There is no limit to my indignation. I even resented my sons.
Recently I found out that my children help their father, who left them a long time ago. He abandoned his family with three children and left them for another woman who already had two children of her own.
At that time I thought I was going to die of resentment and humiliation. I was trampled, humiliated, and insulted. I didn’t want anything and couldn’t do anything. I had to go back to work when I was on maternity leave, but my ex-husband was already working there. I had to look for another place. And all that time we were struggling from bread to water. Then he quit, too. If I had known, I wouldn’t have lost my job.
But I pulled myself together, pulled myself together. It was something scary. It was a period of my life, when I was not living, but a zombie with the definite tasks of child survival. It was also very painful because I loved my husband very much. I didn’t just love him, I adored him, he completely took over my life, feelings, emotions, everything. After him, I never got married again and never dated anyone else.
My ex-husband paid such alimony after the divorce that there was barely enough to eat. That was back in the perestroika days. He officially took a job as a night watchman or a janitor in a kindergarten, and paid alimony from that money, while he was working elsewhere, earning a good salary, built a house, and bought a car for himself and his wife. And me and my children (the older one was 10, the younger one was 7, and the younger one was 3), we lived almost in poverty. I worked two jobs to raise my children.
A few years later, my ex-husband had an accident (no luck with the car he bought with the kids’ money) and he almost didn’t walk. His wife took him straight from the hospital to his mother. A year later she got married. He was left in his mother’s arms and with an invalid’s pension. I even gave up a penny of that alimony for my younger son. He was just finishing school.
I raised the kids on my own, taught them. Now they have families and jobs. And then I happen to meet my ex-husband’s sister, and she tells me that the kids are such a great help to their father, that no one expected such a thing. I became terribly offended. How could that be? I live on my pension, I deny myself a lot, I never complain to them, and they help this traitor! The one who abandoned them and visited them once a year before the New Year. Once a year! Once a year he bought everyone a kilo of not the best candy and a pair of socks, took them to a cafe, bought a glass of tea, talked for half an hour, and said goodbye for the year. And now this? How does he allow his conscience to take money from the children he abandoned?
What can I tell them to stop helping? Maybe I should talk to my ex-husband. Maybe he’ll have a conscience.
Give me some advice. Tell me how to do the right thing, so as not to alienate the children?
