Parental Alienation: A Never Ending Emotional Roller Coaster

“Hermes gazed up at the stars. My dear young cousin, if there is one thing I’ve learned over the eons, it’s that you can’t give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it. It doesn’t matter if they hate you or embarrass you.”

Quotes in movies and books seem to jump out at times when I need them most. This quote resonated within my heart while reading the book Grant asked me to read, The Sea of Monsters. I would like to add to the quote…OR continually tell you they love you then go slam you to please daddy OR tell you one thing, and daddy another even though you have BEGGED them to tell you the truth.

Love is hard. Being a parent and having a narcissist ex hell bent on punishing you eternally is excruciating torture. The alienation is exhausting. It seems to me that living through parental alienation would be close to the same pain of watching a loved one succumb to the addictions of drugs or alcohol. You see the same person you love, but they are NOT the same person.

Many people, well everyone close to me, have told me to give up on Grant. They ask if I am going to continue to sit and let him stab me in the back and do nothing, then take him back when or if he ever realizes the damage he has caused.  

I can’t just walk away. I see the “old Grant” in his eyes, after we have had some quality time together. I see the old Grant when we giggle at the dinner table, when he lets his walls down a little. Everything I read, all the research I do, repeats the same message, “do nothing to create more conflict or pull the kids in the middle any more than they are.”  ” Do not bash.”   “Someday they will see.”  I have to keep living for this to happen because it is all I have. In the mean time I will smile and go on.

I think my loved ones say to totally give up because they see how much he rips my heart apart, but saying that to an alienated parent never helps. It just brings a different, just as powerful, sting.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If Grant tells me tomorrow he no longer wants to see me, I will accept his decision and carry on, but I will never give up. My heart and door will always be open. Ted continually bashes me…well…most of his family does to both Grant and Kristy, yet they are the most wonderful people in the world to Grant. I try to stay positive and do not talk negatively about Ted or his family.

Last summer, Ted tried to take custody away to limit my parenting time to about 65 days a year, telling Grant and Kristy it would be so much easier on them to “not go back and forth all the time” between our homes that are about 10 minutes apart. (Luckily, his plan fell apart at the last moment.) My parents were visiting at the time. They told Grant if he came to live with me, I would never try to take him away from his father, and let him see dad whenever he wanted. They never bashed Ted. Since their conversation, Grant will barely talk to my parents.

I will keep believing Grant will emerge from the “stuff” someday and take off the rose colored glasses he views Ted and his family through, but sometimes even simple everyday conversations are completely blocked by his emotional walls and I start to wonder.

During these conversations when I feel like I am talking to a wall, all I want to do is grab Grant by the shoulders and ask WHY he is being such a puppet and refusing to become his own person. I want to ask WHY rather than creating his own path, he is molding and shaping his personality after a jealous, horrible human being who hurts Grant in an instant to bring himself incredible, empty satisfaction.  It makes absolutely no sense.

After I play out this conversation in my head for what feels like the hundredth time, all I do is look at him and smile. I reach over and rub the back of his head and tell him I love him and always will.

Another quote stuck with me from a movie I watched with the kids recently.  Smurfs 2 is far from the type of movie I ever thought I would quote from, yet it keeps playing over and over in my mind. “She didn’t change because she believed us, she changed because we believed in her.”

I believe in Grant.  I feel it now, and I am letting the negativity go.  I have to continue to focus on the positive.  Because, to quote an american icon, Doris Day, “Que Sera Sera, what will be will be.”