I would rather be Healthy than Normal – Abuse Recovery

Communication with Abusers

One thing I have learned over the years is any amount of communication I have with my abusive ex-husband just keeps him going.  I also learned that everything I say to him comes back to bite our daughter.  We have been divorced for 7 years now and you would truly think my abusive ex  would have gotten over some of his bitterness.

Seriously, why is he mad anyway.  In fact if anyone should be angry still it should be me.  While I was married he did more cheating, spending all our money, getting DUIs, not helping raise our children and more….

Cookie Dough Incident (lol, does that sound silly or what?)

So our daughter came home this weekend and she said her father would not buy any cookie dough from her ever again because last year I gave his cookie dough away.  Do you think he holds grudges? The true story is my step-daughter did not realize it was his cookie dough and gave it to her grandma (who baked them).  So I gave him a check to return the money they paid and I made him a batch of cookies from scratch to make up for our error.  The truth is I had completely forgotten all of this happened last year until my daughter reminded me.  So I said, “He isn’t buying cookie dough from you because of an accident that happened a year ago and wasn’t your fault?”  Anyway, what a dumb thing to go on about.  Plus, he is just punishing our daughter for something she did not do.

Joys of Co-Parenting with Abusive Men

You would think after all this time I would no longer be surprised that he acts like that.  He is a controlling, abusive and entitled man what would I expect?  My twelve year old daughter says, “it is what it is.”  She has already accepted that he is like he is and although I know she dislikes it she also repeats what my husband says to her, “If i said something, he wouldn’t hear me anyway.”  Smart girl!  Just maybe she knows enough not to pick an abusive man to marry some day.

I have repeatedly told her she should love her dad, but she should also understand him and how he behaves sometimes is not acceptable behavior.  I told her she should pay attention to how her father treats his wife and how my husband treats me.   I am so grateful she has a better example of what a ‘real’ pretty healthy man acts like.  I never had that growing up and picked a really unhealthy men and relationship.  I doubt I would have know what a healthy relationship looked like 15 years ago.

Normal Person vs. a Healthy Person

I use to say, “I just want to be normal.”  Then I realized what I knew was normal to me once.  So I changed my words to say, “I want to be healthy.”  I knew there was a big difference between normal and healthy.  I also knew I couldn’t have been healthy and picking relationships like that.  Healthy people just do not run around picking bad relationships like I was.  I believe a healthy person has a better idea of who they are and their personal self worth… and I’d like to believe a healthy person would leave a relationship like that rather quickly. Does this sound more healthy? I think so.

As I said before I left him many times because he was not treating me right, but I kept going back.  I can honestly tell you I would rather have been with him unhappy then alone and miserable.  Just before I met my current husband I would rather have been happy and alone than in any dysfunctional relationship.