The rage — and what I do with it
Yeah, I’m angry. I’m really fucking angry.
I’m angry that my ex gets to lie in court documents and somehow I’m the one who has to prove she’s lying. I’m angry that my 8-year-old daughter won’t look at me during exchanges. I’m angry that my son told me last week that “mommy says you don’t really love us.” I’m angry that I’ve spent $18,000 on lawyers and we’re not even close to done.
And I’m angry at myself for being angry because everyone keeps telling me to “stay calm” and “don’t let the kids see your frustration” and “document everything objectively.”
But here’s the thing — the anger is real. It’s valid. My kids are being hurt and I’m being systematically shut out of their lives. Of course I’m angry. Anyone would be.
The question is what I do with it.
I started going to the gym at 5 AM before work. I hit the heavy bag until my hands hurt. I run these punishing loops around my neighborhood — three miles, five miles, whatever it takes to burn it out of my system.
I write it all down too. Not just the court diary my lawyer wants — that stays factual. I mean the OTHER writing. The pages where I can call my ex every name in the book and describe exactly what I think of a family court system that lets this happen. I write until my hand cramps. Then I lock it in a drawer.
Because my kids don’t need to inherit my rage. They’re dealing with enough. When I see them Saturday, I need to be their dad, not some bitter guy ranting about their mother.
The anger isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But I can control what I do with it. Some days that’s all the victory I get.
Anyone else dealing with this? How do you channel it?
Same here man. 5 AM gym sessions saved my sanity too — nothing like deadlifts to burn off that courthouse fury.
Christ, this takes me back. Five years ago I was you — absolutely burning with fury and having everyone tell me to just breathe through it. Like breathing was going to magically fix the fact that my boys were being fed poison about their dad every single day.
I did the gym thing too. 6 AM starts, weights until I could barely lift my arms. The boxing bag saved my sanity more than any therapist ever did, if I’m honest. And the writing — God yes, the writing. I filled notebook after notebook with absolute vitriol about their mum and the whole broken system. Never showed those pages to a soul but they kept me from exploding in front of the kids or saying something stupid in court.
Here’s what I learned that I wish someone had told me then: that rage you’re carrying? It’s not just anger. It’s grief. You’re mourning the relationship you had with your kids, mourning the future you thought you’d all have together. The fury is just grief wearing a different coat. Took me ages to figure that out. The physical stuff definitely helps — I still run, still lift. But once I started seeing it as grief instead of just anger, it got a bit easier to carry. Not gone, never gone. But manageable.
Your kids will remember that you kept showing up, even when it hurt like hell. That’s what mine tell me now.
Man, this hits home so hard. I’m dealing with the exact same rage right now — just switched to my second lawyer last month and I swear some days I feel like I’m going to explode from the sheer injustice of it all. My ex filed these completely fabricated allegations about me being “volatile” and now I’m sitting here documenting every single interaction like I’m building a case file for the FBI.
The gym thing — yes. I actually joined this 24-hour place in Columbus specifically so I could go when I couldn’t sleep, which is most nights now. There’s something about deadlifts at 2 AM that just… I don’t know, gives me somewhere to put all that energy. I’ve been tracking everything in this app called OurFamilyWizard that my lawyer recommended, and sometimes after I upload another screenshot of my ex refusing to answer basic questions about our kids’ schedules, I’ll just go lift until I can’t anymore.
I started doing the writing thing too after reading about it somewhere on here. I’ve got this composition notebook where I just let it all out — all the things I want to say to the judge about how she’s weaponizing our 6 and 9-year-old, all my thoughts about a system that seems designed to reward the parent willing to lie the most creatively. Then I close it and go back to my “official” documentation where every entry sounds like a robot wrote it. “At 3:47 PM, respondent failed to return children as specified in temporary order.” Meanwhile what I really want to write is “She’s 45 minutes late AGAIN and won’t answer her phone because she knows it drives me insane.”
You’re right though — the kids can’t see this version of us. They’re already living through enough chaos.