Should I stay or should I go?

Should I stay, or should I go? 

A response to an article and the following discussion

So I came across this article  on the NaNoWriMo facebook group which was followed up by a heated discussion.

If you'v read it, you probably have your stance on it.

If you haven't the outline is as follows:

A woman, an active writer in her day, meets her husband and her passion fell by the wayside. She had kids, and a supposedly happy family. Then her mother passed away, and to cope, she wrote letters to her as if she were still alive. This method of grieving sparked her writing bug to return with a fervor.

Her marriage and family life, as a consequence, fell by the wayside this time - she reports that her husband was used to going to bed at night without her and she was often ill-tempered and depressed when she wasn't writing; certainly not the right temperament to be raising two small children.

Torn between pursing her dream of writing and neglecting her duties at home she eventually decided her family was better off without her and left.

Her kids were understandably upset, and many went to calling her a Runaway Mother.

She abandons her family - self titled was the declaration, all in pursuit of her dream and her chance to be published.

In the thread, most agree that the mother was selfish for leaving. Kids are a lifetime commitment. Her parents must have sacrificed their dreams for her, she should do the same, etc.

And I agree.

Many parents have sacrificed a great deal for their children. Many have the capacity to love so much that they would do anything for their family. She admits that her mother would've been upset at what she had decided to do, but she knew either borne out of selfishness or because she knew she lacked that "nurturing, motherly gene" that she wouldn't change and eventually her husband and children would resent her, she left.

Some argue that she should've taken her children with, her dream could certainly balanced with taking care of her children, shouldn't it?

Yes, I understand that children need their mother.

But they also need stability.

When she left her family, she went towards an uncertain future - working full time, writing full time; there would be no time for her children there with her and I highly doubt she had the financial resources to provide for them - her now ex-husband was definitely the breadwinner.

The argument though that the "Children need their mother" angered me.

Children need their father too.

If he had left, certainly this discussion would've been different.

The fact that people say she should've just stayed married and with her kids, says a lot to me. This woman was clearly miserable - perhaps it was the weight of choosing to be a wife and a mother first and abandoning herself, and then the added load of having her own mother pass, but staying married just to prevent her kids being from a "broken home"?

There was another article in which she describes being a monster to her kids.

She decided that her kids being around her, in the state she was in, was no good.

A broken home, as some have said, is better in situations when mother and father either can no longer co-exist or one's presence has a detrimental effect on the family. And to my understanding, that seemed to be the case with hers.

Besides stating that she'd been a monster to her children, five weeks after the divorce, her husband had a new girlfriend.

It may have been because her obsession with writing had eclipsed everything else, and so for the husband to move so soon afterwards isn't surprising - he may have been finding a way to move on long before the divorce was even a thing to be dealt with, I don't know, and neither does anyone else, but there it is.

In my comment on the thread, I said that I thought the woman did something a lot of people never do - she followed her dreams.

Yes, she did hurt people, her kids and herself - she regretted the decision to some degree, she missed her children, she missed seeing them every day and having them in her life. But she saw them when she could, she visited them as often as she was allowed, and in the end, she was happier, she felt whole.

Personal happiness, one would argue, is selfish especially when weighed against the lives of your children.

But for anyone who was raised by a parent suffering from depression, this is a big deal.

If you've ever been sad, constantly down on yourself, filled with self-loathing and short tempered to practically everything in your life, you're like a bomb waiting to go off.

Personally I think it was the right decision for her to leave.

Sure there were other ways to deal with this situation of hers, but the article reads as if she was handling this all on her own either due to fear of having no one understand her and judging her (which is happening right now) or because she never found anyone to confide in and trust with the heavy burden of whatever personal struggle she was going through.

And despite the internet's best efforts, and thousands of people feeling similarly and sharing such thoughts in some way, an outsider and indeed another person suffering through the same torment, wouldn't feel the exact same pain - pain, and handling pain is different for everyone.

If I ever have kids, personally, I don't think I would ever leave them.

Sure, it sounds like I support her move. But that's because it seems to have worked. Her husband is happy, her kids are happy, and she's happy, something they might not have been before she "abandoned" them.

By the way, the title of the article? Really sensationalist.

If she had abandoned them she wouldn't have stayed in contact, she wouldn't have made arrangements to spend time with her kids, and I think the negative connotations with that word have spurred most, if not all, the heated responses towards the article.

Again, if the husband had left and had "abandoned" his kids, the discussion would've been different.

One thing I value most when people share such intimate stories is that those reading it aren't doing it to judge the person's choices, they're reading it to get a new perspective and take away something from the story that made an impression on them (good or bad).

Unfortunately what I got was the opposite.

But what can you do, really?

Anything and everything you say can and will be judged, but I wish people would drop the pretense of "not judging but...", it's both irritating and hypocritical. Yes, if it struck a cord with you, I understand your need to state your opinion and what you would do in the same situation, but persecuting someone for the choices they've made in theirs?

You don't live their life. You don't know their struggle. You can read about it all you want, but you'll never be able to feel what it is they've felt or know exactly what pushed them to make the choices they've made.

The story ends on a seemingly happy note, so why do you have to bring someone down when it's apparent that the choice, though unpopular, was the right one?

As I said on Facebook:

Isn't it so easy to say you don't judge, but when the topic is controversial, suddenly you know everything about what's going on in a person's head?

What you would do in the same situation is irrelevant, if someone is sharing something sensitive, it isn't your place to judge their choices.

For the discussion on the NaNoWriMo group regarding this article CTRL+F and type, "Why I abandoned my young family".