Wednesday 3rd October

I have three times found myself separated unwillingly from one of my children, and no matter how much we think we suffer, the heartache, the desperate feelings of rejection and abject misery, believe me we are not the real victims.  Our children are.  I was lucky, mostly, and managed to have reasonable relations with most of my ex-partners, and ensured that I kept in contact with my children, almost.  But I have seen time and again parents who use their children as weapons, and aimed straight at the heart of their partners too.  Men in particular seem to be the victims here, not only do the courts invariably decide that the woman has custody, but also arrange things so that the biggest contribution to the split-up family the man can make is a financial one.  And one hears so often of the unreasonableness of the mother, denying access time and again on the flimsiest excuses; the child has a cold, or a clash of arrangements and the father has to lose out.  Too often these spiteful women use their own children as poisoned arrows to hurt even more the one they used to love.  But however hurtful this can be what can never be forgiven is those men who use the final weapon in their miserable arsenal.  What can never be understood is those men who, maybe in desperation but so mistakenly, take the lives of their children and often their own too. It is as if they are saying if I cannot have them then I will make sure that you don’t either.  Awful and unforgiveable, and ultimately the most selfish thing anyone could ever do.  And it seems it is almost contagious, as another tragedy unfolds in Hampshire maybe in some distorted mind elsewhere the final revenge is at least becoming thought about.  And how can we ever stop it, except by all of us stopping using our children as weapons.