The dilemma My husband of 10 years left me last year. It has been horrendous since. Our two children (eight and four) have not taken it well and have developed separation anxiety.

My ex-husband has a busy job, so 99% of the childcare falls to me. When the children cry for him and I’ve asked him to see them, he says he has plans. I veer between anger and fear. He gets to decide my future and has left me to deal with the emotional wreckage, while he gets to have a life that I can’t.

He earns a six-figure salary and pays enough for the mortgage, but he’s stopped housekeeping money. I am skidding around with two children and three part-time jobs.

I spoke to a solicitor, but I can’t afford to go down that route. All of our friends were mutual, but he’s more important to know and so none of them has contacted me. I’m too embarrassed to tell my mum friends.

When the children aren’t here I just crumble. I was prescribed antidepressants, but they made me feel worse. I spoke to an online counsellor, but I quit after a few weeks as I couldn’t cope. I just don’t know what to do.

Mariella replies Breathe! I’m not patronising you, but it sounds like you need to give yourself space for a pause. You’re having a pretty horrendous time of it and conjuring a moment of stillness is really important. I’m truly sorry about your situation and can totally understand your anger and frustration. But while these emotions are justifiable, you shouldn’t make them your guiding principles.

The way your children are acting up is, as I’m sure you are aware, learned behaviour. If your kids have separation anxiety it’s because they are feeling elevated levels of insecurity, and that is not necessarily a compulsory emotional state post-parental breakup. It stands to reason that if the adult closest to them appears to be in free fall, children are bound to embrace a similar state of being.

You need to stop looking backwards and fuelling your rage

Your husband has abandoned his responsibilities, so he’s certainly largely responsible for the situation, and blaming him might make you feel better, but it won’t help your kids. One of you has to do some positive parenting, and that’s a role you’ve already stepped up to. But now you’re going to have to get your thinking straight. You may feel vulnerable, upset and vengeful, but this is a transitory period of torment and better things lie just over the horizon. Your current sense of outrage is healthier than melancholic miasma, but eventually even the rage needs to dissipate and rework itself into a more forward-facing emotion.

Your lack of recourse to justice is very frustrating. It seems impossible that any parent, who’s solvent, successful and immersed in the modern world can feel free to abandon their children to financial penury and reduce their involvement to just the odd day here and there when it suits them while still being accepted in civilised company. Unfortunately, it’s a story I hear all too often. Your ex’s choices seem to be bad ones, but he’s a fool if he doesn’t realise that he’ll lose a lot more than money as his kids grow up, unless he invests himself in their lives emotionally and financially now.

I’d criticise him for not being prepared to negotiate a fair settlement, but I have an inkling that you are both at the same level on the acrimony scale. That means that without superhuman levels of restraint and self-discipline it will be hard to have a civilised discussion. That’s not to say that expressing your opinion isn’t essential, but doing so in an angry, emotional or irrational way, while tempting, is generally a surefire guarantee of failure.

To see the wood for the trees will require you to abandon your personal emotions and sense of injustice for the sake of the welfare of you and your children. It’s a tough ask, I know, and easy to suggest from the sidelines, but it’s the only way you are likely to achieve some inner peace.

Getting the advice of a solicitor would certainly be helpful, but I appreciate that’s an expensive way to go. Mediation, on the other hand, is not and sounds pretty imperative here. National Family Mediation do amazing work (nfm.org.uk).

Break ups are agony, betrayal makes for an even more distressing split and people in emotionally unhappy places aren’t known for behaving functionally. I’m not saying you need to turn the other cheek over your husband’s behaviour, but you need to try to put your current situation in context instead of simply giving up. The most important thing now is to stop looking backwards and fuelling your rage, and instead calmly and sensibly negotiate a way forward.

To paraphrase the ancient Persians: “This too shall pass,” and when it does you will emerge stronger, wiser and even more resilient than you already are. The signs aren’t good that the same will be true of your husband.

If you have a dilemma, send a brief email to mariella.frostrup@observer.co.uk. Follow her on Twitter @mariellaf1

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