resurface but on the face of it, I put all of that behind me.  Now when I look back on my life with my ex husband, I mostly just feel sadness.   My ex husband is my cross to bear.  My baggage and my responsibility.

Plus we haven’t been to court.  I haven’t sought to destroy his life and vice versa.  The beginning was pretty challenging but in hindsight and now I’ve seen what CAN happen, it’s not been too bad.

But my partner’s ex wife has taken us through 18 months of hell.  She has sought to completely and absolutely destroy the life of her ex husband by using her own son as an atomic bomb.  Over and over again. 

I won’t go into the exact details of everything she has done as I don’t have endless space but she has lied pathologically, twisted events, stolen property, breached court orders repeatedly, abused multiple public services for her own gain, manipulated people relentlessly and all while weaponising her own son.  The biggest crime of all.

However at the end of those 18 months she became the victim of her own evil vendetta.  At our last court hearing, my partner won in an absolute landslide.

My partner now has a clean 50/50 time split.

My partner now has a joint lives with/shared custody arrangement

My partner won the battle for his son’s school (our biggest and ultimate battle)

There are other negative financial impacts the above has had on her as well which I will leave you to figure out.

Her own obsession with hate and revenge, so obvious to everyone including her own family, her colleagues, her friends, even the courts, eventually led a senior District Judge to rule against her in every possible way without a moment’s hesitation.  

In seeking to destroy her ex husband she succeeded only in destroying herself.  

One of the most important things I’ve learnt through this process is that in this day and age being the mother is not enough.  

Being the mother is not an argument for your children in and of itself and relying solely on this as your argument, as “she” did, will only bring contempt upon you from the judge.

I have watched my partner fight for his son and for our family with every fibre of his being.   He fought for his son and for what was right.  She fought for herself and for revenge and the judge ruled accordingly based on what he decided was best for their child.  I saw him sob his heart out as he came out of the courtroom, metaphorically clutching that clean sweep ruling, a ruling which was such a landmark landslide it left even our solicitor speechless.

Maybe the courts are, admittedly at a snail’s pace, finally beginning to catch up with society.  Dads also have a right to fight for their children and a judge will listen.  

But where does this leave us now?

Despite the fact the judge saw this woman for the awful person she was and ruled in our favour for everything we wanted and more, I’m left with so much hatred and rage.

She consumed our lives for 18 months.  In and out of court, the police at our house on multiple occasions on fabricated allegations, accusations, lies, statement after statement, constantly looking over our shoulders, PTSD, so much wasted time and money, so much fear and stress and agony and now it’s all over and WE WON.

For the first weeks we just talked in jubilation about the annihilation she received, going over it and over it.  Relief was like a drug.  We were finally free of her.  

But gradually the darker feelings crept in.  After focussing on a goal for so long and then pushing relentlessly to achieve that goal, what then fills the vacuum left behind?  Hatred and rage over everything this woman took from me.  And yes this article is ultimately about me.

I didn’t want this shit when I met my partner.  I had already been traumatised by my own marriage and separation.  I didn’t want the trauma and baggage from someone else’s.  I felt utterly trapped by this woman and the situation.  But I stood by my partner through it all because his happiness is what mattered.  We wrote his statements together, we read her statements littered with lies and obscenities together, I was there for every court hearing, I was there for every contact handover as a witness, I was there for every meeting with his solicitor, for school appeal hearings.  All of it.  And I would do it again in a heartbeat.

But the offshoot is that I am now embarking on NHS talking therapies as a way to move on from this.  I moved away from the anger and pain of my own marriage.  I now need to move away from the anger and pain caused by my partner’s.  But this is harder.  There is a part of me (completely unfairly I agree) which blames my partners and yes, even blames his son.  If not for his son, this would never have happened.  I have spent more time over the last 18 months thinking about my step son than my own children and there are days when I look at them both and feel blame and resentment for the pain and despair they brought into my life.  Something I didn’t deserve and was in no way previously connected to.  

However, with time, this is slowly starting to improve.   And I realise that how can I even begin to compare 18 months of pain and worry with a lifetime of happiness.

And whilst they did bring pain and destruction in their wake, how can I let those feelings of blame overshadow even for a second, the feelings of love, gratitude and happiness they’ve also brought with them.  

They are both completely blameless.  I know that whole heartedly.  She made me into a victim indirectly.  She made her ex husband and son into victims a thousand times over.   This man went through the darkest years of his life with me and it made me love him and respect him all the more.  

I need to move on from that so I can look at them and not feel blame.  Not look at his son and see her.  Be able to say and hear her name.

As a mother, I try and feel for her sometimes with what she feared to lose and what she did ultimately lose.  I wonder how I would behave in that situation.  I would fight with everything I had for my own children.  I would die for them.  But would I lie, would I steal, would I manipulate, would I use people, abuse people and services, seek to destroy my child’s other family unit, seek to destroy my own child’s happiness, would I whisper behind closed doors, would I pour my hatred all over social media, would I abuse my ex partner to his son, would I try and get my ex partner sacked, would I breach court orders?  Would I, would I?

I like to think not.  That surely only the fruitiest of fruit loops would behave in such a way.  But our children make us do crazy things and I worry that I’m now just like her.  A bitter woman twisted with hate and anger.  

But then I hear the things people say about her.  Her colleagues, her family, my partner, my partner’s family, even her own friends and I realise I’m nothing like her.  As I hear my step-son tell his daddy that mummy says you’re mean to her, mummy says you’re a bad man, I realise that she sickens me to my very core.  And that is what I need to work on.

To let go of that hate and anger which is directed solely at her.  But I see how much of a waste of my time and energy it, and more specifically she, is.  She has already destroyed her own life.  She is now the only victim of her own malice and spite.  

I’m just so thankful my step son has his dad’s eyes.  Every time I look at that child, teenager, man for the rest of my life, I’ll see the eyes of the man I love reflected back at me and not the eyes of a woman who will take her bitterness and hatred to the grave.