How to Raise a Daughter After Divorce

When my daughter was five years old, her Dad took a turn for the worse. He became mentally erratic and threatening. I chose the path of safety and moved back to my home state leaving several properties and all my possessions. Caught up in the frantic anticipation of divorce and loss of property, I was not according to my daughter and now looking back according to yours truly fully in touch with the emotional turmoil that my decision had caused her per se. I was as if possessed by a demon according to my daughter, and never asked her about leaving her state of birth and her friends.

As a professional woman, I immediately began working in my old state. My daughter spent time with her maternal grandmother, and I was oblivious to the impact of her cousin's negative secret attacks on her. She was now their meat, vulnerable and without a male figure of which they had been conditioned to expect as dominate and protective. My brothers claim they have hands off policy in siding with childish squabbles, but now that I see things, they had few qualms in siding with their own children and making mine the object of their threats, look what happens when you divorce. Where's her husband? Why doesn't she want to talk to her dad?

Lacking the protection of a Dad, my daughter was forced to defend herself in my absence. And, since I worked long, hard hours, that was for the next ten years quite a bit of the time. I sank myself totally in my work and in my clients. My daughter was well cared for by my mother and my sisters or so I thought. The point of enlightenment occurred when she developed bronchitis. I stayed home and had a physician diagnose her. The medication was not working and her bronchitis worsened. I dropped my work and my plans and drove us back to the state where she was born. There, we visited a physician who prescribed medication that relieved her bronchitis in a matter of days. When she had recuperated, we drove back to our new home and my old one. However, I was never again as trusting as I had naively been at first.

At the moment she is in her senior year at a prestigious college and has done me proud to coin an old phrase.

But, for me, a professional teacher, professor, mental health counselor, the shocking secret attacks on a child of a divorced parent by my own family is a stressor that has taken me long to overcome.

I do not think that my story is unique. In my practice working with teenager's at risk, I encountered my story time and again. The difficulty in my situation was that my family and I had been partners in a successful enterprise. Many of my daughter's cousins attacks on her were do to their knowledge of her mothers fortune.

When I think about it, perhaps, they were not as hateful as I have seen some families becoming because of our business closeness. The family that works together stays together. But, to concentrate on the social taboos especially those of a priest who has sided with the financial interests of a sister in law and used the church to dictate my interest in business matters, would entail a book and quite a bit of documenting. I can say this, that we here in America can be made the pawns of bought off priests and ministers to the point of having the church through a corrupt priest dictate to the state what the financial matters should be to one of their helpless parishoners who was, as in my case, unaware of the double edged hypocrisy of priests to your face and priests calling and intimidating, of all things, judges and lawyers.