I received this extraordinary personal testimony from a female reader in New Jersey:
“Too bad the author [of The Hours] didn’t have access to my mother’s ‘plight.’ Depressed, bored, she left my father, who, on that day, was dressed in a hospital gown, sitting at the kitchen table, bandage on his shaved head, recovering from BRAIN SURGERY. Motive: to find herself – her words. She loaded the bedroom dresser, assisted by her boyfriend, into the moving van. (That’s why dad had to wait at the table before he could crawl into bed having just arrived from the hospital.)
“We children, ages, 22, 16 and 12, and our 80 year old grandmother, nursed him back to health for the next year. She felt no remorse. She felt justified in her search to be happy as properly dictated by feminist doctrine.
“The feminist equation seems to be: whatever suffering, inconvenience, mental illness, and abandonment my family members must suffer is WORTH the price of my finding happiness. That’s it in a nutshell. ‘Cold-hearted bitch’ is exactly right. Also try ‘devoid of conscience.’ ‘Shatter the lives of a bunch of innocent children – no problem; the feminists will applaud my courage.’
“My mother also told me, (post divorce), that Dad, suffering from severe headaches, from the undiagnosed brain tumor, ‘hadn’t wanted to go out dancing anymore, so what was (she) to do.’
“She found someone else, since Dad was tired in the evenings and in pain. Dad went from country-western dancing partner to not-so-fun, work-all-day, tired-at-night provider in 6 months.
“His tumor was the size of a baseball at the base of his brain. His post-surgical eyesight created 32 images, then down to 16, then stabilized at 8. Violent hiccoughs racked his body about every 60 seconds. She knew that while Dad was in intensive care (she visited him twice, during a 2 week stay), I was in the ER having a miscarriage. Nothing was going to prevent her escape to freedom.
“What boggles the mind is that NONE of these details deterred her from her self-righteous path. In her mind: She couldn’t help falling in love with someone else. She said this was a ‘friendly’ divorce. This was just between her and my father. No one else should be hurt by this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah! Straight out of the pages of the feminist manifesto. She was absolutely delusional.”
“The truth is far more wicked than fantasy.”