It’s taken me a long time to write this post. On Mother’s Day (2020), my husband and I got into an argument. It was an argument we had had before. Ever since our children were put into foster care in January of 2019, there has been intense pressure from the foster care system for us to divorce. Since day one, there has been an emphasis on the policy that parents who live together must both make progress with the agency’s plans in order for to children to be returned home. If only one parent makes progress, the parent that fails to comply can drag that parent down. End result: termination of parental rights. And who decides what constitutes progress? Oh, your individual case worker does. Absolutely nothing is evaluated objectively. It’s not like you can check a box and prove that you did what was asked. It’s all the subjective opinion of your worker. They decide if you’ve done enough or “benefited” from all the hoops they have you jump through. Their word is law. Judges hardly ever go against the recommendation of the agency.
In previous posts, I’ve talked about the bias in the system. I talked about how difficult the agency made it for my husband to make any kind of progress. They refused to allow him to do online parenting classes. They refused to give him parenting time on weekends. They tried to get the court to rule against his ability to do personal therapy via Skype, but that did not prove successful. Then, they decided that he was guilty of domestic violence, an accusation they came to based on him being irritated during a meeting and telling me to stop trying to calm him down! They demanded we do marriage therapy, but they didn’t want us to do so with pastors at our church. After all, they can’t control the content of the therapy that way. So they got the judge to rule against us and order therapy through one of their pet agencies.
Needless to say, the stress on our marriage was becoming harder and harder to ignore. It’s very difficult to navigate a system that after a year and a half finally admits that they have screwed up your case and dealt unfairly with you but then announces you will now have to restart all your services in order to prove to your new (third!) worker that you are not bad parents. The new worker finally agreed to online parenting classes….mostly because COVID-19 made in person classes impossible for anyone to attend. But COVID-19 also resulted in video visits only with our children. Let me tell you that Skype visits with a 4 yr old and a 2 yr old are frustrating and difficult to navigate. They’re hard for me as a mom to keep my kids interested and interacting. After all, I’m just a face on a screen on someone’s cell phone. I can’t hug them. Can’t kiss them. Can’t play with them. They did okay for the first two weeks, but after that they were dealing with their own feelings of frustration and anger and the feeling that all the adults in their lives were lying to them about this coronavirus no one seemed to have and lying about our being able to see each other again. To them, they were abandoned again. Mommy and Daddy just didn’t want to come see them and play with them.
My husband couldn’t handle it. He’s not a very strong communicator to start with. He doesn’t interact with our kids verbally. He’s more hands on. He likes to rough house and play and wrestle with them. He likes to teach them how to build things. He doesn’t do a lot of talking. Now his parenting ability was being judged solely on how well he could get them to talk to him. Then, he made a comment that foster mom didn’t like. After that, she quit helping him engage with the kids. She quit encouraging them to tell him stories or answer his questions. The system has been rigged against him since the beginning.
So the first visit in May, the boys had had enough. They didn’t want to talk. They didn’t want to stay in the small area visible on the cell phone. They wanted to run off and play and do their own thing. After all, he’s only a face on a screen. My husband took it personally. He felt the kids were rejecting him as their father. He felt the system was alienating him from his children. He lost his temper and his patience. He hung up after only 15 minutes of an hour long visit. These visits are supervised by foster care workers, so you can imaging how they spun that against him. The pressure on me to divorce or separate increased. My husband’s pain caused him to lash out at me, yelling and screaming and just dumping on me in general.
Finally, I had had enough. I told him how it felt to be in the middle. I told him how unfair it was to feel like I was in a place of choosing my children or my husband. I told him how I felt like no matter what I did I was going to lose relationships that were important to me. My husband checked out of the conversation. He refused to respond at all. And suddenly I wondered if he wanted me to make the decision. I knew that if I chose the kids and filed for separation or divorce, he would point the finger of blame and claim that I had never loved him and didn’t have enough faith in God to work things out for us. I knew that if I chose him and didn’t file, I would lose my parental rights, our children would be placed for adoption and I would struggle to forgive him. It was also probably that he would point the finger of blame at me and say it was my fault the kids were put in care to start with (something he was already doing) and walk out on me anyway. I told him how this all felt, and what I thought.
He accused me of having no faith. And he’s right. I don’t have faith. I don’t believe God waves a magic wand and rescues you out of difficult situations when you have the ability to do something. If we had both been giving 100% effort in meeting the hoops that foster care put in front of us, I believed God would honor that. I believed that if the system ignored our cooperation, then God would step in and handle things in our favor. But I struggled to believe that God would step in to handle things with my husband so frustrated and angry that he was actually starting to actively work against the treatment plan from the agency. My husband was beginning to refuse to do anything. He couldn’t have a conversation with any of the workers without losing his cool.
I felt so hurt and angry that I told my husband that I didn’t want to fight for our marriage any more. I told him I was tired of feeling as if I was the only one. I asked him to give me a good reason to keep fighting. He said that he thought our marriage was God’s plan. I told him that I didn’t think God’s plan for our marriage included him treating me badly. I asked him for some space. Asked him to sleep somewhere else just for the night. He refused. So I left. I’ve never done that before. I’ve never walked away and left for the entire night. When we argue, I am always the one to run after him and apologize. I am always chasing after him. My stomach gets tangled in knots when there is discord in my home. I am always the one who tries to make peace. I think he counts on it.
I don’t know what happened in his mind after I left the home. I don’t know if I hurt him so badly that he decided to up the ante on lashing out in pain or if he really had given up on our marriage a long time ago. All I know is that he packed his things, left his keys, and sent me a text saying that he was done being held hostage by me, done playing games, and just done with me. He hasn’t spoken to me since. No phone calls. No nothing.
So I struggle. I struggle with wanting to do anything to fix this and knowing that I really can’t. I struggle with the fact that if he continues to let his anger vent on our worker, I will have to file legal paperwork documenting our separation….paperwork that may very well drive him over the edge to file for divorce. I struggle with the fact that all my worst fears are coming to fruition. I struggle with not knowing what God is doing here. I felt like my husband and I were meant to be together. I still feel that way. I’ve never loved anyone as much as I love him. Even now, I would take him back and gladly forgive him. I just love him. I struggle with the fact that this is my third marriage and maybe I’m not meant to be happily married (although I know this last one is a lie from the accuser). I struggle with all of it.
As I cried and prayed and poured out all my hurt and pain to God in bed the next night, I heard a whisper. It was so soft I almost missed hearing it under the sounds of my sobbing. It said, “I will restore.” That was all. “I will restore.” And I cling to that promise because I believe it is God’s promise to me that He will restore all things. He will restore my children to me–that’s almost guaranteed now that my husband is gone. “Just file that paperwork,” my worker says, “and you’ll have the kids home entirely by Christmas.” And I pray and hope that He will restore my husband to me. Not the man who left my house, because that man is a different person than the one I married, but the man that I married. I pray that in this time of silence, God is healing his heart and turning him back into the man I know and love….the one who told me I was beautiful. The one who thanked God for me every time he prayed. The one who promised that nothing would ever keep us apart. I want that man back in my life. I want to pick up the pieces from there and grow forward together.
So I hope. I hope and I pray and I fast and I ask others to pray as well. Because I believe that God is a God of resurrection power–even over dead marriages. I believe that He can do exceedingly abundantly beyond anything I could ever think, hope, or imagine. And because I know that God works all things for the good of those who love Him. I love God, so God has to work this out for my good. I just hope that my idea of good and God’s idea of good are the same.
A Beautiful Mess 