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My experience of PAS
I came to find out recently that it is thought that I am trying to alienate my children from their father. I read everything on your site and wanted to share with you my story.
My children are 15 and 12. Their father and I had an awful divorce in which a lot of things transpired before to cause it and then during. I tried my best to hide these things from the children because I did not want it to affect them. But I think they picked up on it all anyway and have shown many signs of it since. At first the children really were not comfortable with going to their fathers home on visitation because he developed a new family (wife and 3 children). I reassured them that it was okay for them to go and enjoy themselves and that I wanted them to feel it was okay to get to know these new people and like them.
I tried last school year after asked by their father to allow them all more time outside of the court order for visitation and with an entire school year of this, it failed, ending in fits of the children not wanting to go over there anymore. I became frustrated naturally but continued to make the children go. All of the issues the children brought home I tried to help them resolve and encouraged them to bring the problems of that household to their father so that he could fix it. They stated they had tried and he would not listen to them. They tried many times also to express things they wanted to do with 'him' and he would always say no, ignore them like he didn't hear them, or was sleeping or too busy. I expressed this to him as well as other things and he began to blame me instead of trying to work it out with the children. Towards the end of the school year I was approached for more time with the children. He asked for exactly half time (one week in his house, one week in mine).
The children already expressed the confusion of the previous attempt at more time and I took the summer to think about it all after expressing all of my concerns that came from the children to their father which ended up in a defensive type argument on his part. In the court papers, naturally, their are many things addressed.
I have primary custody and him I think the term is secondary...where he has every other weekend, certain times on holidays, birthday, summers, etc. He also has access to their schools and doctors and I am to supply him with the events going on in their lives should he choose to attend. I have done all that.
He has not shown up to any doctors visits, one hospital visit when my son fell. He rarely attends school functions and when he does he doesn't stick around to talk to the children, he watches, then he leaves. He has access via, phone, email, and two other accounts they have online that I made and monitor strictly for access to each of us while they are at the others home. He has never initiated contact with them via either way. And he barely replies when they initiate contact with him. Anytime he has answered the phone because the children wanted or needed something the answer has every time been no or we'll talk about it later with no result.
I have tried to tell him that it's not always the amount of time that counts with the children it's the quality of time spent with them. The children complain that he's always too busy, sleeping, or just shows no interest. I told him after a summer of thinking it over that the schedule needed to go back to the way the court ordered it, because not only were we unable to solve the issues of the prev
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