I’m writing this as an open letter to StillMeOnlyStronger.

Where did I go?

I am in a place where no mother wants to be. Where your kids very lives and safety are at stake if you do not take action. Where your ex-husband is a complete jerk who puts his kids at risk for inexplicable reasons and you have to be the only grown-up in the room who says enough. Where your kids are hurt by people who are supposed to love them but who are too screwed up to love themselves, never mind these perfect little beings. We are all trapped in a nightmare of someone else’s making and I want so desperately to wake up.

Time flies when your ex is a moron so I’m not sure when I’ll be back.

You can try to convince me all you want that society shapes gender roles (the whole nature vs. nurture debate) but when I found my son, at 12 months, standing over the toilet with a plastic cup in his hand that he just drank from filled with toilet water, I knew he was born a boy and will always be a boy.

Girls don’t do dumb shit like this.

Well, maybe it’s pretty smart (I mean a 12-month-old who just started walking is smart enough to find a cup, open the toilet seat, dip the cup into the water and drink it when he’s thirsty is smart…sort of.)

Girls tear your heart out by telling you they hate you but they absolutely do not drink toilet water. Ever.

It began with snow pants.

Evil snow pants. I know. Wars have been started over less important things than a pair of snow pants. So, how could I have brought up the snow pants with my X?

See, my daughter comes home from school one day after spending the night with her father. It had snowed the day before and the kids need their snow pants to go outside at recess. My X, who believes himself to be Super Dad (because he pays child support, only has one Baby Mama, and does not beat the children), did not know or remember this to be the case.

BIG MISTAKE #1 I gently reminded him. I asked him if he had snow pants for her and if he could, next time, pack them to take to to school when there is snow on the ground. He became defensive and said gruffly, “I didn’t know that.” (I reminded him last year about it but the guy does have a lot on his plate.)

As he stormed off in a huff after my reminder, I called out to him, “Why are you walking away from me?”

“Because you’re a jerk!”

Seriously, I’m not even missing a step. My X goes from zero to nut-job in 5 seconds flat and I don’t even get to enjoy doing anything to provoke him.

“Really?” I responded.

BIG MISTAKE #2 “What’s your problem with me?” I added.

“You exist.”

Therein lies the crux of the problem with my X.

I’m not sure what bothers him about my existence. Is it that he feels guilt? Is it that he is unhappy about the choices he has made and dealing with me is a reminder? Is it that he has created this fictional account of our marriage to justify his misdeeds and he really convinced himself that I am this horrible person?

I’ll never know. But one thing is for sure is that this is not something I take lightly.

It is disturbing on many levels. Was that a physical threat? Is this the environment my children are being raised in – where my X disparages me? What is his anger doing to my children?

Early on in the divorce, I was on strict no-contact. I only emailed, never spoke to him on the phone and rarely saw him. Little by little, I have eased up on no-contact even though he has had many outbursts and has consistently insulted me in emails and over the phone. I have pushed it further, sitting with him at our children’s events and even chatting with him. I decided to be the bigger person and pretend that he was not the raging asshole I knew him to be.

That all ends. I can no longer pretend he is not a raging asshole. While I cannot do strict no-contact, I have decided on the following for my own safety and sanity.

• I will only respond to emails that do not have accusatory, demanding, rude, or insulting language.
• I will only give short yes or no responses or have factual information relating to the kids.
• Any issues will be discussed in the presence of our therapist.
• During pickups/drop offs, I’ll say hello and goodbye or answer yes or no. Any other information will be shared by email.
• At events for our children, I’ll sit next to him but I will not speak to him. If he speaks to me, I’ll politely ask him to send me an email. If he pushes the issue, I’ll get up and walk away.

There is a strategy to all this, which I’ll go into in another post, called “The Funnel.”

Last week, my mother told me she had seen my grandfather, my Grampy, walking around in the driveway. Only thing is, Grampy’s been dead for a decade.

My mom sees dead people. Sometimes she smells them. Sometimes they call her name. Sometimes they walk past the window. Usually it’s my Grampy but sometimes it’s my dead Grammy or one of my mom’s deceased relatives. My aunt smells her dead mother’s perfume. My uncle is visited by Grammy, too. She’s traveled all the way from Connecticut to California just to touch him on the arm.

Now you understand why I am so crazy.

Two years ago, I was agonizing over the course I should take after discovering my then-husband’s affair. I prayed every night for guidance. I am not sure if God heard me and sent my Grampy or if Grampy was listening to my prayers. But immediately, I started to dream about Grampy. What was odd was that I was never particularly close to him. He and I did not often see eye-to-eye and I often felt that he thought young girls should be pretty but quiet.I got the first part right.

I was regularly having very vivid dreams about an argument we had when I was a small child. I didn’t understand the meaning but I kept having the dream. And I kept feeling like my grandfather was around me. I felt like he was pestering me about something but I wasn’t sure what he was telling me to do.

Things with my X were very confusing and I kept having this nagging feeling that I was missing something and that my Grampy was part of the puzzle. It got so bad and I was so lost, I went to see a psychic. OK, so my family is totally cracked. My mom sees dead people and I go to a psychic.

Anyway, I walked into the psychic’s office (she’s a professional so she has an office) and she said to me as I walked in the door, “First off, someone came with you. As soon as you walked into the office, my lights flashed on and off and that always means a spirit has come. He’s got something to say to you.”

She proceeded to tell me that this man, a father-figure to me, and she named him, has been trying to tell me something. He wanted to tell me that my husband was “garbage.” Then he said to the psychic that I should “remember my heritage and that I was strong.” She mentioned that two other women were there with him but that he was doing all the talking. Sounded just like my Grampy. He was never the sort of man to let a woman do the talking for him.

My Grampy was one of the kindest and generous men you could ever meet. He spent his life in service to others, first in the military and then as a life-long volunteer in the Boy Scouts and as a very active member of his church. But one thing you did not do was piss off my Grampy. He was Russian. And when he got mad, he stayed mad. Forever.

But what really struck me was for me to “remember my heritage.” My family has struggled but always overcame insurmountable odds. The son of an exiled and later institutionalized former Russian Orthodox priest and murdered mother, my grandfather was raised in abject poverty with surrogate parents in the slums of New York during the Great Depression. He joined the military before World War II where he met my grandmother in Puerto Rico. My grandparents married and after having one very healthy child, they had my mother who was born with a fatal birth defect. My grandfather fought doctors, hospitals and surgical device companies for decades to get my mother the then-experimental surgeries that kept her alive, long enough for science to catch up to the point where her surgery is now performed regularly. And the one unbreakable rule in my family – we take care of one another.

It’s funny but his words and the thought that my Grampy was affirming the decision my gut had made long before was what made me act. Not finding my X at a hotel with his mistress. Not the graphic emails about Viagra, “workouts” at the mistress’ house, “I love you”s. Not the fact that my X lied, and lied, and lied until I had gathered so much evidence that he could not hide the truth form me anymore.

Nope, my dead Grampy speaking to me from the grave through a psychic is what did it for me.

I’ll never know if it was my Grampy, God or my imagination at work. What I do know is that when a psychic says your dead Grampy is in the room and wants to talk, you better listen.