Firstly, I had some great times with my husband (of 46 years) but they were always overshadowed by the fact that he began using my daughter against me from when she was 15 and continued to do so right up until I decided I had to leave them both two years ago. Throughout all that time (19 years!) I thrashed out my frustrations on paper in private because he robbed me of a voice – he was never wrong about anything ever. There was no talking to him or reasoning with him. After 19 years I had 50 pages that documented everything that had happened, everything he’d done and said and everything I had ever thought or felt. It was how I dealt with it.

Seven years before I left he started ramping up the exclusion, the verbal abuse and the tale telling to daughter. I poured out my heart to him on paper. I was very careful what I wrote and tried to be fair. I was asking for it all to stop because I felt like I was on a treadmill that I couldn’t stop. I pleaded with him. It was a plea for him to understand how it was all making me feel. I handed it to him one morning after much deliberation and left the house for the rest of the day. When I got back he was acting quite normal, as though nothing had happened. I asked him if he had read it. He told me I was a liar and a fantasist and it was all in my head. I’d made it all up and I was a drama queen.

He ramped it up again and then daughter told me to get out of her life. It was exactly seven years after I’d written to him pleading with him to make it stop. So I made it stop. I left them both. I wrote to my daughter via email trying to tell her that I just couldn’t stay when I was so excluded by her father and herself. I told her how very much I loved her and always would and hoped that one day she would make contact. My door would always be open. The reply (I didn’t actually expect one) came by email a few days later. It was full of vitriol, hate and blaming. How could I have so little regard for her father and herself that I could so easily throw away 46 years of marriage? That was one of the questions amongst all the vitriol.

I emailed back to say that it was far from easy but how, in all honesty could I stay there and be totally excluded. She had told me to get out. How could I stay, living with her dad and watch him go to her for Xmas while I stayed at home, excluded. What if she got married? I told her I didn’t blame her in any way. I had left because at the age I was, I had to find happiness where I could before it was too late so I’d left and moved away. She replied with another email full of vitriol and hate defending her dad and blaming me for everything. If she could have blamed me for existing she probably would have done!

Nothing I have ever written to him or to her has ever done me any good. I reached out to my husband on paper in the hope it would all stop and he would understand, give me a hug and meet me half way. It was like asking to be elevated to the gods. He did not have the capacity to do what I asked so that we three could exist together and actually be happy and we (he and I) could share OUR daughter like normal parents within a marriage. I was hoping for the impossible. He set the path that was to be my future and together they sealed my fate .

Total madness that I am glad I am no longer part of. Life is so much more peaceful these days without all the hassle.