Says Difficult Child has abandoned her in this faraway state.
Oh. How very difficult.
I don't even know what to say.
I waited a few seconds and this is what came up. Many, many years ago I got a phone call from a woman who said that my father had slipped a mickie into her drink at a party and that a consequence she had become psychotic. She said her life had never been the same. When she called me it was approximately 1988. The supposed drugging incident would have happened maybe 20 years before that. She did not know it but at the time she called, my Dad had been dead for 5 years.
In the late 60's she had known my father and I because we had lived together for a short time, my dad, me, my half-brother and her with her toddler son. I knew my Dad was attracted to the young woman but never realized they were involved in any way. I would have been about 18. The woman slightly older. My father about 44 or so and dissipated. And sadistic. I don't doubt that he might have done what she alleged.
I want to stress how little I knew this woman. We were only surface acquaintances.
So. Out of the blue this woman had found me, 20 years later and she targeted and blamed me for this thing that destroyed my life. *Uh oh. That was a Freudian slip. I meant to type, the thing that destroyed
her life.
And even more bizarrely, she found me a few years later in a different city, and again she raged and threatened and blamed me for these crimes. To her it was as if I, not my father, had destroyed her. I believe my father to have been capable of this kind of inhumanity, in the service of what he wanted. And to be indifferent to the roadkill he would leave in his wake. But I was not my father. Yet indirectly she held me responsible.
To underline this, 22 or 23 years after we knew each other in a very surface way, she found and targeted me because my father apparently drugged her to have sex. And then she found me again in another city a few years later and targeted me again. For ruining her life. In this latter time I would have been about 44, the age my father had been at the time of the supposed incident. Not having seen or thought of the woman for 25 years. And my father dead already, many years.
Deep breath here.
Here there are two young mothers, with children. Each vulnerable and putting themselves in the paths of predatory men with varying degrees of responsibility and seeking well after the fact to involve or punish others.
Here we are roped in by these women. In the case in which I found myself, this woman clearly wanted to discharge her crazy rage onto me. I became my father, and she cared not, my responsibility or the effects on me of what she did.
In the case of this woman who is your son's wife, now abandoned, it is less clear what are her motives. But how in the world could they be clean and above board?
She chose to marry a man who she knew was capable of violence because he had already perpetrated the act on her. I am not judging her. I am saying the horse was already out of the barn. She knew. This does not say that she deserved it. And I know I have stayed in or deepened relationships where there was already problematic behavior. We do this. Unfortunately.
But here, with her, the story has already been written. The plot line has unfolded. Nowhere have you or your husband been introduced as characters into this narrative. It's like Jane Eyre showed up in Huckleberry Finn on the last page. What's the point? What's Jane doing here with Huck? There's nowhere to go with this, except confusion. What in the world do you have to do with this story? You're Jane Eyre in Huck's story.
Add to that, my favorite childhood party game, Pin the Tail on The Donkey.
I fear that in the case of this poor abandoned woman, she quite likely sought to do the same thing as Michele did all those many years ago. Look for a donkey. What could she have wanted except to find a way to discharge her pain, and to find a substitute to attack, unable to have at your son.
Perhaps I am coloring this with the ugly paintbrush of my own past. I find this story sordid and small. I find your son's behavior to be repugnant, but I also find this woman's behavior to be disgusting, too. Where is her honor?
I know you guys are probably not as old as I am but I know you are retired, and she for sure knows you are retired. Why in the world is she trying to rope you in? What kind of a person does that?
It sounds to me like they are a lock and key the two of them. While my heart, like yours, went out to her at first, I am ending this with a way different take. Run, don't walk away from this woman.
Finally, I find myself lately thinking about how bizarre life really is. Or maybe it's just my life. Thank goodness it's been somewhat peripheral to me ( not entirely so), but there has been way too much drama! What I have experienced vicariously through people I have known *the tragedies they write for themselves, could be a dozen blockbuster movies. Or biblical stories. Is it just me? And you?
Be super, super kind to yourselves this weekend. Indeed this is a gut punch. But most of all is the ugliness of it. How could you not be affected? I am too.
