‘I moved away from my kids - I can’t cope when I see them’

“My mothering journey is the opposite of what I imagined - I'm a mum but not a mum."

In the time they were living as a family, Tina worried that her daughter, Macy, was always being ignored by her father, Luke. *

“He never really cared about our daughter,” the mum tells Kidspot.

“Any attention he had to give was always for our son, *Andy.”

The 42-year-old never could have imagined, however, that as her daughter grew up, it would be her and not Luke who would become the distanced parent - in the most horrific of ways.

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Claims of family violence and financial abuse

When Tina took her children and fled the home they shared with Luke, she hoped it would be the start of a life free of the abuse she alleges she suffered for over a decade. But it was the beginning of a whole new nightmare.

“There was a lot of family violence,” she recalls painfully.

Tina, who worked full time during the majority of the marriage in a well-paid job, claims she was also financially abused.

“My wage was controlled by him, even when I earnt more than him. I didn’t have access to any money through an ATM. Every dollar I needed to spend, I had to ask for and he would only transfer exactly how much I spent on the day.

"He was also accruing thousands in debt in my name that I didn’t know about.

“It wasn’t something that happened overnight - he started off just offering to take care of the bills, then he gradually took more and more control while I was so busy with work and looking after our young kids.”    

This is a stock image and bears no resemblance to the people in this story. Image: iStock

When Tina was eventually forced to return to the family home to retrieve her beloved pet, her ordeal escalated.

“Luke wouldn’t give my son back to me,” she says.

“Andy was in tears and so overwhelmed, so I did the only thing I could and left so he could calm down."

Despite the family violence order being in place, Tina says her pleas to the authorities went unheard.   

A legal battle over the children began. Court orders gave both parents shared care, but Tina says that Luke repeatedly flouted them and withheld the children from her, using the excuse that they refused to see her.

“The whole time he would digitally stalk me and make threats, and turn up to school when it wasn’t his day to pick the kids up, and follow me home,” Tina says.

Tina's $200k fight for her kids

Determined not to give up on her children, the mum-of-two spent just over $200,000 to fight in the family court, as 100 percent care was eventually awarded to Luke.

“I pay more in child support now than I do rent,” Tina says, adding that she's a shell of her former self, and far from the doting mum she once was.

“I have seen my son once in three years and I only see my daughter for a few hours near her dad’s home once a month - and even then, she doesn’t talk much and it’s a struggle,” she reports through tears.

“I have one court-ordered phone call a week with them, and I’m always telling them how much I love them, but they won’t speak to me at any other time.”

Last year, Tina made the heart wrenching decision to move to an area further away from her children’s home as she "could not cope any longer" having them so close yet being so estranged.

“If I drove past my daughter’s school, I would look in the playground to see if I could see her and even if I didn’t, I would blow her a kiss anyway,” she says, her voice shaking.

“Every time I walked down the street seeing a group of teenagers walking to the shops, I would look to see if my son was one of them. It sounds so pathetic, but I just wanted to see him. Then I saw him in a shopping centre car park with his dad and couldn’t believe how tall he’d gotten but I couldn’t go up to him.

"Now that I’ve moved, I feel like I can breathe a little again.”

This year will mark five of her son’s birthdays that Tina says she's missed, and she fears there will be many more which will bring only more crushing disappointment and despair.

“I send presents, and each year I ask to see him but I never get to give him any,” she says through tears.

“I get told that he doesn’t want to see me. I fear that soon, I will completely lose the kids and have no relationship at all.

“My mothering journey is the opposite of what I imagined - I'm a mum but not a mum."

*All names, ages, and locations have been changed to protect identities.

Tina has been supported by the Eeny Meeny Miney Mo Foundation.

Originally published as ‘I moved away from my kids - I can’t cope when I see them’