Caty

“The reputation of the absent parent is the responsibility of the present one. Your children will direct all their anger at him toward you, because you are here and safe and they can trust you not to leave when they get emotional. You must hold space for them to be able to do that.” I remembered how mothers contain and grow life within their hollows. There was space for their feelings within me there. But I also sat in the tension of learning to call what happened to me using correct language, while simultaneously holding that named trauma far enough to the side to remember he was still their dad. Where would he face accountability? Why did mothers have to support the reputations of men who weren’t there? It was as if the support resources—the therapists and investigators and judges—all understood that parental alienation was terrible. But they’d swung so far the other way that there wasn’t a healthy way to hold absent men responsible for their own reputations. Somehow, I had to spread my arms wider and hold it all.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy