...that I believe PAS exists. My husband, Dan, and I have been together for almost 8 years. This is my first marriage and his second. He and his first wife had two children. His first wife left the marriage in 1995, after meeting someone on the internet . She had no resources or plan to support her children. She struggled with emotional and financial problems while living on her own. My husband had custody of both children after she left, though she had visitation. In addition, she paid NO child support.
Flash forward to 2001 when I met my husband....everyone is getting along OK, first wife re-marries and moves about 30 miles away. My husband and I get serious and make plans to get married (all this time the kids are living with him and see her once every other weekend, which was her choice, at her new home). Well, as soon as Dan and I bought our new home and started making plans for the future with the kids (from vacations to choosing and paying for college), this women went nuts! She started telling lies about Dan to the kids, particularly my step-son, sendiing me e-mails accusing me of being a childstealer, among other things. She made it very difficult for the kids, and us, and all this time she is still didn't pay a dime of child support!
For the next five years she continued to lie, evaded child support ,and voluntarily impoverished herself by quitting her job as a school teacher to go back to school to get a Master's Degree! Can you believe it? So while this is all happening, she is continuing to tell my stepson, who was 15 through 19 at the time, what a horrible father and stepmother, Dan and I were. One night in January of 2006, after an argument with his dad, my stepson left the house, called her, went to live with her and for ALMOST A YEAR didn't speak to us! Through all this craziness, her craziness, Dan "took the high road" and refused to stoop to her level. I was so angry...angry that she had a $27,000 child support bill reduced to $4,400 (She told my stepson that Dan and I were trying to financially ruin her by enforcing the child support order - WHAT?!?) , angry that she alienated my stepson from his Dad, his older sister and me, angry that she went out a bought a BMW Mini-Cooper, while my husband and I are both working full time and sacrificing to pay for braces, college, car insurance, clothing, cell phone, you name it.
Now that my stepson is a Junior in college, I think he "gets it". He has distanced himself from her, but as he has said to us, he feels "sorry for her". My step-daughter is cooly cordial toward her and has no desire to have a mother/daughter relationship, but that has come with a cost to my stepdaughter's trust and self-esteem. I believe that their mother's own insecurities, fear of loss, selfishness and envy of us and our relationship as a family made her alienate herself from her children through the veil of PAS. I can't be responsible for her "choices" and it is a shame that during the most critical period of her children's lives, their teen years, she pitted them against us as a way of being in control, because she had no control over her own life. Sometimes, I think PAS is self-induced and we all pay for it.
