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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]When I was 6 years old, my mother divorced my father because he had a drinking problem. She was a stay at home mom and left with my siblings and I to live with her parents in a small town 2 hours away from the city we lived in. When the divorce was finalized, my mother was able to stay in her childhood town with us, and my father had to stay in the city 2 hours away for his job. He did not have any work opportunities in the small town. We saw him every other weekend, 1 week over the summer, and at other random times when he'd visit us in the small town for school events and sport tournaments. He was a good father and many of my favorite childhood memories are with him. He stopped drinking after the divorce, and tried hard to continue to be a part of our lives. As far as I know, he never drank or was drunk around us kids. I know he struggled with depression, and as we got older and couldn't see him as much due to school and sport obligations, he started drinking again.

Up until now, I always supported what my mother did. She told me at the time of the divorce that he was an alcoholic and that is why we left him. [b]She has always complained about how much hell he put her through during the divorce. He tried so hard to stop her from moving away with us, and she said he did it because he was just trying to control her and didn't want to pay as much in child support[/b]. [b]As we got older, she also encouraged us to try and get him to pay for as much as possible on top of the child support.[/b] Looking back, I can now see how anxious this made me and how much she damaged my relationship with him.

I'm now in my early 30s and I'm starting to resent her for taking us away from him. I don't blame her for leaving him, but if we had stayed in the city, we would have seen him so much more, especially as we got older and school and sports took so much of our time. He never remarried, and for the longest time I think he had hopes that he and my mother would get back together. When I was in high school, he started drinking pretty heavily again and he died from cirrhosis in my early 20's. I gave him a hard time, even when I knew he was probably getting close to the end. I guess I have just been missing him a lot lately, and it's like all of a sudden I can see and understand his side of things. I just want to tell him that I see now how much he struggled and that I love him and don't blame him. I feel so guilty about how I handled his final years, I know he was depressed and that in the end he stopped taking his meds and just gave up and let himself die.

I don't blame my mom for my dad's drinking problem, and again I understand why she divorced him and I am not upset about that. I also know that he was far from the perfect parent. I guess I am just wondering if my newfound resentment of my mother is warranted, or do you guys think she did what she had to do?

[/quote]

Yeah that is super messed up. For sure. A parent should never, ever come between the child and the other parent. My mom used to do that to me and it's really disgusting.

But I don't know about moving. Could she have afforded to stay in the same place? And she shouldn't have said those things about trying to control her, but it might have been true. I don't think you can ever know whether or not she did what she had to do. But you can know that the way she turned you against your dad was absolutely not okay.

I used to ask my parents why they divorced, and obviously they gave me their own side of the story (although my dad was a bit more reasonable about his version of events). Eventually I came to the conclusion that they were both right, in that they were both wrong to do some of the things they did and their own contribution to the divorce. [/quote]

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