My ex-wife and I got along only at the beginning of our relationship. While we were going through the candy and bouquet period, we thought we were madly in love, but when we found out that we were expecting a child and our parents forced us to get married, leaving no way out, it spoiled everything between us. Not enough to demand a divorce after a year of living together and having a son, but enough to fight a couple of times a week over nothing.
Luckily, I was working a lot and my wife was at home with the baby, so we had a chance to take a break from each other. As long as we didn’t cross paths much, and we were spoiling the baby in our free time, it wasn’t so bad. That’s probably why we decided on a second baby when my son turned four.
Having a second child also brought us together, making us think that everything in our family was pretty good. We were in the midst of worrying about daycare, a toddler who was teething, and so on.
The second child was followed by the third. I took on even more work, but my wife was all for it. We were not used to saving money, and so that the children never felt deprived, I worked as hard as I could. I spoiled my wife, too, but apparently not enough, because she still had the conscience to prepare divorce papers and, when the oldest was eleven and the youngest four years old, declare that she had another man.
It wasn’t any great blow to me; I wasn’t surprised that she managed to find someone while she was running around schools and kindergartens. In between, she just had time for dates. I was the one who was always busy with work and thinking only about family. But I was struck by her desire to leave the children to me.
She is a mother, she had been babysitting them all this time, and now she suddenly got tired and began to threaten me. She said that if she had to “drag the kids with her into a new marriage,” she would put them in an orphanage or something. She and her new boyfriend had plans to have a child together, and she didn’t want “mine.
I didn’t even know my wife was capable of that. Even though it was all empty words and threats to keep me from dumping my children on her, I still don’t understand how I lived with her for so many years and didn’t see her self-serving, rotten nature.
