The Aftermath

If you read my backstory, you’ll know it was a difficult journey for me to get out of the abusive relationship I was in.

Unfortunately that was only the beginning. I had to navigate my own uncharted territory of going through a divorce, finding a new home and still trying my best to be a good father. This post goes through the 3 and half years that it took to reach the closest thing to a resolution I could get with an abusive and manipulative ex-wife after I walked away.

Deciding to leave

man standing with suitcase

In July of 2019, I started a new job. I’d been back in the UK at that point for 4 months, and I was still getting used to everything. At that point, I was very depressed. My previous job was awful, and I now didn’t have any friends close by to talk to, and when I could talk to my friends back in NZ, it was briefly in the evening or morning when our daytime hours would overlap.

At this new job, I desperately wanted to talk to people. I would commute in by train to London, leaving home at 7am and most days I wouldn’t make it home until 7pm or later. I’d spend all day during the week with these people, and of course eventually I started to open up to my colleagues about my life and past. I found out that a couple of the gentlemen at my work were in the process of separating from their spouses.

I explained my situation, how I’d been treated by my ex-wife ever since we met in high school and how I didn’t feel like I could ever leave, as she could ruin my life if I left and how I believed she could alienate me from everyone I know, if she felt like it.

One day in early September with my head swirling with all these conversations, I reached a tipping point. I confronted my ex-wife and tell her I want to leave. She seems astonished I’ve worked up the courage to do something like that and that is when her usual manipulation comes in to play.

“You’re going to leave me and ____ all alone, and f*** off to London then and live the single life are you!?”

“You’re a coward”

“You’re just like your Dad a loser and a useless father”

“Your friends will never forgive you for doing this”

“You’re never speaking to my family ever again”

“I’ve been so good since ___ was born, how can you do this now”

“What will everyone think, who will they believe”

It was constant, especially in those first 3 days after I told her and then it subsided partially, and she was in denial. Then she pivoted again by trying to convince me this is just another blip. She told me that as I always do, I blow up sometimes. At this point we hadn’t slept together for 2 years, so she told me we could sleep together because she knows I get frustrated periodically and that it’ll reset everything.

This is one of the tactics of manipulation she used, every so often I’d say I had enough of our relationship and her control. She’d put on the intimacy suddenly as if by magic she felt like it, explain to me that my problems were all in my head and there is nothing wrong with our relationship, and I’d carry on depressed and lost.

During the course of my relationship with my ex-wife, I struggled to reconcile how she was able to lie so easily. On various occasions we’d be out to dinner with friends, or out partying and she’d outright make up a story. They could be seemingly innocuous but albeit pointless, such as “___ loves to drink ginger beer, he has it all the time” if she saw someone drinking some, she might say that to drum up conversation, when in reality I never drink it.

Or it could be more serious where she is telling someone something about herself, myself or the past that didn’t happen. She dropped random falsehoods into conversations a lot, sometimes she would argue they’re not false, because she included one fact amongst many falsehoods.

This is scary to me and always will be. Things I constantly asked myself:

As someone with a moral compass and a conscience, it baffled me how she could tell lies and it not keep her up at night. Like I said, it scares me.

As I mentioned before, I’m naturally awkward and shy, a bit of a geek. I don’t know how to act in certain situations and I sometimes won’t even make eye contact much because I find it too much. My ex-wife on the other hand is very confident/arrogant and likes to be the centre of attention. This means I felt she had the upper hand when it came to convincing other people about what really happened in our relationship and our eventual break up, and as you’ll see in another post sadly I was right.

In September 2019 I left, and never looked back.

The Immediate Aftermath

a snowy field

Once you leave, if you know there is no fix for the relationship, and you feel the wave of freedom and happiness, you have to hold steady. A break up is difficult at the best of times, a break up with children is even harder, a break up with children and a narcissistic ex-partner is diabolical. The manipulative tactics, the guilt tripping, and the constant flurry of bad communication makes it so hard to stay strong.

But you have to.

After I left I had to keep telling myself why I knew it was the right decision, but repeating these two things:

  1. My daughter deserves good parents and I couldn’t be a good parent if I stayed with my ex-wife
  2. If I had stayed I’d be dead in the next 2 years either by suicide or I would have drank myself to death

I left with nothing but a duffel bag, my wallet, phone and some keys. I traveled south from where we lived and stayed at the cheapest hotel I could find.

Here is where I made my first mistake.

Mistake #1: Thinking we could be grown-up about getting divorced

I told my wife: “I think we should get divorced, and that it’s actually very easy to do, and here is the link.”

Once she had a calmed down, she surprisingly agreed. I told her “it’s only £550, I can pay that and we can file the documentation ourselves”.

About 3 weeks later, I got a phone call. I’d been served over the phone. My wife had gone ahead and filed for the divorce herself because filing first gave her more rights. She falsely tried to file for adultery, because her ego was too bruised, she didn’t want people knowing I’d willingly just tried to leave.

She even went so far as trying to find women at my work that it might seem plausible that I’d been sleeping with. Unlucky for her I’d always been a faithful partner and had no interest in cheating.

This leads quite neatly in to my second mistake.

Mistake #2: Talking too much about my new life

After we officially separated a few months later, I started dating. I think people are very judgemental on this point. Some people believe you should leave a long gap between separating after a long relationship and dating.

But why?

Especially if you’ve been trapped in an abusive relationship for over a decade, why should you then wait months or years, to find someone who might treat you better and make you feel loved for the first time in years?

I took 3 months before I started dating after separating from my ex-wife. When I would be allowed to come and visit my daughter, my ex-wife would ask questions about what I’d been up to. She seemed so genuine each time, I kept thinking we’d turned a corner. She’d say she was thinking about dating too, and wanted to know how I’d found it.

A few weeks after I told her I was seeing someone, a legal document arrived stating that if I share finances or a property with another partner, they could be dragged into the divorce process and have their financial statements examined once that part of the divorce unfolds.

I couldn’t believe it, every little bit of information I would disseminate, would eventually end up being sent one way or another in our legal correspondence. It wasn’t until later that she admitted to me, she’d turn up to our meetings with her phone recording in her pocket so she could capture our conversations.

She also later admitted she had me followed.

Mistake #3: Letting guilt take over

I didn’t push hard enough to get more time with my daughter. It’s because I was already broken down piece by piece during the separation by my ex-wife, I was feeling guilty about leaving my daughter so young. I believe that if we had stayed together until she was old enough to remember our relationship, it would hurt her even more.

This meant I accepted the little amount of time I was given, because I was punishing myself for leaving. Although I wanted more time, from what I’d read early on about the likelihood of Dads getting their fair share, I was feeling quite pessimistic. This is a common mistake for separating fathers to make.

We rented a semi-detached house just north of London. All rent and bills would come to about £2200 a month. My salary at the time was about £3800 a month. After we separated, I would pay the bills and then transfer my ex-wife £1000 for living expenses for the month and keep back £600 for myself to live on for accommodation and food for the month. For that amount of money, all I could afford was hostels and meal deals for 3 months.

It’s very difficult working a full time professional job and showering with a bunch of backpackers at 7.30 in the morning, I’ll tell you that. It’s also embarrassing storing a suitcase under your desk because there is nowhere safe to keep it in a hostel without money, and you’re too broke to pay the £10 for a locker.

I should make it clear at this point. My ex-wife and I were in very different circumstances at the time in two ways.

  1. She wasn’t working and I was, as we’d agreed for her to be off work
  2. She had all her family here in the UK, and I didn’t have anyone

I continued to pay for the roof over her and my daughter’s heads because I wanted to make sure my daughter was looked after. I asked for my ex-wife to work with her family so that we could find a resolution where I wasn’t living in hostels and out of a suitcase under my desk.

She refused, and said: “I’m going to milk you for all your worth”, thats not an exaggeration but literally what she said.

Mistake #4: Giving in to get the divorce process over with

My ex-wife made the following demands in order:

Eventually, my solicitor made a suggestion considering her offers had been going down as we kept refusing them. She told me to tell her I’d pay for half of nursery fees and whatever CMS I’d need to pay until my daughter turns 3. I was happy with this as it was an actual contribution to my daughter’s well-being.

The catch was, my solicitor said she’d never go for it if I told her I’d pay the nursery fees directly, as she knew my ex-wife just wanted the money. Sadly we made the offer, my ex-wife took it and never put my daughter in nursery until much later. She instead pocketed the cash.

Post Divorce

hour glass with sand falling

After our divorce was finalised I took my ex-wife through multiple rounds of mediation, as she kept refusing to give me more time to see my daughter. Eventually after 2 painful years of negotiation, I was able to have roughly 3 days a week with my daughter, sharing near 50/50 custody which was amazing.

Things were going relatively well, then my ex-wife told me she was moving and refused to tell me where. On top of this we were due to discuss what might be best for our daughter going forward.

Here sadly is another mistake I made. I thought my daughter would be better off spending more time with my ex-wife overall, making that her stable constant home. She was so happy splitting time between the households, and I didn’t want to lose the time, but with my ex-wife being the primary parent and her moving house, I had to put my daughter first. I figured it’d be unfair for her to travel the journey to and from school multiple times a week, given the distance to my ex-wife’s new home once I found out where she was going.

At the time my daughter was a happy and fun-loving child. Her nursery workers, the nurse at her nursery, friends and family had all said she was a well adjusted child. I was even told by the nursery staff that they had no idea she was from a separated household.

At this point, she’s 4. Because my ex-wife refused to tell me where she was going for so long, and she was refusing me half of my daughter’s holiday time I took her to court.

Just before we were due to attend court, my ex-wife told me where she was moving and agreed to half the holidays, which frustratingly was after I’d already missed two summers with her.

The move made it impractical for me to continue having my daughter as often as I wanted because it would become a 2 hour round trip to collect her or drop her off to her Mum’s new home. I was gutted by this, and to make matters worse the court seemed indifferent to the situation, I heard the usual trope of “it’s very common for Dad’s to get every other weekend”.

By the end of the whole debacle, my ex-wife got majority custody. On top of that she used the £50k I’d transferred her over 3.5 years to buy herself a new car and put a deposit down on a house and go abroad for holidays half a dozen times. I couldn’t afford my rent, haven’t been abroad in 5 years, and as a result of the payments I ended up racking up loads of debt.

But who cares about any of that what I miss most, is the time I lost with my daughter. I’ll never get that time back.