It started with little things.
Most of our spoons went missing when I came back from a long trip. Money suddenly disappeared into thin air.
Those were the first hints at my (now) ex-husband’s dark, drug-addicted nature, encountered long before there was ever talk of a breakup, or a child in the mix.
After our daughter came along, I learned that he was a cheater, so we split by the time she was two. We negotiated a joint custody arrangement that allowed us to be equally present in our daughter’s life. But I still didn’t know even half of his ugly truths — until they started trickling out from my daughter’s visits in the ever-so-innocent way that children do.
There was the time she told me about a new “friend” she’d made at an outdoor summer music festival. Later, I found out that he wasn’t so much a “friend” as he was a complete stranger who’d been enlisted to watch my daughter when her father was incapacitated.
And then there was the time, at age 7 or 8, when she proudly announced that she’d made dinner for them both — on the stove — because Daddy wouldn’t get off the couch. (But it was more like couldn’t get off the couch.)
Piece by piece, year by year, I put these stories together and realized what I should’ve known all along: he was an addict. I knew he’d used drugs, but I’d been telling myself he would never put her in danger. I’d been wrong. By the time she was 10, I’d restricted everything. No outings — because I didn’t want him to drive. No time at his house — because I just couldn’t trust him to keep her safe. And he never even fought me on it.
But she did. “Why?” she’d wail. “Why do you hate him so much?” For a while, I let her think that I was restricting their time together out of some old spite from our breakup nearly a decade ago. “She’ll get it someday,” I consoled myself. But I was conflicted: Should I tell her the truth of why she could no longer see her father?
People tend to paint alcohol and drug-addicted parents as monsters — angry, mean or uncaring of others. Yet, for the majority of the time, he was none of those things. When a child loves a parent as much as my daughter loves her father, how could I make her aware of such ugly truths? I couldn’t stand to let her feel that her father was choosing drugs over her — but I didn’t think she’d be able to understand the power of addiction, either.
Finally, I began to ask myself: Why am I protecting his reputation over my own?
With that in my mind, I was no longer plagued by the question of what to do. One day, I decided to just flat-out tell her. I sat her down and, in the gentlest way possible, told her that her father had addictions that made him make poor choices. That it was a sickness and, like other sicknesses, it doesn’t always go away just because you want it to. It’s because of his bad choices that she isn’t safe with him, alone. And that’s how it needs to be.
She cried and was angry with me for lifting the veil and telling her the whole truth.
She pushed me away. She hid in her room. She acted out.
Two years later, she still does. They see each other in public places or when she’s with his mom — but their time is very limited. And in her eyes, I am still the bad guy. Though, I believe she knows better in her heart.
“She will get it someday,” I keep reminding myself — and though I know this was the right thing to do, I keep hoping that that day is today.
