Company and Roses January 15, 2008
Posted by Conrad Hubbard in : The Chip , 3 commentsTonight contained another painful reminder that my estranged wife Rachel left last June because of us fighting about her interactions with other men.
Okay, first a little context. My estranged wife keeps asking that I maintain contact with her youngest daughter, Deva. Deva is not my child, but she thinks she is. Someday, surely, she will be told this, and hopefully it will not adversely affect her. I still have love for her mother – my estranged wife – and the little one. But trying to make the little one happy has been very difficult for me.
I talked to Deva again tonight, and again she inadvertently broke my heart. She sounded really excited that I called her, but she immediately wanted to follow up on our most recent discussion.
Half a week ago, she said to me something like, “I want you to talk to mommy, and make her happy, so we will come home.” Then, during that previous conversation, she literally put me on the phone with her mom and demanded that we talk. I explained the situation to Rachel, with an unfortunately predictable lack of results. When I asked about the current status of things, Rachel said she had been busy and had recently had company. She left it all vague and ugly like that.
Deva desperately wants us to be a family again, but Rachel seemingly has no desire to settle things in any positive manner. Rachel continues to assert something along the lines that she is “more concerned about Deva being happy than she is about being happy herself.” Given that Deva wants us to be a family, and Rachel apparently wants something else, I don’t see that as anything but self-serving nonsense.
Tonight, when I called to speak to the little one (she is 5 years old, 6 years old in April), her first question to me was “What did mom say when you talked to her?” I had to tell her that her mother did not want to talk about coming home. Then she went on to tell me that “Dan” had been visiting her mom for 6 days and 3 weeks (obviously she is confused), and that her mom had just taken him to the airport to go to “Canada” so she couldn’t ask her mom about coming home. (See, Dan lives in California, and Shaun lives in Canada, and my estranged wife was having inappropriate interactions of some sort – whether by internet, by phone or in person – with both of them even before she left. Deva is as bewildered as I am.) She also said that “Dan” had given her mom a rose, and had stayed with them, and that he had given her some bubble bath.
I am unsure what the reality of the situation is, but that has been happening to me for some time now. I feel really bad for Deva, as she is stuck in a position where she loves a “father” that is not really her father, and lives with a mother that is more concerned about maintaining secret relationships of some kind or other with multiple men than she is with maintaining some sort of stable family unit for her daughters (Kira and Deva).
I will probably rewrite this, or delete it, as I am confused and really upset by the situation. My estranged wife said she wanted a divorce, so I filed for one in November, but she has sat on the papers for a long time without returning them. Yet, it seems like the only thing she wants from me is for me to pretend to be Deva’s dad, while she continues her other activities. Every time I try to keep contact with the little one, who is absolutely delighted when I call on the phone, I get these painful jabs in return.
I have a recent poem about the situation in my Pathos category of my blog.