Comment by deltaonefour | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deltaonefour | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I want to hear the Moms' side of the story. An abusive man can wield power through domestic violence but an abusive women is far more insidious. An abusive woman does not have the strength to employ violence so she uses other means inflict damage. Manipulation, legal tactics, lies and other techniques are used. The key here is that most of these techniques are subtle.

I don't know what happened here, but I can almost guarantee that the full story hasn't been told by the ex-wife. This is not to say the ex-wife is wrong, but I am 100% sure that aspects of the suicide that she was a direct contributor to are deliberately not mentioned in her little comment there. Rarely is a story so one-sided.

One thing that really pisses me off is this:

"I considered not sharing this out of respect for Rich's parents and sister, but after thinking on the incredibly vitriolic wall of text Rich's Mother sent to me this morning, saying upon many other things, that his blood is on my hands, I need to share it to regain some sense of control over what's taken place in the past 48 hours."

Someone is dead. Some vitriolic wall of text from the mother of a person who just died is normal. You need to share private information just to feel better? That is not justification AT ALL. What the hell did she do to push him to put a bullet into his own skull without saying goodbye to his childen? What WAS on that vitriolic wall of text that she is deliberately not mentioning?

What concerned me in that post was this bit:

> His other ex and I got to tell our children that their father died without saying goodbye to them, or that he loved them

Assuming the children aren't 14+, this is where a white lie is in their best interests. Telling them this, true as it may be, will only traumatise them further than they may already be.

I know it can be very hard though when you've had a traumatic relationship with your ex.

Source - based on all my research, and discussions with child psychologists, I tell my younger kids, when they need to hear it, that their Mom still loves them, she's just working through some stuff.

The reality is that her conduct indicates no love whatsoever, merely an interest in using our kids to further her narcissistic goals ("Winning" against me, even though it's not a contest, and garnering sympathy from her well meaning but somewhat naïve religious community).

And she definitely isn't working through any of her stuff. She's only allowed supervised access, and hasn't used it once in the nearly 4 years I've had sole custody - because she "did nothing wrong", and using it would imply she had.

But, my younger kids still need to hear that she loves them, from time to time. I admit that I dislike telling them she does, but it's not about me, it's about them.

I thought the implication was they’d have to tell the kids that he died. That he didn’t say goodbye is something they’ll immediately know themselves.

Yeah, fair, it's ambiguous wording, although the "without saying goodbye" segues into "or that he loved them" You still have the option of fabricating a comforting lie around the latter part.

It's actually all very sad. Lowtax wrote funny columns about Uwe Boll's movies, and Uwe charged him to a boxing match. Lowtax got his manhood taken from him and never was the same. The domestic violence can be seen as him moving down in weight class. After a few he actually got pretty good at it for his weight advantage. And then this happens.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com