Be Careful What You Wish For

 Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.

A few months ago, my ringtone went off on my cellphone while I was painting. As I looked at the caller ID screen, my heart felt like it skipped a beat. The identification said that one of my two adult alienated sons was calling. He had not phoned me in almost 20 years.

You know how there are things you pray for - well, at least I do as I have occasionally asked God for assistance in the same breath as expressing gratitude...but you realize they are unlikely? I often pray for my sons to have awakenings. To understand that they were victims of their father's abuse in so many ways, especially in destroying my relationships with them. Parental alienation is the weaponizing of children, usually in high conflict divorces, as they are brainwashed by an abusive parent to turn against the targeted loving parent. As in my case, it was merely another way for my ex-husband to hurt me. My sons actually joined him in abusing me toward the end of my marriage and well into my decade long divorce proceeding. It was all part of the post separation abuse.

I won't get into the tactics of parental alienation right now, but let me tell you it is brutal. My sons went from being my world, telling me that all their friends wanted me as their mom to sending me vicious emails and leaving vile phone messages. Brainwashed as teenagers, they are now both adults with children of their own. My grandchildren are not allowed to know of my existence.

So, when I saw my 39 year old son's name on the caller ID, I ignored it. Thinking it was just a butt dial, I continued painting my canvas. My ringtone sounded again about an hour later - my son's name lighting the screen. Then a text came through. As I read it, I remember forgetting to breathe. I was completely shocked and lightheaded simultaneously. He wanted me to call him back.

And after a few minutes of breathing again, I did. A five minute phone call followed. It was my son's voice which I was praying to hear for so very long. The only way to describe it is surreal and generic. I tried my best not to cry. We did not get into anything messy, for lack of a better word.

However, in the course of 9 months, that was the only voice communication. My son would not answer his phone again, nor did he ever try to call me again.

We texted. That was it. But it was something.

Periodically, I asked him to meet me for coffee somewhere, meet me for dinner anywhere, go to a therapist’s office with me (of his choosing)….I was always told he had no time for me. 🚩

And I was extremely guarded. For this was a son who wronged me in so many ways from when he was 14 years of age up to the awful time just prior to the outbreak of COVID when he demanded I sign a gag agreement to protect his father (I did not sign it). I had to let it go, as much as I could. I have major trust issues and this particular son is one of the main reasons for them. History has made it so. As a teenager he did everything from kidnap my dog for his father, ask me for my voicemail password only to give it to his father, sent me emails calling me a "cuntrag" and telling me to die....It's hard to act like it all is forgotten, when it isn't. One particular email he sent me years ago said, "Get a gun and blow your brains out. Kill yourself. Taking pills is for wusses." Sure that may not seem so bad to you - but it was right after I had a month long hospital stay after trying to stop all the pain I felt in my heart from losing my sons during the divorce from hell. It almost cost me my life.

Let me repeat - for their 14 and 17 years at the time I said "no more" to the abuse in my marriage - my sons were my world.

Losing them to lies and brainwashing had broken me.

And now here was this male adult texting me like we were old friends. Even though we weren't. I struggled through every word we exchanged. For a few months, the communication was very civil. But there were so many red flags I now see in hindsight.

My son was collecting information. That is the sum and substance of the communications we had for several weeks. And I was a fool. I remembered reading a quote years ago that the best way to begin to trust someone is to act like you already do.

That is how a few months of communication started. 

He focused on what I can now only think of as his mission. I was diagnosed with cancer almost three years ago. My son kept asking me for my "prognosis" as many people in my life had reached out to him over the last two years, asking him to reach out to me. The fact that it took him so long should have told me everything - but I tried to keep moving forward.

Imagine you have a virtual stranger asking you the most personal and vital challenges going on in your life - WTF doesn't begin to cover it. There is nothing more personal than a cancer prognosis. He wanted to know when I was going to die.

But stupid me floated past some information and disclosed a little. I regret it all more than I can put into words. I told him some personal things, thinking it would open doors of communication only to have him slam them in my face.

I literally begged him for photos of my grandchildren. He refused. I asked him what they loved to do, their favorite foods, what made them happy - for the most part, he refused to engage. I just wanted to learn about them.

The first and only phone encounter was in February of 2024. Our texts were weekly for a while. He would tell me how stressed he was. And I told him to enjoy his life, change careers if that would make him happy, that he could do anything he set his mind to. As we became more familiar, he told me he was angry at me and I kept apologizing for things. Do you know that not once did this grown son ever apologize for the horrific and hurtful words he directed at me well into his 20's? Nothing. And I did not remind him. Not even of how he hit me during my divorce from his father. Believe me, we have been through so much. I believe he may have blocked much of his own behavior out of his mind, as a coping mechanism.

July came around and I got quite sick. I contracted Covid despite all my extra vaccinations. And when you get Covid while on chemotherapy treatment for cancer - let me tell you it was serious. I was totally debilitated. In and out of the hospital, I faced my August birthday in an emergency room.

With a morphine drip for the severe pain in my chest and on oxygen to breathe, my son texted me "happy birthday" with a photo attached. It was of 2 children from the back - their backs are facing the camera, and they are approximately half a mile away from the lens, walking up a lit staircase. It reminded me of a cruise ship ad. I saved the photo on my phone but won't share it here, as I will keep my word regarding that privacy.

An hour after the initial birthday text, my son texted again asking if the photo made me happy.

Here's another WTF moment. I may have been on morphine but why would looking at the back of something unidentifiable make me happy? I answered him as I struggled to text with my good arm - I was hooked up to an IV and more machines than I can name. I thanked him. I told him I was in the hospital and why. He told me the photo was of the backs of my grandchildren as they climbed stairs so far in the distance. I asked him how I would ever know that and could he please be so kind as to send me a photo of their faces. No. He would not.

Be careful what you wish for. As tears leaked from my eyes, a nurse came into my room. I don't know why, but I told her what had transpired and showed her the photo. Sometimes you have to tell someone how you are being treated to realize how bad the treatment really is. She went ballistic and told me to block the "little shit son". She told me that no mother, especially one in the hospital who is sick, deserves to be treated like that.

Well, happy birthday to me. After that, there was a little more texting with him - as I was forever making excuses for his awful behavior. He lives 30 minutes from the hospital I was in. He never asked how I felt or if he could do anything. Nothing. There was no one home there.  

My son lost his father in law to pancreatic cancer the year before so I rationalized that he couldn't deal with another hospital. I thought of my son's father in law alot while I was in that emergency room, and all the things he had told me only 2 years prior.

My son's father in law had told me that my son removed himself from my ex husband in every way imaginable as he finally realized the extent of his father's abusive behaviors.  Another mistake I made was believing this to be true. My son's father in law passed away not long after telling me that my ex was no longer in my son's life. He lied.

Fast forward to September and I start getting very hurtful messages on my phone. My son wrote that I was only his "biological mother." That the cards I have sent my grandchildren, now 6 and 8 years of age, have all been thrown in the trash. That every letter I wrote went unread. And my son was in Florida, spending a week with his father. The messages became combative. Telling me my son pitied me, I was going to die alone, that his father "wasn't mad at me anymore and moved on......" And that I would never meet my grandchildren.

He told me his father's father died - and all I could think was that there was a seat in hell waiting for that man, too. Maybe someday I'll write about his awful acts of abuse and how he trained his son to be violent. My former father in law hurt so many people over the years in so many ways. I grew up down the street from that family and I could tell you an earful. At 93 years old, he's gone - good riddance. All I could think of was how I had begged him and my mother in law for help so many times only to have them literally laugh at me.

I don't mean to ramble but PTSD from domestic violence sometimes gets the best of me. Back to getting what you wish for.

I never received any apology nor acknowledgement from my son. The verbal abuse continued via texts until I stood up for myself in a nine page letter I emailed him. I was on a delay switch. I had taken enough and deserved so much better. Forget about my continuous cancer battle and treatments, I raised him practically alone for his first 14 years of life. I was not perfect, but damn - I did the best I could. I was the assistant soccer coach for years, always the class parent in his schools, attending every single event of his on my own, alone....I did not deserve his animosity. Especially as he repeatedly told me I could not see my grandchildren. Not in a photo and most certainly not in person.

So be careful what you wish for. It has taken me months to recover from the pain my son inflicted - again. It was as though a scab was torn off and a knife penetrated my heart. Over and over.

I will no longer be making excuses for how damaged my sons are. They are well into adulthood with families of their own. Families who also deserve better than to have my son's wounds bleed on them, too. I'm missing out on being a grandma, but those children are missing out on so much more. And I truly fear for them as my ex husband is a perpetrator of abuse in all ways possible. He was diagnosed as a psychopath with antisocial personality disorder and being morally bankrupt. And he is in the lives of my grandchildren.

Maybe parental alienation isn't the worse thing that can happen to a loving mother. Now I think it's worse to find out that your alienated child has grown up to be everything you hoped they would never be.

 Sometimes my higher power will give me exactly what I wanted just to show me it wasn't what I needed.