Is there a silver lining?

[susiestar]

If by some chance FTN is still around, it is time to focus on hwat you CAN do.

You can get counselling for the child. You can get counselling for SO - why for SO? Because she CHOSE a relationship with ex and stayed in it for some length of time.

FTN YOU can take parenting classes, and read books on parenting. It isn't something ANYONE just automatically "knows" how to do - not in ANY circumstance. Even those of us who start with infants read books. Mostly because kids don't come iwth instruction manuals (trust me, I looked ALL OVER my kids when they were born trying to find the manual!!! All that came out was icky black looking stuff when they first pooped - mo manual anywhere!)

Read "Parenting with Love and Logic". It is one of my faves, and is the ONLY one of hte hundred or so parenting books I brought home and read that made ANY sense to my husband. I do mean the ONLY one, so it is the one we stuck with. Luckily it DOES make a lot of sense.

I understand you are trying to do the right thing, and really don't know how. IF the kids are this damaged then you truly NEED to all be in some kind of therapy.

The local Domestic Violence Shelter will be an excellent resource for your family FTN. I am NOT saying YOU abuse them. The DV shelter will have counselling groups for hte entire family, as well as individual counselling and many other resources for you. And it will ALL be FREE. If more than 1 place reports the sexual abuse (and EACH place will be required to) it will show the authorities you are A. getting help for the kids and B that there are more people to corroborate things.

But calling the Ex a pedophile or rapist or whatever IS ABUSE to the youngest. PERIOD.

And I know that isn't your intention.

I also know you are mad and scared. BUT the youngest has the right to NOT hear her father called these things. This man contributed 1/2 her DNA. So HALF of what makes her came from him. Y'all are saying that HALF of her is totally bad. And this will HURT her, is hurting her.

 

[ThreeShadows]

FTN, if you are still reading, you are not much older than my difficult children. They have both lost themselves trying to save "damsels in distress". You are so very young and at the start of your life!

I am trying to think of you as coming from a different culture in order to understand your involvement in this family's affairs. You were in the military, where they taught you that there were good guys (you) and bad guys (the Enemy). I truly have no idea what the real story is in this case but I want you to know that my parents had a very vicious divorce. My mother was Hell -bent on getting me to hate my father because he had hurt her. When I was 13 y.o. she told me he was a sexual deviant who wanted her to **** dogs while he was watching. For years, I was unable to look at a man or a dog without that excruciatingly painful association.

Please protect yourself if you decide to stay and take on the burden of this family's problems (you may be accused next). This little girl needs to be allowed to find out for herself what is reality, she can't be a pawn in this game of bitterness. Everyone of you needs to calm down and grow up.

You can only control your own behavior: http://www.conductdisorders.com/community/threads/article-on-detachment.53639/

I will say to you what I say to my sons: please do apologize for the emotional *F* bomb comment.

God bless!

 

[Shari]

FTN - I'm not going to get into whether or not your difficult child's bio dad is guilty or not, but I want to share this with you.
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For what its worth.
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I came into my difficult child 1's life when he was 2 years old as the girlfriend of his father. difficult child moved in with us when he was 3 1/2, and eventually, I became his step-mother.
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Prior to this, tho, his bio mom maybe fed him one time a day. He was found locked in cars at random by passers-by, sometimes the police. He was exposed to drugs and alcohol and prositution. There was plenty of evidence to find her guilty.
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The only thing the family court did was to give "us" supervised visits with his mom. I hated it. The woman was toxic; how could a court care about this child and allow that to continue?
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But that's the way it was, so my job, then, became to make it have the least impact possible on difficult child. I took difficult child to his visits, I smiled and was pleasant, and I let her be the ugly one. She'd scream at me, use ugly names for his father and I, etc, and, like water off a duck's back, I let it slide in front of difficult child. ONE TIME in 17 years did I make a detrimental comment about his mother in his presence, and that was to say she was stamping license plates in jail. And I still feel bad for it because it wasn't his fault he had her for a mother.
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In time, I beleive partly BECAUSE of my choice to not stoop to her level and engage in her pettiness, difficult child saw the situation for what it was and called the spade a spade.
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When Christmas would roll around, and she'd yet again promised to come, I'd take him shopping to buy small gifts for her and his siblings. And when the promises weren't kept, he knew it was all her, and he knew he could come to me to cry. When his mom stopped showing up altogether, he knew it was all her, and he knew he could come to me and cry. When, after 6 years, she showed up out of the blue and invited him to her home, he wasn't afraid to ask me to go with him and stay with him while he was there. He TRUSTED me to not play her games. I hated being in those uncomfortable positions, but I did it for HIM. For years, it was a tenuous love/hate thing with him; she was his mom, so he was supposed to love her, yet he also knew she didn't treat him like mom's treat their kids. Eventually, he saw it for what it was.
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I am long since divorced from his father. difficult child lived with me until he left for boot camp. Now, he's 19, a Marine, married, with MY grandbaby on the way. And nothing made my heart sing like talking to him those first few times after boot, when he'd yell at the other guys in the barracks to "shut up so I can hear my MOM".
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I guess the point I'm trying to make is, I let difficult child make his own decision, and he made it. I tried to be a stable person in his otherwise unstable world. He's not out of the woods yet, but he's making it, and I'm proud of him.
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And I firmly beleive the outcome would have been vastly different had I adopted an ugly attitude towards his mother.
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If you want to do something for that little girl, be a person that she can cling to in her otherwise rocky world. Hate her dad if you want, but don't let her know it. Be an unbiased soul she can come to. "Kill them with kindness" often does work.

 

[Ropefree]

FNT: I came back to see what happened next with you after reading what others have to offer.
Shari...bless her heart, gave you and excellant illustration in where the silverlings are found...in the success of our children. The impact we have on them.
When one person takes on the modeling and is appropriate and dependable and does the work of taking the care and needs of a child seriously that child discovers that they are valued, respected, protected, and offered the shelter of child'hood' to learn their way up the developemental stages at their own pace.

Child sexual abuse is a crime that strikes at the wholeness of a child. Where what a child does deserve as a 'right to life' is the oppertunity to develope and grow in an environment of care and love and nuturing that alows that child to learn what is approriate at each age and as they are able.
To be a healing environment for the damage to mind-body-soul that a child with those injuries requires work on the part of those who have this priveledge of her
lifesaving. It is so enraging to all who this toxicity touches because it is so very
deeply challenging to each of we who hear about it.
It can be done, though, and you too can help see it that it is.