Divorce Support Forums: malicous mother syndrome

Even when you have a psychologist confirming that the parent is trying to accomplish PAS (whether or not successful), it is nearly impossible to get the kids away from that person. The courts these days want to go with what the mother wants first, unless the kids are very vocal, in which case they'll go with what the kids want. There's some theory out there that the kids will not do well with a parent they've been alienated from.

In our case, it was not just bad-mouthing my husband to the kids. It's bad-mouthing him to her family, the neighbor, the kid's friends' parents to the point where the kids are terrified to invite their friends to spend time at thier Dad's house... and somehow, their Dad's HOUSE... because apparently this location is the cause of all evil in their eyes (they KNOW HE is not evil, so she's somehow convinced them that it's OK if we take them shopping, or out to dinner, or to a sporting event or movie or vacation, but spending an overnight at our house seems to be the cause of huge concern for them, to the point where they're nearly panicked on some days when they're supposed to be here... and we're in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city, not ALL millionaires like she's in, but close, and with a better school).

And then there is the things she does actively to punish them... such as not allowing them to drive the car if they come to see us (I think this is another thing she's convinced them of on some objection to our neighborhood) ... but thier brother is allowed to drive the car if he comes to pick them up because she's decided it's too inconvenient for her to do so.

And then there's the situation of having them missing when we go to pick them up for our parenting time with them... simply not present at the house and she convinces them that we're unreasonable for not wanting to wait an unspecified amount of time for her to get everyone back hom from whatever trip she's taken them on.

Or the times she books them for EXTRA events to take place on OUR weekends. NOT just their ordinary stuff, which we take them to, but extra stuff... stuff SHE will be taking them to.

At one point she told the kids I was an alcoholic (she doesn't even know me) and they should never get in the car with me. She was reprimanded for that, but no one ever told the KIDS that waht she said was improper or that her order to them was inappropriate.

It's not simply trash talk. It's the intended result of the trash talk to have the children disapprove of the other parent, his activities, his home, spouse, job, discipline... even the toys in our house aren't acceptible because when he left, she convinced him that if he allowed her to keep them all, he could start from scratch and get new things that they'd like better. Then she told him waht kind of things to buy. THEN she told the kids that he didn't get them ENOUGH stuff and so it proved that he didn't love them enough.

And when you've only got a few hours of time with the kids in any given week (because she organized their schedules to keep them too busy to talk during the weekends), it's tough to counteract this through example. And it's more impossible when you realize that the non-alienating parent is trying to do the RIGHT thing and not fight dirty (not put the kids in the middle of world war three... not to mention that if the alienation has worked, it's useless for the other parent to do the same things as the alienating parent has done).

It's not just talk. It's actively preventing them from spending the allotted time with us. And the first year, we spent $300 per session to go in about once a month and have her slapped on the wrist by a mediator for all the wrong things she'd done THAT month. She'd stop doing THOSE things for THOSE excuses and come up with a whole new set of stuff the next month.

OK... and for Jada's situation and other adults who have grown up and for some reason think thier fathers who they spent very little time with are the ones who engaged in the alienating things... has it ever occurred to you that perhaps what was going on behind the scenes with your mother was that she was doing alienating things to you and your father that caused you to spend less time with you... caused him to try to fight fire with fire and say mean things about her? Is it possible that some of what she was doing with booking you for events and activities were contrary to what the visitation plan needed to be?

I mean, I don't know, but you sure have some anger towards your dad and ... well, there just aren't that many bad dads out there are there are adult children who are angry at their non-custodial fathers.

We see it all over the place... and every once in a while, we see a more realistic portrayal of it in the media... I'm thinking of the series Gray's Anatomy, where we see the title character, as an adult, totally estranged from her father. Over the years, in the little vignettes we've seen about her parents, it turns out that her mother had an affair and kicked her father out. That she actively alienated the child from him at the same time as she was demanding full custody, continuing the affair with a married colleague, being a very firm and often nasty parent and talented but cold-hearted doctor... and tried to kill herself in front of her daughter when the affair didn't work out.

In the meantime, the father had been entirely cut from the child's life. When he returns as an adult after the mother becomes incapacitated from Alzheimers... he has a new wife and child. He does not appear to be the monster that the title character had been trained to believe, but she has a lot of suspicion, is entirely incapable of believing he's not evil. She sees his current wife and daughter acting as a nice, normal family, trying to accept her as the previous daughter, being loving and decent to each other (in vignettes that she apparnetly never experienced with her mother)... And she can NOT accept that they are nto evil.

This persists even through her own father's illness and death.

When you see him, it's obvious he worries about her, loves her, and regrets leaving her to that controlling, overbearing mother that he left when she was having the affair. You can see that he regrets not fighting for custody... or not fighting harder. But WE all know ... who have been the object of PAS and who have tried to fight it in court... that his decision to give up the fight was made in good faith that hopefully nothing awful would happen to the kid.

But when you look at her as an adult... she's a brilliant surgeon but a horrifyingly damaged human being.

Sad... but it's not such an odd situation... odd that the kid would grow up to be a brilliant surgeon maybe... odd that she'd have a reunion of sorts with her fahter and WATCH as he did not sprout horns & hooves... but it's not an odd situation. When we hear people like JAda talk about how thier mother never did a thing bad towards her father but her father couldn't do a nice thing towards her mother... well... it makes me wonde rwhat the story would be if we really talked to both of HER parents.