Your feelings are very normal. There are times when I am angry at my husband for his "not so bright" judgment that lead us to where we are today. When I feel the anger creeping in, I remind myself that we all make mistakes...some bigger than others. The anger fades, but it is very normal to feel the way you do.

Hindsight is always 20/20. Anger rises up, thinking "if I did this, not that, none of this would have happened." However, we can't change the past, and getting angry over something we can't control does us no good.
It's good for you to open up about this, it helps you to release the anger in a safe environment.

Nicole,

Your life and your family is absolutely not ruined by all this.

You are allowing your imagination to take control of your mind.

We spoke before and I told you how bitter I was for years after my false conviction. I wanted answers as to why this happened, but there are no answers to be had. Sometimes things are just as they are and cannot be explained.

It is kind of a stretch to blame an innocent man for his conviction. The blame lies with the DA and all the witnesses---especially the mother and girl.

I sincerely hope that you NEVER tell your husband that you partly blame him for his conviction. If you ever tell him anything like that, he will be very, very hurt and lash out at you with anger----and I would not blame him.

All of these conviction were only allowed to happen because several factors converged at some point. If at any point, the chain would have been broken, it could have been avoided.

So you partly blame your husband for being kind to his ex-wife and allowing her to see her kids. You gave a couple of reasons why you partially blame him.

You mentioned that when she found out you and your husband were getting married, then she came up with the false charges. Maybe you ought to go back farther and blame your husband for falling in love with you and wanting to be married to you. After all, if there had been no marriage plans, he would not have been accused.

So are you partially to blame because you fell in love with him or is he to blame because he fell in love with you. Which is it? Assuming the pending marriage was the cause of the false accusations, if you had never met him, the conviction would have never happened.

What I am saying, Nicole, is if you trace the chain of events that caused this mess, there are probably five or six incidents that caused this. If any one of those had not have happened, your husband would have never been convicted.

If he had never married his first wife to begin with, if he had never been nice to her, if he had never met you, if he had not wanted to get married, if the DA had been more fair, if his attorney had done a better job. If, if , if , if..............

Nicole, you are chasing ghosts in an attempt to make some sense out of this thing. Know why? You will never make any sense out of the conviction.

You are playing and replaying the entire investigation over and over in your mind to try to find a blame or understanding. Let it go, Nicole.

Playing the "blame game" will only lead to more heartache and misplaced feeling. This lady and the state will take away several years of you and your husband's life----don't allow them to take any more than that by "overthinking" the situation.

The first week out of prison, my mom told me that she blamed me for the conviction because it was my wife's daughters that were instrumental in getting me convicted. She said I should have never married her in the first place.

I was CRUSHED when she told me that.

There is enough blame to go around in each of these cases. Who do you begin blaming......and when does it stop?

To preserve your mental health, you just have to look at it as "life just is not fair," or "it is just one of those things that happened."

Don't do what I did and scrutinize every little thing that went wrong. It made me an emotional wreck and wasted several years of my life.

Nicole, I am not criticizing you or anything. I am only trying to make you see how foolish it is to replay these incidents in your mind day after day.

Keep your chin up,

rewdiazepam

Yes, anger is normal. I have been angry, sad, played the "what if" game. Like ThoughtAsWeak said, you can't change the past. This site is a godsend.

It might be easier to find fault in .your husband, but honestly, I think he was the kind and trusting person you fell in love with, He thought he did the right thing by letting her see the kids, because he has a good head on his shoulders. Did he know it would end up turning against him…probably not. We do the things we think are right. He is the good person in all this, giving his ex the benefit of the doubt. If he wasn't like that you may have never fallen in love with him. You can't fault people for trying to do the right thing. Stick by him as he seems like a really good guy

Oh wow! I know how you feel. My in-laws are the ones who instigated my step-daughter's false accusation against her dad. yes, sometimes i'm angry at him. I wish he'd have either never let her live with them, or just let them keep her.
That, and I wish he would have listened to me, when he went to talk to the police. As people often do, he tried to cooperate with the police, and tried to explain things, and when asked if he could have "accidentally bumped a breast while pillow fighting with the family" he said he guessed it was possible.
*head smack*
I know that I can't really put myself in his place because we're 2 different people and unlike me, he tries to comply with authority. I look at them as public SERVANTS so I while I'm not generally rude to them, I don't go out of my way to abide by their "authority" unless I see it as reasonable.