~ A mother’s perspective.
“He was never very good with ordinary women.
Too intense, too dazzling. Women like that – girls, really, don’t know what to do with men who shine too brightly. They want safety, not blaze. Stability, not confrontation. And he…he was never built for mediocrity. I saw it in him early. The way he walked into rooms like they owed him an explanation. The way he stood just a little apart from the others, as though already aware he would be the one blamed when things fell apart.
I taught him to be brave. That was my gift. To endure.
But no one sees that now. They only see her.
Contrast the ex-wife. With the large eyes and the story that keeps growing teeth. She weeps, so they believe her. She stammers, and it becomes diagnosis. PTSD, abuse, safeguarding risks – the language of institutional pity. She knows the system. She knows how to frame the narrative: the bright man who lost control. The woman who survived him. It’s always easier to believe a woman who cries than a man who roars. Even if the roar was just heartbreak echoing through the wrong halls.
As a barrister, I know better. As a mother… well. That’s more complicated.
There’s a conflict of interest, isn’t there? That’s the phrase. What happens when the professional and the personal are housed in the same bone? I see patterns where others see emotions. I map risk like a courtroom argument. I diagnose what I cannot comfort.
Sometimes I don’t know if I’m helping him or writing closing statements in my head.
Sometimes I wonder if I love him more as a principle than as a person.
I tried to offer structure. I said: keep records. Document everything. Don’t react. I told him the only way to win was to appear completely rational, while bleeding to death. He didn’t appreciate that advice. Too emotional, too defensive, too like me, perhaps.
I noticed he stopped asking for my opinion after a while.
Then he stopped offering his.
When he called me cold, it struck deeper than it should have. I wanted to tell him that detachment was the only thing that kept me alive at his age. I wanted to tell him that watching your child go through something that mirrors your own pain is a kind of slow crucifixion, but I didn’t have the words. So I said nothing.
Or worse: I said the wrong thing.
I may have hinted, gently, that some of this was predictable. That he had a pattern of choosing complexity. I might have asked if he considered the effect of his affair on the children. That was a mistake. Not because it wasn’t true. But because he needed me to be unequivocally on his side, and I was still in court mode, weighing evidence on both hands.
They say unresolved trauma fragments the ego.
They say grief denied becomes aggression.
They say mothers pass down their ghosts like heirlooms.
I did not mean to become a haunted house for him. But I did.
I tried to support him, in my own way. I wanted to be in his corner. He refused. Said he didn’t trust that I wouldn’t “see both sides.” That word again: sides. As though truth could be halved like a custody agreement, can’t it?
But I’m also a grandmother.
He said I had failed to protect him. That I had chosen justice when he needed allegiance.
He forgets I was trained for war, not rescue.
Now I sit in the back row of this mess, watching the boy I raised become the man I can’t reach.
And I don’t know if I’m a bystander or a witness for the prosecution.
Either way, the verdict is already written across his silence.”
Reade Saunders 
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