The courtroom was cold, but the look in Mark’s eyes was freezing. He sat there, wearing his best “concerned father” suit, while his lawyer tore my character apart.
“Unstable.” “Emotional.” “Unfit.“
My husband fought viciously for full custody, claiming I was unfit. He brought up every mistake I had ever made. He twisted my anxiety into insanity. He turned my late nights at work into neglect. He put on the performance of a lifetime, convincing the court that he was the only stable parent.
And the judge believed him.
He won.
I collapsed inside. I watched him walk out of that courtroom with a smirk that didn’t reach his eyes. He had taken the only thing that mattered to me. I spent the next sixty days in a hell of silence, pacing the hallways of a house that was too quiet, imagining my children crying for me. I felt like a failure. I felt like I had lost my reason for breathing.
Then, the phone rang.
It was his mother, Barbara. She sounded frantic.
“You need to come get them,” she whispered.
“Get who?” I asked, my heart stopping.
“The kids. Mark… he dropped them off here this morning.”
I drove to her house at ninety miles an hour. When I got there, my children were sitting on the sofa with their backpacks, looking confused and abandoned.
“Where is he?” I demanded, hugging them until my arms hurt.
Barbara couldn’t meet my eyes. “Two months later, he dropped the kids off at his mother’s house and moved to another country with his girlfriend“.
He was gone. He was on a plane to start a new, carefree life abroad. He hadn’t fought for them because he loved them. He hadn’t fought for them because he wanted to raise them. He hadn’t fought for them because he thought he was the better parent.
He didn’t want the kids. He viewed them as pawns on a chessboard. He knew that taking them was the only way to truly destroy me.
He just wanted to hurt me by taking them away.
I held my children, feeling the terrifying relief of having them back mixed with a white-hot rage at the man who had treated their lives like a weapon. He had won the battle in court, but in doing so, he had revealed himself to be exactly the monster he claimed I was.
