‘I'm Getting Divorced And I Left My Children Because Of It' – Mom Struggles With Walking Out On Her Marriage As Her 4-Year-Old Daughter Watched
You have to put your own needs aside and look out for your children.
MNStudio / bbernard / Shutterstock Deciding to walk away from a marriage is one of the most difficult choices you can make, especially when there are children involved. One distraught mother took to her TikTok account to share the traumatic story of the night she walked away from her marriage and left her four-year-old daughter behind.
She described why she decided to leave her marriage — and kids — behind.
The grieving mother named Katherine Ann started her video by saying, “So, I’m getting divorced and left my children because of it. And this is not something I ever, ever thought I would do.”
It all started five or six weeks prior when she and her soon-to-be ex-husband got into a volatile exchange late at night. She got into an argument with her spouse and said it left her feeling unsafe in her own home. “So, I removed myself from the situation and I left,” she said. The confrontation took place at 11:00 pm, long after her small children had gone to sleep — or so she thought.
Her eldest child, a four-year-old girl kept getting out of the bed, likely due to the disturbance that her parents caused. The last time she came out of her room, it was just in time to see her mother leaving the residence. Unable to hold back tears or finish her sentence, Katherine Ann said, “She witnessed me leaving her and…”
The sorrowful mom explained that her intention was to leave her husband, but not her children.
Nevertheless, she did walk out on them as well, and her daughter was wide awake and saw her mother walk away. She stood at the top of the staircase and watched her mom take off as her father yelled.
“Just seeing her be [a] witness to that breaks my heart every day,” the mom cried.
She left the home she shared with her husband and children in Tennessee and went to stay at a friend’s house in Florida, where she grew up, until things calmed down. Katherine Ann also explained that her friend was the only person she had to lean on when she needed support, so her options were limited as to where she could crash.
But viewers did not have much sympathy for her. They made comments like, “There’s nothing in this world that would’ve made me leave my children,” and “If you didn’t feel safe, why would you leave the kids with him? I could never!” Others urged her to return to her home to pick up her children as soon as possible.
The general consensus was that Katherine Ann’s first priority should've been protecting her kids, especially if she truly believed the home environment was unsafe.
Katherine Ann took accountability for abandoning her children in the process of trying to escape her husband.
In a follow-up video, she explained that he would no longer talk to her. When she reached out via text, he would simply ignore her or answer her questions with his own inquiries — not surprising being that his perspective likely differs greatly from hers.
“I’m so over the drama and I just want to see my kids,” she complained.
She is looking to establish a parenting plan with their father, but according to her, he is refusing to cooperate. Still, she filed for divorce, expecting him to be served quickly but her attorney’s office has experienced some delays in processing the paperwork. Desperate to see her kids, Katherine Ann was considering popping up at home but believes legal processes should be in motion first.
Eventually, he was served and she was livid because he ended up asking for full custody and wanted to limit her visits with the children to once a month. People pointed out that her desire to have 50/50 custody from a different state while exchanging them monthly was “insane” and “chaotic.” She became very emotional trying to understand why he didn’t trust her with the children and why he would request something she viewed as unfair, but seemed to overlook the fact that the arrangement she wanted would be impossible to maintain once school started.
When divorces happen, the children usually get the short end of the stick.
With emotions running wild, both parents in a child custody dispute tend to not be able to “see the forest for the trees.” They let their anger and frustration render them unable to do what’s best for the kids and instead go to war for their own interests, no matter how damaging they are.
But people in the comments judging Katherine Ann should know that when a relationship becomes scary and unbearable, many wives believe that their spouse would have no qualms about hurting them but would never harm their own children. That might easily have been her reasoning when she chose to walk away, flawed or not.
Now that there is distance between the feuding spouses, it’s time for both parties to put their differences aside and work to give their children the best upbringing possible. That includes Katherine Ann moving back to Tennessee near her kids, and then seeking shared custody. The children would benefit from counseling due to the dysfunction they’ve witnessed and to address any abandonment issues, and they should never see their parents acting anything but amicable toward one another in the future.
NyRee Ausler is a writer from Seattle, Washington. She covers lifestyle, relationship, and human-interest stories that readers can relate to and that bring social issues to the forefront for discussion.