My Husband Divorced Me, Taking Even CUSTODY — He Had No Idea What He Would Face and…

The Sound of Betrayal

His laugh echoed through that courtroom like a knife twisting in my chest. Brendan actually laughed right there in front of the judge, in front of everyone.

My husband of eight years threw his head back and laughed at me. His lawyer had just finished explaining why I was an unfit mother.

The judge had just granted him temporary full custody of our two children. And Brendan Holloway, the man I had given everything to, leaned over to me and whispered,

“that I would be lucky to see my kids twice a month with supervision,”

like I was some kind of criminal, like I was dangerous. The mother who had rocked those babies to sleep every single night, who had memorized every food allergy and every nightmare and every favorite bedtime story, that mother was now being treated like a threat.

And my husband laughed. I am Aelia Selenas. I was 34 years old when my entire world collapsed in a California courtroom.

A Life of Trust and Shadows

I was 34 years old, married for eight years, and mother to Marisol, who was seven, and Theo, who was almost six, with his birthday coming up in just two months.

Suddenly, I had nothing. No home, no children, no savings, nothing except the clothes I was wearing and a used Toyota that made sounds like it was auditioning for a horror movie soundtrack every time I turned the ignition.

“The car was not broken; it was just expressing itself,” my mechanic once told me. I could not afford a second opinion.

Let me tell you how I got there. And more importantly, let me tell you what happened next.

I met Brendan when I was 25. He was charming, ambitious, climbing fast at a tech company in San Diego. I was working as a medical billing specialist at a hospital.

It was good, steady work that I was proud of. My parents were immigrants who taught me that hard work and honesty were the only things you needed in America.

Keep your head down, do your job, treat people right, and everything will work out. I believed that; I really believed that.

Brendan swept me off my feet with fancy dinners and weekend trips. He told me I was beautiful, that I was the woman he had been searching for his whole life.

We got married when I was 26, and Marisol came along a year later. Theo followed two years after that. Life was good; life was exactly what I had dreamed it would be.

When the kids were little, Brendan suggested I reduce my hours at work.

“Just go part-time,” he said, “for the family. The kids need you home more. I can provide for us.”

Because I trusted him completely, because I thought we were building something together, I agreed. I went part-time, managed the household, raised our children, and supported his career while he climbed higher and higher.

What I did not know was that Brendan had been planning to leave me since before Theo was even born. He gave me an allowance like a teenager.

Every month, a set amount would appear in my personal account, and that was supposed to cover groceries, kids’ activities, my gas, everything. If I needed more, I had to ask; I had to explain.

I never questioned it because I trusted my husband. My parents had a traditional marriage where my father handled the money, and I thought that was just how things worked.

The Collapse of Everything

I was a fool, a complete and total fool. If I could go back and talk to that younger version of myself, I would shake her by the shoulders.

But hindsight is 2020, and foresight is apparently legally blind. The divorce papers arrived at my workplace.

Not at home where I might have had privacy, and not through the mail where I could have processed it alone. No, a process server walked into the hospital billing department and called out my name in front of everyone.

My co-workers watched as I was handed documents that destroyed my life. Brendan did that deliberately for maximum humiliation.

That should have told me everything I needed to know about who he really was. But it got worse, so much worse.

His lawyer painted me as mentally unstable, neglectful, overwhelmed, and incapable of caring for my own children. Every small moment of exhaustion that every mother experiences was twisted into evidence of incompetence.

That time Marisol fell off her bike while I was distracted with Theo, that time I forgot to sign a permission slip, that time I cried at a school event because I was going through a hard week—all of it was documented.

All of it was saved. Brendan had been building a case against me for 18 months while I was busy loving him and raising his children.

And he was not working alone. His mother, Constance Holloway, had been helping him the entire time.

That woman had smiled at me across holiday dinner tables while secretly documenting every mistake I made. She had offered to babysit so she could take notes on how the children behaved with me versus without me.

She had been photographing my messy kitchen, my unfolded laundry, and my tired face, building a file, building a weapon. Constance was the kind of woman who could find fault with a sunrise: too orange, too slow, not enough vitamin D.

But the betrayal that broke me the most did not come from Constance Holloway. It came from my own blood.

My sister Paloma testified against me. My baby sister who I had protected our entire childhood, my sister who I had loaned money to, who I had let cry on my shoulder through three bad breakups, who I had considered my best friend.

Paloma sat in that witness chair and told the court that I was always overwhelmed, that I was short-tempered with the kids, and that she worried about my mental state. She said those words while looking at the floor, refusing to meet my eyes, and I felt something inside me shatter.

I found out later that Paloma had been dating one of Brendan’s colleagues. She wanted to stay in their good graces and sold me out for a man and some dinner reservations at nice restaurants.

My lawyer was court-appointed because I could not afford anything else. Brendan’s lawyer wore a watch that probably cost more than my car.

Considering my car’s primary feature was sounding like it was being murdered every time I started it, that was not exactly a high bar. My lawyer was overworked, underprepared, and clearly outmatched.

She did her best, but her best was not enough. The temporary custody order gave Brendan everything.

The children would stay in the family home because it was the stable environment—the $600,000 oceanside house that I had helped pay for, that I had decorated and cleaned and filled with love. That house was now his.

I was ordered to find alternative housing and could petition for visitation rights once I was settled. I moved into a studio apartment so small that I had to go outside to change my mind.

The real estate listing probably called it cozy and efficient. Real estate agents could make a prison cell sound like a spa retreat.

It was one room, one window, and a bathroom where the shower was directly above the toilet because there was not enough space for them to be separate. This was my life now.

This was what eight years of marriage and devotion had earned me. But something happened during that terrible court hearing, something I almost missed because I was so destroyed by everything else happening around me.

A Tiny Seed of Suspicion

It was just a moment, a flicker. Brendan handed a folder to his lawyer, and the lawyer quickly slipped it into his briefcase with a glance around the room like he was checking to see if anyone noticed.

When the financial disclosure documents were presented, something about the numbers felt wrong. Brendan’s income was listed at $140,000 per year.

But I remembered conversations. I remembered him bragging about bonuses and stock options, and I remembered a lifestyle that did not match those numbers.

At the time, I was too broken to think clearly about it. But that seed was planted.

That tiny suspicion lodged itself in my brain and waited. The weeks after that court hearing were the darkest of my entire life.

Brendan used the custody arrangement like a weapon. Every single visitation became a battle.

I would drive 45 minutes to pick up the kids, and when I arrived, Brendan would meet me at the door with an apologetic shrug.

“Sorry,” he would say, “Marisol woke up with a stomach ache. Better if she stays home today.”

Or, “Theo has a playdate that just came up. Maybe next weekend.”

Next weekend. Always next weekend. And when next weekend came, there was always another excuse.

The few times I did get to see my children, something had changed in them. Marisol, my bright and chatty little girl, was quiet and distant.

She would answer my questions with one-word responses and spend most of our time together staring at her tablet. Theo was worse.

My baby boy would cry and cling to me, asking why Mommy left them, why Mommy did not want to live with them anymore.

“Who told you that, baby?” I would ask.

But I already knew the answer. Brendan was poisoning my children against me.

Every night in that house, he was filling their heads with lies. Mommy chose to leave. Mommy does not want you. Mommy is sick and cannot take care of you properly.

He was erasing me from their lives one bedtime story at a time. And Constance Holloway made sure everyone knew about it.

That woman treated social media like her personal victory parade. Every other day, there was a new post: photos of her with my children at the zoo, at the beach, at restaurants, with hashtags like Grandma of the Year, blessed, and family first.

She had moved into my house to help Brendan, which really meant she had moved in to finish erasing me. I wondered if she was also teaching my children that passive aggression was a love language.

She sent me a private message about a month after the court hearing, just a few sentences that I will never forget. She wrote that I was never good enough for her son, that everyone could see it except me, and that my children deserved better than a mother like me.

I stared at those words on my phone screen for an hour, reading them over and over, wondering if maybe she was right. Meanwhile, Paloma had fully joined the Holloway family.

She showed up in Constance’s social media posts, smiling in my kitchen and playing with my children in my backyard. She was given gifts, a new car, and her credit card debt was mysteriously paid off.

Our mother was caught in the middle, heartbroken, not understanding how her two daughters had ended up on opposite sides of a war. The financial situation was strangling me.

Brendan’s lawyer filed motion after motion to delay spousal support payments: temporary orders, continuances, and requests for additional documentation. Every legal trick in the book was used to keep money out of my hands while I drowned.

I was working double shifts at the hospital just to cover rent and food. I stopped eating breakfast and lunch to save money.

I kept telling myself it was intermittent fasting for my health, but really it was intermittent fasting because my wallet was on life support. I sold my grandmother’s gold bracelet, the one piece of jewelry that meant anything to me, just to make rent one month.