Finding Strength in Adversity

In this raw and revealing episode, I get into the challenges of navigating co-parenting and overcoming manipulation during and after divorce. From struggles with custody agreements to dealing with intentional disruptions, I share my experiences of staying resilient amidst attempts to alienate me from my daughter. You’ll hear about the impact of toxic dynamics, how I managed to rise above it all, and the lessons I learned along the way. Tune in to discover how I reclaimed my peace, launched this podcast as part of my healing journey, and continue to find strength while inspiring others to do the same.

Episode Highlights:

[0:07] - Kicking off the episode: reflections on adversity and co-parenting challenges.
 [5:45] - How my ex manipulated custody agreements and alienated my daughter.
 [9:10] - A bizarre story about the "dog food in the piano" incident and its deeper implications.
 [12:35] - The challenges of being excluded from pivotal parenting moments, like summer camp decisions.
 [13:55] - Finding healing and purpose through launching this podcast and sharing my story.

Links & Resources:

Be sure to follow, share, and leave a comment if this show resonates with you! Send me a message at podpage.com/themusicoflife to share your experiences, or to leave a comment. I'd love to feature it in a future episode.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Karen,

Caryn Portnoy: 0:07

hi everyone, and welcome to the music of Life. I'm your host. Karen Portnoy, before I get into this episode, please comment, ask questions, share some of your experiences, and don't forget to subscribe. You. So I ask you, how did your ex go about trying to ruin you and your divorce? What subtle or not so subtle nuances did you pick up on that had to do with your children? How did you handle those moments I spoke in earlier episodes about how my ex manipulated my daughter against me and alienated her from me, how he bought her loyalty by spoiling her, how he enabled her by doing everything for her, and how he empowered her to rule the roost. So I always taught my daughter how to do her own laundry, how to load the dishwasher. I even taught her how to clean toilets without touching anything with a rubber glove, and, you know, the wand that cleans the toilet without having to touch anything. When she was younger, she used to love doing that, so it wasn't a stretch for me to teach her how to clean how to put things away, how to wash laundry. I mean, all these things. He wasn't having any of it. He did everything for her. He even yelled at me, how am I making my daughter clean toilets, like she's too good to clean a toilet and all I kept thinking to myself every time he would clean her room, change her sheets, vacuum, dust, all of that stuff she could have done herself, and he would have benefited her by giving her life skills, by teaching her how to do these things herself. Instead, he did it all for her. He cleaned her bathroom, he cleaned her bedroom, he did all of her laundry, he cleaned all of her dishes, and he thinks that that was good parenting. So when she's 30 something years old and living in New York City and calls her daddy to come and clean her apartment, he'll go running. How does that benefit her? And the fact that he empowers her to make all these decisions that I'm sorry a 14 year old shouldn't be making. He's only hurting her, especially when it comes to our custody agreement, we have very clear cut parenting time. I'm supposed to have her after school on Thursdays. I'm supposed to pick her up after school. She's supposed to stay by me and I take her back to school first thing Monday morning, and that's supposed to be every other weekend. And then on top of it, I'm supposed to be with her every Tuesday. I pick her up from school. I'm with her for the rest of the afternoon, and I have dinner with her, and then I drop her off. He allows her to cancel her parenting time with me. He allows her to not see me on Tuesday nights. I understand she has appointments and tutors and homework and all kinds of things after school. She told me back in August, when we were on vacation together, that Tuesdays weren't going to be good for her, but we'll find another day. And every time that I've asked her about finding another day, I keep getting the same excuse. I have something every day after school that may be true, but I don't have a co parent who is enforcing our custody agreement on any level. The fact that she had her attorney advocating for her to live with her dad, primarily after we had a 5050, custody agreement verbally for a year, is mind blowing to me all because he doesn't want to pay me child support. I reminded him that as the primary residential parent, it is his job, as per our agreement, to encourage a meaningful relationship between she and I, and while he says that he's doing that, the evidence of that says otherwise, I highly doubt that he is encouraging any relationship with me, because his entire Mo was to hurt me through her. From the moment I filed for divorce, I told him early on that if he really, truly loved her, he would make sure that she and I were strong, and instead he dismissed me. It was all about keeping her away from me, slandering me to her and brainwashing her with his narrative about me. He was a Disney dad. He would rather spoil her, buy her loyalty, whatever she wanted she got. That was his whole motivation for everything make it impossible for her to ever say no to him. I. On top of the fact that he's a very overbearing bully type of personality, no child would be able to say no to him or stand up to him or go against him in any possible way, he bought her so many clothes that the closet in her room that we expanded years ago, all of her clothes have spilled out over her already expanded closet, over to a bench that was in the hallway, and the ping pong table we have in the basement, and then all over the laundry room. So all of those places were spilled over with her clothes. What 14 year old actually admits that they have too many clothes, and while he claims to have encouraged a relationship between she and I, he doesn't realize how much I heard the complete opposite narrative from him when we lived together. He would talk to her like a surrogate wife. He would share things with her that were not appropriate for a child to hear about me or the dynamics of our divorce, all things I overheard with my own ears. I avoided confronting him because I didn't want to get into something in front of her, but I was very well aware of the things he said to her when he thought I wasn't listening. The interesting thing is that he severely underestimated me at every twist and turn. I kept my mouth shut as time went on, and I let him tell on himself, either to me directly or loud enough for me to hear him tell her, I plead dumb so I could stay a few steps ahead of him, and when he thought he succeeded in destroying me, I always rose from the ashes, just like a phoenix every single time. Another example of how he tried to sabotage me was with our dog. Once again, it was the most bizarre thing, and I swear I could never make this up. But it was a Saturday morning, and I was sleeping in, and he was downstairs cleaning angrily because I wasn't, and he was vacuuming the living room, and all of a sudden he yells up to me pretty loudly, that I should come down and see what my dog did. I ignored him because it seemed ridiculous off the bat. So again, he called up to me, yelling that I should come down and see what my dog did. And that piqued my daughter's interest to go down and see what the dog did. She was unimpressed, and I don't really know what she thought about it, but by the time I came downstairs to see what ridiculousness I had in store, I noticed that the piano was pulled away from the wall, and behind it was all this dog food, apparently that was spilled into the back of my piano, and this piano was mine. It wasn't ours. So I came downstairs to look and see closer what this looked like, and I took pictures of it too, because nobody would have believed that this was actually what he was saying, but he claimed that the dog was hoarding food in the back of the piano, so my 35 pound dog is able to move a piano away from the wall so that she can store food in the back of it. Now, the point of the pictures was to show anybody who didn't believe this that a dog hoarding food would take mouthfuls of it. If this is exactly what was happening, what the back of the piano actually looked like was a human who actually poured it into the back of the piano. It was uniform. There were areas that were higher than the others, but it was so clearly, a human who did this, it was neat. It was it was so dumb to think that this dog would be able to do this. His whole Mo was to get me to clean it up, and I refused. You're not going to pour dog food into the back of my piano and then make me clean it up. But I made him feel foolish for the fact that I didn't believe him. But like I said, you can't make this shit up. This was about the time we were getting close to finalizing our divorce agreement, according to my attorney, we were in the final stages at this point, and it just was very clear to me that he was becoming unglued and running out of things to pin against me. You know, he said and did all the things that he could think to do to ruin me, and none of it was working. So I was unbothered by this whole dog food in the piano episode. I said I was not cleaning it up, and I went back upstairs to my room, and lo and behold, he wound up cleaning it and vacuuming, and that was it. We moved on from that. Can you imagine? So camp was coming around again by the summertime of last year, and I. Don't know whether it was him convincing her that she shouldn't go back to camp, or if it was her decision, I'm not really sure, but she decided not to go back to camp. This is her narrative. The whole year through, she wasn't going back, and from what I understood, she was trying to make plans to go on a Teen Tour with some local friends from a neighboring town, and I believe the friends that she was wanting to go with were flaking out of these plans, and they decided to make other plans instead for the summer. So lo and behold, my daughter decided that she was going to go back to camp after all, and she didn't want me there. Now she's at the age where it's very likely that she didn't want me there, and I accept that, except because I worked at her sleep away camp for the last six summers. Somebody printed an email from him to her last summer explaining that she shouldn't come to me if she needs something at camp, her cousin went there, and so he was directing her, if you need something, go to your cousin. He'll go to his mother and get a message, and the mother will then tell my ex what the message is. So instead of doing what she always did every summer, which was come to me and ask me for something, he was telling her not to come to me and to go the route of his cousin. Could I promise that the only reason she didn't want me there was because of her reasonings, or was it safe to say that he influenced her with that too? I'll never know, but it was the first time I did not go to camp with her. I was there for six years, and the seventh year I was not able to go. Some things happened at camp that weren't ideal. She got involved in some situations at camp that I don't know if I were there, if I would be able to have stopped, but she did not have a good summer, and as such, is refusing to go back. Now for her last summer, it is so hard to be an active mother in the life of your child who wants nothing to do with you, and I recognize that this is an age where she would have separated from me, and she would have rejected me normally, but I am 1,000% sure that he influences all of these decisions with her against me. I'm at a point now that I'm five months out of living at the house with them, I had to leave and move out of that house. It was the only way that this divorce would end. I'm trying to move on with my life. I'm trying to find peace. It's taken all these months, but the shock is wearing off of my body. Finally, and my nervous system is starting to calm down a bit. My body is recognizing that it's safe to rest now. So I've been in a recovery mode for the last several months. Moving on and launching this podcast was a major thing for me, because I really was not wanting to relive all of this, but if I'm going to be somebody who is willing and able to help others going through this, I needed to do that, and what I discovered was that it did help part of my healing by going through all of it again, so far, I have reached over 100,000 people in different groups that I'm in on social media. I've gotten a lot of positive feedback, some negative feedback, from people who I believe I've triggered, and therefore they don't like me, and that's okay, but I believe that there is a very large audience out there who could use the help that I can offer, the wisdom, the experience that I've had, and so I'm highly motivated to keep going, because I really want to help People. Please join me every Thursday for a new episode. I invite you to comment, like, share, subscribe. You can reach me at the music of life, five, five@gmail.com with any questions or stories or experiences or anything that you want to share with me, I'd be happy to talk about it on another episode. You can check out my website@podpage.com slash the music of life. You.