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What a farce! A dark, dark comedy of wickedness. What a real piece of trash this little charlatan was. Clearly, NOT a man of God.

I've been well aware of that truth for many years. In this situation, the years and forgiveness and most especially the renewed relationship with my kiddo (which dates from when my daughter was pregnant with her first born) and HER grace and forgiveness have dampened the pain. Truth be told, both my ex-wife and I brought SOOOOOOOOO much emotional baggage to our marriage. Both of us are much more mellow now than we were 25+ years ago. And we are friends now. If you haven't yet gotten to a similar place, I will long and yearn for it for and with you.

Rocky, this thread touched me profoundly. Thank you for your courage and grace. I, too, have experienced parental alienation, which is not only a cruelty against the parent, it is child abuse. Literally. Actually. Child abuse. Your words, and those of Cain and Hayes, triggered me into deep contemplation and solitude. And from this, arose, among many things, a remembrance of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke "Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if we could only arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.” On Rilke's desk was a little piece of paper or card with a solitary inscription: "Today." The only day you will ever write your memoir.

You'll always be a star in my book, Twinky

Very thoughtful posts, Rocky! And I would be very interested in reading a memoir by you.

Me, too, Rocky!

I think what you wrote is just beautiful.