How can I see the sons my abusive ex turned against me?

There was also enough light, Mma Ramotswe reflected, to see that the world was not always a place of pain and loss, but a place where our simple human affairs — those matters that for all their pettiness still sometimes confounded us — were not insoluble, were not without the possibility of resolution FROM THE HANDSOME MAN’S DE LUXE CAFÉ BY ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH (SCOTTISH NOVELIST AND POET, B 1948)

I was abused physically by my wife. In the 1980s, we had a six-year relationship but I left her for the third time because of it. Two years later we met by accident and got together again. When family and friends protested I told them she’d changed.

Married, she reverted... nevertheless we had two children. The pattern continued (including embarrassing scenes in front of family) until I decided I didn’t want the boys growing up in that aggressive environment.

I quickly sorted legal access to the boys every other weekend. This continued for 12 years, apart from times when she refused. Often when collecting or returning the boys she would be abusive towards me in front of them.

My older son told me he’d like to go to a boarding school close to me. Within a month of him starting I received a phone call from my other son saying his mother had been hitting him. I collected him from school that afternoon, informed my solicitor and we arranged immediate schooling, telling the court why.

I didn’t hear from my ex for over six months. This was acceptable to the court. Both boys told me of abuse from their mother and her new husband.

For four years the boys lived with me when not at boarding school. We had holidays together ? a happy time. I was self-employed which allowed me to earn a healthy salary and be available for school events. But unfortunately this was over the financial crisis period of 2008 — and by 2010 I had a mental breakdown.

Now 15 and 17, they decided they could cope with their mother, so returned to her. Initially they came to stay with me on occasions, but after about two or three years their visits stopped. They turned against me.

I worried about this daily but a stroke made me concentrate on my health. Now my attitude is: what will be, will be. I’m in my early 70s, still working and living in a beautiful place. My door is for ever open to the boys but I don’t know how to break down the barriers. They are both successfu. Most nights I dream of them but in those dreams they are still children and not the men they have become.

My older son married last July but I only learned that through the internet. I wonder about the decisions I’ve made. I still think I had to leave my wife and do right by the boys and know that it’s now pointless to fret. But how I long for a relationship with my adult sons.

SIMON I

’VE chosen to publish your letter, even though you don’t end with any specific question or request for help, because it’s important people understand that men can be victims of female bullying and specific violence too.

What’s more, your last sentence— so full of wistful longing — is a reminder that fathers who lose contact with their children often live with a profound sense of loss.

The latest statistics show that one in three victims of domestic abuse are male, and it is often the case that male victims find their situation acutely embarrassing, and therefore stay quiet about it. Yet in your case family and friends suspected (or knew) what was going on. You’ll understand why readers probably wonder why you married and had two sons, when your first six-year relationship in the 1980s proved what sort of person your wife was, so much so that you left her three times.

It suggests to me either that you believed you could change her, or that you were easily dominated by her much stronger personality. I suspect it’s the latter case — yet when the welfare of your sons was at stake you acted decisively and did everything in your power to give them a stable home and a good education. Fate intervened, in the shape of your mental breakdown.

It surprises me that your exwife should have had the power so comprehensively to turn your sons against you (when you say she’d been abusive to them), so I must ask what you actually did when their visits stopped.

Did you try to see them? Did you write to them? Go and knock on the door?

To live your life according to a philosophy of ‘what will be, will be’ is all very well, but is it useful?

You seem to show a pattern of being passive as far as your own welfare is concerned, even though you were proactive concerning the boys. You re-started your relationship with your exwife by accident, and it almost seems as though you allowed her to call the shots after your breakdown.

The crucial question is whether you tried to find out why your sons ‘turned against’ you. Is any of this your own fault?

I’m leaving you with that thought — and the suggestion that it is never too late to mend relationships.

You can live a life of acceptance - or rebel, just as you did all those years ago.

The first step towards ‘breaking down barriers’ has to be a belief that a relationship with your sons is an absolute priority. Surely, ‘what will be, will be’ isn’t good enough?