Please send love to my daughters and I this week if you can!

Things have been a bit dramatic lately. Nadia has been really struggling at her Dad’s house. He’s been having a very hard time accepting and supporting Nadia’s recent shift in identity. From what she tells me, she has had multiple yelling matches with him, trying to get through to him about how she feels and what she needs. Since he is not only transphobic but also a bullying narcissist, he has said some terrible things to her about how he doesn’t believe her, that he knows this is a scheme that I put her up to, and all the reasons why he’s so sure she’s not really a girl. Some of his words hurt her so badly she has nightmares about them even when she’s at my house. She has also had many thoughts of hurting herself. In the last several weeks Nadia has made some minor progress in getting through to her Dad, but it’s just not enough. He sometimes tells her he supports her, and has even been trying out her new name sometimes. But then he also told her that she has to hide her identity from her 11-yr old step sister because he and his wife don’t feel like she is old enough to understand. This means that they expect Nadia to wear boy clothes and go by Aidan and male pronouns when she’s at his house. They also expect Brooke (also 11) to call her Aidan if their step sister is around, even though she’s used to calling her Nadia. The whole thing is very painful for Nadia, who is dealing with lots of gender dysphoria as it is. And Brooke feels stuck in the middle of it all.

Last week Nadia’s school principal called Child Protective Services on her Dad because they found a test where Nadia had written “PLEASE HELP ME. IF I DON’T GET AWAY FROM MY DAD, I’M GOING TO KILL MYSELF”. The principal has had some of her own dramatic dealings with Dad in the past, and knows some of Nadia’s struggles, so she took it quite seriously. CPS sent the police to my home (since it was my custody week) to do a safety check on Nadia. She told them that she’s fine now, she only feels suicidal when she’s at her Dad’s. She told them she doesn’t want to go back there. They told us they cant override a custody order unless there is imminent danger. I talked to CPS and they told me that nothing that the school or I reported to them constitutes child abuse, so there’s nothing they can do. They advised me to go back to family court.

And all the while he sends me relentless messages about how all of this is my fault and accuses me of all kinds of crazy things. His grasp on reality, his obsession with control, and his respect for other people, including his own children, is similar to that of other people with NPD (i.e our current president). There’s really no way to reason with him on anything.

So yesterday I had to send my girls reluctantly back to their Dad’s for another week with him.

And now I have to get ready to go to court again where he’ll have lawyers who help him tell his lies and it’s up to me to get the court to hear what the kids are actually saying. Uuuuuuuuuggggghhhhh.

Just trying to trust. Could use some good juju.