My daughter, my Heaven....

Pan · Member Joined: 13 Dec 2006 Posts: 4

Hello,

I have never posted before , but i feel encouraged by all the other brave posters who have shared their experiences with this difficult matter.

About five years ago, i decided to finally meet a daughter i had, result of a brief youth love affair when i was about 18 years old. I had been supporting her mother and got some news about once a year, but had refused to participate in her life since my marriage. When we met she was 16, a cute teenager, kind of skinny and shy.. I felt such strong emotions, starting to know her. I wanted her happy, integrated with my family, but my wife didn't take it very well, and accused me of being over emotional, kind of obsessed and she was very jealous. Because of this I limited my visits to just us two, and took her out once a week for a few hours. We went to a movie, for a snack or just a walk in the park. These were very happy moments. I was so fulfilled to be a real father to all my children at last, without leaving one out. But at the same time I had many problems at home defending this father-daughter relationship and was accused of being in love with her, which i considered absurd and false.

Nevertheless, as we became more and more close, with time I started having strange fantasies with her, imagining how it would be to make love with her. She was just so much like my dream girl! I fought them as much as I could for a long time.

When she turned 18, she spent a summer holidays with me and i was more confused than ever! I decided to tell her these feelings, so she could help me clear my mind and move on to an healthy relationship. But I was quite shocked to hear from her she was having those same feelings for me. We talked a lot about it. This could not happen! I wouldn't start something with her! I took her back to her family, but during the journey back, we spent a night in bus travelling and somehow we found each other and kissed.... I still can't describe this kiss with words!

I reacted after this and stopped seeing her for a complete year. I told her I wouldn't hear anything but normal father daughter conversation. We did chat from time to time and I could see she was having a terrible time. So did I...

She was 19 when I came to her town and saw her again, and the overwhelming feelings to see her, touch her and be with her, were too much for me. We soon kissed again and ended embracing and a little more...

I still tried to stop then. I told her this was so wrong... but i wanted her so so much at the same time. We agreed to be together and about a month later we made love for the first time.

What can i say? I was the happiest and the saddest man. I couldn't understand these feelings. "Don't try to understand!" she would tell me, "just let go from your mind and live by your heart!!" . I had never felt before the way I did for her. At the same time I couldn't help but knowing this was not right somehow and it would hurt in the end..... Well... it did!!

About six months later my wife died in a car accident, she was ran over by a truck while riding her bycicle.. I never told her anything, but maybe she knew somehow and could not take it... maybe not... Who knows? She often talked about my daughter, how much i loved her, and how hurt she was I never showed her that kind of love.. What could I answer to that?

I was terribly shaken by her death. I am still. I miss her very much and I know I loved her once so much. But my daughter.... What is this thing between us? Is this love? I thought I would never feel anything again for her then, but it has continued just the same. I just have to go and be with her once a month or I can't go on...

So you see my heart is in a complete turmoil!! I have to care for my two children as well, 13 and 9 years old, and I can see the damage this would cause them if they find out......

What will be the end? I guess the passion will cool down... We'll eventually retake the road to a "normal" relationship... I believe I would prefer to be her father rather than her lover, though for now I just need her more than ever...

BarbGonyo · Administrator Joined: 31 Oct 2003 Posts: 222

I just want to thank you for your post. I know how difficult this is for you and I hope you feel a little better for letting out your feelings to others.

There are no words of wisdom that I can share with you as it is only you who can go through this and hopefully you will be guided by a higher power to help you on your path.

Barb Gonyo
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Pan · Member Joined: 13 Dec 2006 Posts: 4

Thank you Barbara for your kind words.

I have read what i wrote several times since i posted it, as well as my daughter. She pointed out to me I never mentioned the word love when talking about my feelings for her. I did ask the question "Is this love?"
What do you think? Are GSA feelings really love or just a mental illness from a sicko? How should we call what we feel for each other?
We talked about it together and she calls it "magic" and that it was meant to be.. That it is not our fault and that we should not deny ourselves what our hearts are longing for... But, are we really in love?

cap · Member Joined: 20 Oct 2003 Posts: 23

I have to say i've read about many different situations which lead to GSA, most involve adoption and in most cases the people involved were separated by means beyond thier control. Such is the case with siblings separated by adoption. It also holds true for a 16 year old mother who is forced to give her child away because that is mostly what society makes them do.

For fathers who convieve children and then bail out of their lives, this is a little different. You weren't there for her growing up, you could have been. You knew she existed and you knew where she was and you could have visited her. You finally pop back into her life and instead of being her father that she needs, you take advantage of her. I can't really feel much symphathy.

Now that I'm done with my little scolding, my advice. You're her father. Be her father. If its too hard get out of her life until you can just be her father. If Its extremly hard to do so, get counciling, I am. Be strong for her and be her father. The pain of not being able be with her like you want, that will be your cross to bear.

Find a counciler, I have. Its not that hard.

cap

P.S. sorry if I was a little hard, just trying to get a point across.

cap · Member Joined: 20 Oct 2003 Posts: 23

GSA is caused by family members falling in love when they meet as a result of a long separation. Now, people have a right to free speech and all, but you know, lets not comepletly forget about responsibility!!!

If a parent is involved with a child in a GSA relationship, it had better be that the parent had no choice but to surrender the child to adoption or otherwize surrender that child for some other damn good reason. It had also better be that the parent had no way to see the child when they were growing up (such as sealed adoption files).

If you're parent that was not involved in your childs life when they were growing up (when they really needed you) because for some reason it was not conveneint for you, you gave away your right to be thier parent. Dont come into their lives now when they are physically developed (notice I didn't say an adult ) and take advantage of the "fantasy father" image your child has and sleep with them and completely blame GSA. You are very much responsible for what happened.

Your quote: "She pointed out to me I never mentioned the word love when talking about my feelings for her"

Now your daughter is asking you if you love her, or if you're in love with her, and you don't even know? You mean you slept with her and you aren't 100% completely head-over-heals madly in love with her?

DUDE - STOP IT. JUST STOP IT!!!

Pan · Member Joined: 13 Dec 2006 Posts: 4

Thanks cap for your comments.

I agree with you I need counsel. This is the main reason to have spoken about all this on this site. It was not to brag about anything, but just to hear what people like you have to say..

I don't know if the reasons of a separation and later a reunion are really an important point to "qualify" for GSA or not. It seems important to you.

I am not trying to hide my guilt behind what is called GSA either. You are right to tell me what I should have done.. I can realize that perfectly on my own.

Finally about being "in love", we are both deeply in love. Just wanted to ask a more general question about wether this can be called love or not? A friend i told him about this just told me this could not be called love, but just a sick mind disease...

BarbGonyo · Administrator Joined: 31 Oct 2003 Posts: 222

I couldn't resist putting in an old romantic song title. But you have to admit it is a good question.

What is love? There are all types of love as far as I can remember. We can love our pets, our parents, our neighbors, a certain movie, our church, our Creator, and the list can go on and on.

I remember how much I loved my father as a little girl because he was the person who liked to spend time with me and take me to wrestling matches and movies, and the Circus.

He bought me a small inexpensive toy every Friday when it was payday. He encouraged me with Art supplies when I showed interest in Art.

He also bought me skiis and inline skates to encourage me to be athletic. They didn't get used but he tried. He showed me love and affection by just inviting me along when he went to the store. He was a good father and I still miss him even though he died in 1985.

Was I in love with him? NO, I loved him because he was my fahter. He had faults and could be quite the disiplinarian and when I came home pregnant at 15, he was not accepting of my situation and told me many years later how I was his little girl and he was so disappointed.

I was lucky to have my father as an example, even when I failed his expectations. We had history together and a bond.

Now what of the father who was not there to give all the things he could h ave for his child and now wants to make up for the lost years. Can he love his daughter?. Of course he does, she is his little girl with all the years removed. Now the relationship takes on a whole new direction.

Can he be a father or daddy to her? Can he buy her dolls and take her to events that they can share together after skipping all the stages that brought them together in adulthood? Is this love?

Yes it is love with the years removed which removes the stages which brings on the problem for both of them.

I'm not pointing fingers at anyone in this post, I just trying to let you all know what I have discovered in all the years that I've dealt with GSA and it's victims.

Now we are years away from the beginning of what our relationship should have been with all these things missing so we jump the stages and are dealing with the adult child, who I still say is mentally the little girl looking for her daddy or the little boy looking for his mommy. She may be 16 or 50 but it is the daddy she missed even though she may feel her needs going in another direction. He may feel fatherly but the baby, chld, little girl is gone and a woman is there and the feelings get so confused. We then begin to look for possesion that we missed. Possesion can become the need for lost intimacy of growing up with that person. Intimacy can become a need for sex because some people only know how to gain intimacy with sex and not conversation and years of being together.

Of course we love our children and they love us. We love the person who shares our blood, genes, likes and dislikes. We belong together but the boundaries have to be there.

I hear so many who say, I only have the feelings but would never go any further. That is like saying I'm on the ledge of a burning building and it is too far to jump so I'll stay here in hopes that I don't burn. But there are times when the flame gets so hot we want to jump.

I know this is an extreme example, but it is the only way I know how to let people know that we really don't think we will lose control and think boundaries aren't necessary but they are if we want to be what we really are to each other.

I'm sorry for getting on my soap box and I do try to let most of you answer each other, but every once in awhile, I have to restate my beliefs.

Barb Gonyo
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cap · Member Joined: 20 Oct 2003 Posts: 23

marcito,

I'm not saying your case doesn't qualify as GSA, of course it does. Im just saying you should have been in your daughters life when she was growing up. Why did you wait until she was 16 to meet her? I just hope you have a better reason than "I got married to someone else so I didn't bother to be a father to my daughter because its wasen't convenient". Thats BS.

What was your reason for not being there for your daughter when she needed you the most, when she was growing up? Do you really think that what you're doing to her now is going to help her?

All i'm saying is you lived your life and you've run your course. Now let your daughter do the same. Let her meet someone she can fall in love with for real and have a fresh start. Let her meet someone she can have kids with and raise them in a normal family setting. At least let her have that chance. You owe her that. Stop being selfish and do what you have to do. Be a man.

I'm sorry if I'm being harsh but it needs to be said.

cap

Heaven · Posted: Wed Dec 20, 2006 6:45 am Post subject:

I just want to tell you I don't love you as a father, but as a man. I am not confused and I am not a sick person. When I asked you about love, I was asking you about love as a couple. Remember that from the very beginning I looked upon you as a friend, which had so much affinity with me. I didn't look at you as the father with whom I needed to catch up the lost years and therefore sex was not an instrument to strengthen a relationship.
You have forgotten to tell your readers that I have someone whom I love as a father, someone who brought me up and shared my growth. I could criticize you so well for not being there when I needed you and also your weak argument that you prefered your marriage, which you have always declared, that was just selfishness! But it doesn't matter anymore, God put someone else in my path who fulfilled all my needs as a daughter. What matters is the present!

Nowadays, I don't believe it is selfish from you to stay in our relationship, on the contrary, it has taken us both many struggle to keep it. Selfish would be to drop me after all that happened between us, all that we have built and grown together. A cut would be my death. We both know how much we need each other. The truth of our wishes are inside our souls, and not in others. With others one can share and take opinions, but I don't define myself based on what people tell me, but from from what is inside of me. Learn to find that!

Our relationship is more like, from my perspective, two persons who fell in love without knowing they were relatives , since they never looked at each other that way. Have you given a thought that maybe since the first day, you saw me as a woman without even knowing? Of course I knew you were my biological father, but nobody can deny the possibility of having fallen in love with you like in those "love at first sight". You were somehow so much like the man of my dreams.

About an ending to our relation as a couple, I believe no decision should be taken without me being part of it, that would be so wrong. No one can think, give opinions, and decide for me, as I have seen in the posts from your readers, which they have done without knowing what I think. I am 20 years old and have enough judgement to respond for my decisions, my stands, and responsibilities.

As a last thing, don't forget that "truth, goodness and evil are relative" (subject to a context, to people's experiences and circunstances, etc). And this you told me once in that poem: "our love is stronger than they are", whom of course I respect and thank for their opinions...

With love, your Heaven.

BarbGonyo · Administrator Joined: 31 Oct 2003 Posts: 222

It is good to hear your side of what you feel. My opinions are due to all of those I have spoken to in the last almost 30 years I have been involved in reunions and GSA, as I'm not an adoptee but a birthmother.

You stated what is one of the key issues of why GSA happens. That is that you already have a father and you don't want your birthfather as a father. That is the point. You have a father and to ask your father to be a father to you would be unheard of as an adult because you have a father who raised you and loved you and gave you the things that fathers give.

It would seem to you that you would be unfaithful to your Afather to even think of your Bfather as a father. So you turn to another type of intimacy as an adult that of a man who you love and share likes and dislikes with but who will not take your Afathers place. So if he can't be your father, he has to take a different position in your life.

I don't know if I'm getting my point across here and hope that other adoptees will write in to say how they feel about this.

Barb Gonyo
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cap · Member Joined: 20 Oct 2003 Posts: 23

Heaven,

Seeing how you already are in love and acted on you feelings with your "father, lover, whatever" I guess it doesn't matter because whats done is done. It seems any hope of him being a father figure is now gone. If you and he are in love and you both want to see it through than thats your decision, and I wish you well and happiness.

I think your father's post just struck a nerve. My mother gave me away when I was born and I spent 3 or 4 years being a ward of the state. Then I was adopted by an abusive family and didn't have a good childhood. Finally four years ago at 32 I met my natural sister and fell in love. She doesn't feel the same way and for the last four years I guess I've been really angry and resentful that I can't be with the woman I love. So when I hear of people getting to be with the person they want I guess I get a little envious.

For this GSA love feeling to happen there has to be a long separation of birth family members. What bothers me is I did nothing wrong to cause this separation. In your fathers case he is the one who caused the separation from his selfishness. He basically disowns you as a daughter and causes you to be a stranger. Then he pops back into your life just when you are becomming an adult, and lucky for him this separation that he created makes you fall in love with him and he gets to have a sexual relationship with a young woman without any care for what the long term consequences will be to you. How f__cking conveinient for him!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah this still technically counts as GSA, but this is the most extreme case of irrisponsibility i've read about so far, and just a sence of unfatherly selfishness!

Personally, I think if you as a parent cause the separation without a really good reason, and then you as a parent seek out the child as an adult and have a sexual relationship with the child, man you won't get a pass from me! Especially the sacred father/daughter relationship.

I'll not say anything more about this and let other people post, perhaps some other father/daughters in similar situations can point out how I'm wrong. I'm only referring specifically to father/daughter relationships where the father caused the separation by his lack of giving a s_hit about his daughter and where the father seeks the daughter out as an adult.

cap

P.S: merry christmas everyone

P.S.S: Sorry about the language Barbara but I think in extreme cases its called for.

TheOtherWoman · Member Joined: 16 May 2004 Posts: 11

cap, hello,

I feel for your anger. I'm so sorry that your mother gave you up. I would like to make a comparison between your mother and marcito. They both made choices that affected two little children. I don't know that we have enough information to say that one parent was more or less selfish to not participate in their child's life. Marcito and you bmom both knew that their children existed. They both chose to not be there. I don't see the difference. I'm an adoptee, too. I know my bmom didn't check in on my life to see if I was adopted by good people or in foster care or adopted by abusive people. It sounds like the case may be the same for you. Did she not know you existed? Did she care enough to be involved. The difference between you and Marcito is that one of Heaven's parents did stay in her life. And Marcito did support her. But we go back to the fact that he didn't meet her until she was a grown person, just like you didn't meet your sister until you were grown. I am sorry, yet not sorry, that your feelings weren't reciprocated. GSA does cause horrible torment and confusion and pain. You may be a very lucky man that it was one-sided -- you don't get the "priviledge" of even more pain later if there is a sexual relationship that falls apart. That's not meant to be simplistic or glib. I've been there as a witness.

Marcito, I'm your wife. My husband was possibly the father of a child from a two-night stand. The paternity was suspect. He met the baby but didn't hear anything else for sixteen years when he was being asked to pay child support. We had occassion to meet the little girl who had now become a blossoming woman of 17. Under the guise of abuse, she asked if she could stay with us. I was all for it! As an adoptee, I was thrilled for this girl to be reunited with her father. It was no different to me than my situation of not knowing both parents. A child needs to know where they come from, and lack of one parent is the same in adoption or in Heaven's situation. I knew of GSA, but thought "it couldn't happen here" as my husband was a handsome man who had many opportunities that he just wasn't interested in. GSA IS DIFFERENT!!! It isn't cheating, it isn't an easy opportunity for sex and to take advantage. It is two people who eat the same and look the same and smell the same and laugh at the same stupid jokes -- it is a connection unlike anything either one ever thought possible, or their spouses.

I watched the progression of the affair, but had no idea it was an affair. I thought it was a wonderful reunion of this wounded child with the father she always wanted. I found out three months into the affair. It caught my blindsided. They ran off to be together. They even tried to move out of the area so they could be in a place where they could be a couple and no one would know of their family relationship. She even convinced him that having a baby would be a good idea and the only last thing she needed to make her dream life complete. When he started realizing that he shouldn't be with her, they had a baby, and she wasn't going to let her dream get away that easily. She turned him in to the authorities, and he is now in prison for the next fifteen years. All because incest, even with adults, is illegal here. She was eighteen when she got pregnant, but the affair started a couple months before she turned 18.

Marcito, I have no doubt that the feelings you and Heaven are exploring are real. However, you will be the person who is called upon to be "the responsible one" because you are the father. You know this is wrong. You have more life experience to know the disaster that lies somewhere in front of you, if not tomorrow, some time out there. The feelings you have are very real, but they are a fantasy. One of you and many others will get badly hurt in the end. Despite yours and Heaven's pain in the short-term, you, as a parent (not to Heaven, but a parent in general), know that you sometimes have to make the hard decision because it it right in the long-term.

Heaven, I know the intensity of the feelings that you have. I'm very sure you could be angry at my advice. Yes, you are an adult, and you know your heart and are making your own adult choices. I just know what I am now seeing in my husband's daughter's life. She thought she would die the first few months without him. But at some point, she knew that she had to go on with her life, since the judge said that there was a permanent restraining order and the man she couldn't live without would be gone for fifteen years. She has talked with me in-depth. She was angry for a while, accusing her dad of stealing her life away from her. I reminded her of how much she loved her dad and how she pushed him to get involved sexually. She still now says that it was his responsibility as a mature adult to have stopped her. She resents that she was able to experience that heaven that could never be. She is now in a wonderful relationship and is engaged to be married. But she knows that she will never be able to experience those feelings she shared with her father, because of the close genetic relationship. But she doesn't see their GSA involvement as a blessing. She curses it. She says that it never should have been.

And now, there is a precious two year old little boy that will never be able to meet his father becuase his mother hates dad and says he is a sick man. She knows how lonely it is to grow up not knowing your biological father. Yet she hates her own enough to put her own little boy through the same pain.

Marcito and Heaven, please please look at all the people in your lives now. How devastated would they be? Look at each other. Could you stand for that other to someday hate you? I know it's heaven right now. But please, please, please, take very seriously that what has happened to my family is a very very real possible outcome for yours. I can't imagine it could ever be worth it.

Heaven · Posted: Tue Jan 23, 2007 4:16 pm Post subject: To "the other woman"

To “The Other Woman",

It is difficult to imagine that others have gone through similar situations...

I thank you for your comment, and I truly feel sorry for what happened to your family. However I want also to give my story and point out some differences between your case and mine.

When I met my biological father at 16 years old, his wife didn’t let me be a part of his family, even long before our romance started. When my father left to another state to a new job, two years after our first reunion, I realized I was in love and could not stand living so far from him. Because of that I tried to move close to him, even if not in his house. This didn’t work out, for reasons I don’t want to go into details. But during the short period I spent there, the feelings exploded, we declared what we felt and we shared our first kiss. I was 18 and a half.

Alter that, back with my parents, my father, seeing the distance between us, and because nothing really intimate had happened, took that determination, hard and intransigent that you spoke about in your comment. I didn’t see him for a year, but I could not get him out of my heart. It was just too much; I had a terrible anguish and quit the university where I was studying. In the middle of my sadness I used to try to cheer me up having fantasies about meeting someone or falling in love with some of my friends who liked me. But nothing worked, I kept feeling so anguished, missing him so much and unable to accept being without his love. During that time, my family could hear me crying at nights, until my step father, who is quite mystical and gifted, just guessed me out without me telling him anything. To my surprise he was so supportive, without blaming my bio-father and told me that he did not judge incest, because of the many ideologies he had studied. I also told my sister, I confessed myself to her and she understood me.

By the end of the year, my father traveled and came to see me. I believe he also had a hard time being away from me. From then on we could not control ourselves anymore. We started to meet once a month during weekends. I was 19 and a half when we started to consummate what we felt for each other.

But something unexpected happened, his wife died in a tragic accident and my father’s feelings of guilt were very strong. I was myself struggling with the exams from the university (I started to study again), with lots of stress and quite weak with an infection that wouldn’t heal. The fact that he once again tried to end our relationship made me break down. I got into a depression, having “panic crises”, vomiting and refusing to eat. When he found out, he called me and apologized, telling me he needed me to help him out of the loneliness and anguish he was in, and still fighting again up to this day.

Now we see each other a few days every month, and keep in touch by phone, by chat, we share pictures and use the web and the camera to spend time together. My adoptive father and my sister support me still. My father has also a friend who knows about us and accepts it.

Just recently I quit taking pills and no longer have panic crises. We have a deep relationship even with the distance between us, and are very careful of what we have. We keep it secret, and are conscious of the probable bad opinions of the people that could be affected. We decided to be above them, to be more than them, more than society accepts… so he told me in a letter.

But I know my father has a hard time living like this, more even now that he is going through such difficult times in his life, and because of it, he constantly questions himself and many times tells me to try to return to be father-daughter. I always refuse and he yields to our loving, to this tenderness, sweetness and warmth he finds in me.

Please understand, I cannot be someone I am not, I love him as a man, and for me to act and express as his daughter would be such a contradiction, a deception to myself. Neither could I be with someone else, this would be selfish. Every person deserves to be with someone who really loves them. I can’t do that! I tried once, and to have another guy kissing me and getting his hopes high made me feel horrible.

Now, being 20 years old, I have reached some emotional stability, little by little, and it was so hard. I don’t want to suffer no more. I am very scared to break down again, if I try to end this relationship. It is like a psychosis. No more depression, no more anguish!! And I don’t want to spend 12 years, like Barbara did, trying to control what I feel inside and wants to get out. I am young, and I don’t deserve to waste all my youth chaining my heart. I know that it can have unfortunate consequences in the long term according to you, but remember that happiness is a private thing! If the daughter of your husband ended hating her father doesn’t mean the same will happen to me. I would never do such thing to the one I love, and would do anything to protect him from harm. I have never blamed him to abandon me as a child, never felt resentment, but always tried to be understanding, and even justified him after he told me his reasons and feelings at the time. He is such a good person, and not a sick person to have fallen in love with me, a daughter that was never such! I won’t end this relationship, nor ruin my present life because of a dark future that is so uncertain. I prefer living a life with some struggle than being dead alive.

Maybe one day, when my father is older, when the sons naturally become keepers of their elders, I’ll start to see my “marcito” in a more fatherly way. Maybe then I’ll think about starting anew. Not before.

Anyway, nobody can tag our love as wrong, if you look to the essential and detach from the socio-cultural structures. Inside our love there is no evil. And the word “wrong” is subject to contexts, to perceptions, and experiences different for each person. All is so relative and not because a majority thinks one way, that way become the only right way!
You can talk about probabilities, but exceptions always exist.

The reality here is those GSA feelings; no matter how weak or strong, are inappropriate only because they go against the conduct patterns taught by the “established order”. It might be a difficult, atypical relationship, but that is all, and not enough to declare it wrong or a fantasy. It is real, this I can testify with all my senses. Freedom should be granted to people, as long as no harm is done, and my relationship is personal, intimate and carefully kept private.

I thank you anyway, because you and this makes you different than many, understood that this is not a sexual issue, not the “great thing” for my father to lay down with a young girl. This is so much more!

I am truly sorry for what you went through, but in my case, “the other woman” is not here anymore. And unlike you, she never accepted me to walk into my father life, from the very start, even though she had two children from a previous marriage and my father took them in and raised them. The only occasion we talked, she tried to picture my father as black as could be, for me to disappoint myself and go away from him.
Sometimes I think if she had been less selfish, would have let me get close to her family, to my brother and sister, and showed some caring for me, as my father did with her children, we probably could have become close and I would have had the opportunity to feel as a daughter. I would also never have betrayed a friend…

So, there are so many reasons for this relationship. I am now deeply in love and have lived it all intensively. I fought for it, got used to it and stuck to it, and I am willing to give it all for it to last.

It is now too late; I never can be a daughter, never can be what I never was! My eyes can only look at him one way…..

TheOtherWoman · Member Joined: 16 May 2004 Posts: 11

Heaven, Thank you,

I appreciate your open and honest sharing with me. Thank you for not seeing me as someone against you or pan. Yes, I understand so much of what you say. I haven't felt it in my own heart, but I feel like I have after seeing what my step daughter went through and as much as she became part of my heart.

She was such a dear girl/woman/daughter. Her heartbreak each time he would push her away was more devastating that anything imaginable. I held her many times while she dripped blood on the floor from self-inflicted wounds. (She wasn't gushing blood, I wasn't negligent) She couldn't stand the pain any longer and resorted to cutting herself. I held her because her heart hurt more than the cut on her arm. She sobbed and wailed in complete anguish until she was utterly exhausted. She came over to my house many times completely out of her mind; she was going to kill herself because she couldn't and wouldn't live without him. I, as the ex-wife and breifly her Mom, was the only person who she knew could understand the devastation of losing him as the love of all life.

And in our shared pain, she held me many times when I couldn't understand how, after 12 years of each of us fighting so hard to protect our marriage, he could leave me for her. She had seen herself how much he and I loved each other. That was the biggest reason I knew that GSA was so much more powerful than anything I had ever experienced. He and I had lived through temptation without giving in. His daughter was different -- their bond was far more than anything we could understand or explain.

I don't think that any regular thing could have changed her feelings from love to hate. The biggest thing was that he has been sentenced to 15 years in prison, so she knows she must create her life with their son separate from him. He is listed as a child abuser to his son, simply because of the incest that created this little boy. Both she and he were consenting adults, but he was the older adult who was charged with full responsibility for this "crime." And then he can't have any contact with her even after he is released. Then, for her to keep her son, she had to undergo court-ordered counseling. In that counseling, they basically said that until she "realized" how sick and awful he was, she was still too sick and damaged to be a good mother. Essentially, they told her what was "right" and that everything she had felt and experienced was "wrong", but it wasn't her fault -- it was his. I understand her change of feeling based on this. I don't think these are her true feelings, but she is learning society's expectations of what she has gone through. In that, I agree with you that it's societal expectations which are driving making this "bad".

I think she "hates" him right now because she is without him and again remembering that big void in her life where she always wanted a father. This is a big difference from you, as you had a (step) father who loved you and raised you. You are very blessed in that. My step-daughter only had abusive men married to, or dating, her mother. That made the dreams of having a Dad so much bigger. I think she "hates" him because she still doesn't have a Daddy and now she never will. She asked me not to call him her dad -- it creeps her out.

Heaven, Thank you again for sharing. Being able to see so many of the same deep emotions in your situation as I saw in my step-daughter's helps me so much. It's a way to see the other side without the emotional charges of the person who stole my husband. Those charges are long gone, but she and I don't talk as much as we used to. She is trying to put the past behind her. She still says I'm welcome to be Grandma to her little boy. (I'm not even close to 40 -- it's weird saying Grandma!) It's nice, now that I'm not feeling so hurt, to be able to hear again about the depths of the feelings.

My point to you, though, Heaven, is that we DO live in society. Even if it is kept as quite a secret, one of the two people involved may start leaning more towards society's expectations. When that happens, sometimes the other person becomes the scape-goat. There are just so many ways for this to go wrong. Please read Barbara's accounts and many of the accounts on this site: the odds are against these relationships lasting and along with it the enchantment. I'm not telling you that you are wrong to follow your heart. I'm just encouraging you to keep your eyes open. Please, never be afraid to listen to those with a different perspective. I am not offended if you don't take my advice; I'm not glorified if you do. All I offer is the same thing that you give to me -- a broader perspective helping me put my mind around a big topic; a chance to have more information with which to make the best possible decisions about my own life.

Blessings,
T.O.W.

Pan · Member Joined: 13 Dec 2006 Posts: 4

I don't know very well what to say here. The posts have been great! So many emotions, love and sharing, suffering and pain also..

Heaven is a fighter! She has the youth, the strength to want to go through hell for what she believes is right. I admire her! And so many other qualities. She is kind, warm and sweet, and quite smart with words!
I don't want to let her down..

Cap, T.O.W. and barb have the maturity to see the other side of the coin. I wish we could all get together and hold each other through all this.

I personnally am not doing so well for the moment, but with time will get going again. For now I let the the river flows... God will take me where he wants and I believe all is part of a sure plan to teach something, maybe to me , maybe to Heaven, maybe to each one of us?

Thanks again for the sharing!

I love you all already..