Our dad split the scene with no contact information for twenty-three years. We’re in loose touch now and I’ve pretty much forgiven him. There were all sorts of contributing factors about which we (rightly - we were in grade school) new nothing, but it still was kind of awful. But the point you make is the big difference to me. My mom was the wronged party, not a suspect.
I saw another report that included her daughters’ tweets as she went through getting a call from detectives, being hopeful, and then disappointed, and then angry. It was kind of heartbreaking.
My roomie just found out her brother died about a year ago and none of his friends could be arsed to notify her, yet she was mentioned in his obit. :dubious::rolleyes: It doesn’t take walking out to be lost track of, just a single move without letting people know your new number and friends who don’t give a shit.
I don’t know. I think I could convince myself she was acting in her children’s best interests, without much effort. Isn’t it just possible that people who do such a thing are fleeing horrific thoughts toward their spouse/children/life. Thoughts they possibly cannot process or even vocalize? I mean if you were disturbed enough to feel your children would be better off without you, as in not in danger, then fleeing doesn’t look so terrible. What if she felt like she was about to “go off”?
Yeah, I’d probably forgive and move on, choosing to believe the universe was perhaps correct to send her messages to leave me alone, in the bigger picture. Assume I’d dodged a bullet, like that. Compassion and a little pity, and leave it at that.
I would forgive, if she actually wanted forgiveness. But I forgive people for all kinds of things that some others never forgive them for, like cheating or whatever. This would be very hard to forgive and might take me a good long while but I think I could do it if the person made honest amends.
In the pic from the article she looks pretty far gone, as if there is nobody home inside her head. I’m not sure morally judging her as a rational actor is really possible.
I would want to see her out of curiosity, and to ask all the questions I’d had over the years that I thought I’d never know the answers to. An interview, so to speak. Then I’d probably curse her out and never speak to her again.
My mother died twenty years ago, when I was eleven. I have dreams every so often that she comes back with some weird “faked my death” story. My first reaction in these dreams is “Where the FUCK have you been?!” Followed by instant, overwhelming anxiety over wondering when she will take off on me again. I wake up feeling very ripped off. No way I’d want to feel that way all the time.
I feel bad for the fact that she was going through depression, but that’s absolutely no excuse for what she did to her family. Making people think her husband was a murderer? Abandoning her kids? No fucking way. She couldn’t even send them a letter to let them know she was all right. No way I’d ever forgive that.
I will always believe most of these are cases of women who had big aspirations as a younger person, then real life came and swallowed that up. One day it hits them hard that twenty years later, they’ve got nothing to show for it (or so they think); thus they up and walk out.
Then they show up a month, or a year or ten years later - whatever time they needed to take to ‘sort things out.’ They don’t all expect to be welcomed back with open arms, though some do.
What gets me is that if a man did this, he’s a dead beat who abandoned his kids.
If a woman does it, she was just ‘trying to find herself.’
Yep, reading the comments in this thread and on the various news sites, it appears that everyone is commending her for her journey of self discovery. :rolleyes:
This is pretty clearly a case of severe mental illness. Nobody is saying that what she did was right, though, by any means. Everyone agrees that it is disgusting to abandon your kids that way.
When I read that she is facing drug charges, it doesn’t surprise me at all that she was able to forget about her family. A lot of drug addicts out there will choose drugs over their own children.
And if she is still actively using drugs, her family probably IS better off staying far away from her.