I met my husband 2 years after he and his first wife separated. We married four years later. He had two children, I had none (sadly, we didn't have a child of our own). We lived 200 miles distant from them, something that was neither his choice nor fault. We spent years flogging up and down the motorway once a fortnight to see the children who vacillated unpredictably in their reactions and feelings towards us. This, I learned, was due to a regular drip of poison from the ex and her family. Poor kids. They were used as meal tickets, weapons, leverage and excuses, but rarely treated simply as children. The ex sat in a well of self-pity for years, as a highly qualified woman, wouldn't even take part-time jobs in her field and wouldn't consider meeting someone else because her ex husband had 'ruined her life'. She lied to the children, cheated over money and didn't let up on demands even when my husband was being treated for cancer. Her reasoning over the last? "Nobody asks me how I am." Eventually, when my mother died, she wanted a lump of my inheritance. After much soul-searching I agreed to turn it over in exchange for full and final settlement (she even lied about that to the children, saying she 'didn't know' it was my inheritance - but we have the solicitors' letters proving, unequivocally, that she did). All this from a 'committed Christian' - her words. My problem is that, ten years later, it still eats away at my soul that I gave a woman, for whom I have nothing but contempt, money that my parents worked for. My husband and his, now, adult children say "Let it go, move on". Easy to say. I would love to. Even so, with all I've done for the kids, time I devoted to them, gifts, advice, shoulder to cry on over 25 years, I was excluded from their graduations and treated as nothing but an ordinary guest at the first wedding. The second one is coming up. I've been told I won't be at the top table. I didn't expect it. But I'm so throughly pee'd off with the whole ghastly saga I feel that I don't want to attend at all and have to put on a brave face, yet again. Not keen on acronyms, so interested only in reactions/advice/commiseration from others who've been there, too. Maybe I won't feel so isolated, angry and guilty for using my parents' hard earned money so wantonly. And I do want to move on, but I don't know how.
