PAS: Watched Her Lie on the Stand

I was a little older when my parents split - in my teens. My father wasn't perfect and made mistakes as a parent and partner. An affair was the final straw.

My siblings and I tried our best to stay removed from the situation, but after my father had moved out, my mother went into an understandable depression, was angry and she was bitter. The stories we would hear made my father evil personified.

Both of my parents were very loving to us and showed their affections often. In the aftermath of the split, what my mother would tell us or her friends (I/we would sometimes overhear on the phone), made us really hateful of our father. Personally, I cut off all communication with him and it wasn't long before what little efforts he made to contact me stopped.

It would be 2 long years before I would talk to him again. (My one brother lasted about 5-years.)

I had become tired and suspicious of all of the things I had heard about my father and decided to attend one of the many, many court hearings that was to take place. I forget if it was a custody or support hearing, not that it matters. Making a long story short, as me and one of my siblings sat in court and watched silently - we got to see my mother outright lie right on the stand. Worse than that, from the stand, she tried to prompt my brother to support the lie.

That was it. I actually left the court room with my father and started speaking again. Reluctantly, he shared some stories of his own of his life with my mother and unsurprisingly, they weren't good stories. I'm sure he did his best to temper some of his feelings on the issues, I can recall him being quite matter-of-fact about what he shared without vilifying her. I'm even more sure that he held plenty back because, as he said, "it's really not any of your business and not anything you should have to know." I realized then that both of my parents had their faults and made their contributions which, after 20-years, led to their divorce.

Today, I have a very good relationship with both of my parents. They both have their faults as we all do and I've come to understand that they are both human. However, parental alienation did affect me and all of my siblings, some more profoundly than others, and cost me 2-years of contact with my father during some very important years in my life.

~T.

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