Honey

Honey Robins (née Hedrick) and I were married 15 years when she ran off with our son (then seven months) in March 2018 to live with her parents in West Virginia, where she grew up. I have yet to learn why – and after she had the legal advantage of having had David there six months, she filed for divorce in November 2018 and stopped speaking to me; she has continued the silent treatment until the present day, despite attempts to get her to go to counseling, speak with Christians we know, or in any way be reasonable, turn from this great evil, or let me see my son. It eventually took a court order in 2020 to get even ridiculously limited time with him.

She professed to be a Christian (maybe still does?). I believe her grandfather, David G. Pollock, certainly was; and if he were alive today, he would at least help us communicate. Her parents inherited his and her grandmother’s house, which is very close to the chapel in Otsego. When I could see David in 2018 (before she filed), she would bring David to the second service, and I could spend time with him in the playroom, which had a speaker to hear the message (sermon). Like Job, I looked for a mediator; but there was none to be found – plenty of friends offered, but she would not speak to them.

We met after I moved to Memphis, TN in 2002, for my second job after graduating from the University of Waterloo (BMath, Computer Science), working for Hilton, which had corporate offices near Audobon Park. I drove down to see someone who turned out to be a mutual friend, Frank Burgess, in Marble Hill, MO, and he introduced me to Honey and shortly after I went to visit her, meeting up at the “Tamarack” art/souvenir grounds. We were engaged at Natchez Trace Park in Tennessee and married in 2003. We lived in several states since then – Massachusetts briefly, Washington – where I worked for Microsoft and she started taking courses towards her Bachelor’s, Florida, and (in part to be closer to her parents) Indiana, where we were living when she ran off.

It has been a horrible time. All I have sought from the start is to restore our family, but she has no interest in that at all. It doesn’t look good that she decided (based on a letter she wrote, to no-one in particular, dated 2014 that I only found recently) to have a child while considering divorce: to pre-meditate to put a child through that is extremely cruel, and that having a child can lead to more financial takings for her makes it worse. She very much doesn’t want to work; I had suggested I stay home with David for a while and she have a chance to develop her career after finally obtaining her Bachelor’s; perhaps that drove her to it. A psychologist has also suggested that Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) or a related PD (like Dependent Personality Disorder) are likely, especially given she has been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). So many questions; so few answers.

If you pray, pray for a pathway to reconciliation and restoring our family. Hope is slim; she seems to really want this destruction, no turning back, but God can do what is impossible for us (Luke 18:27). I take hope from books like I Do Again (Cheryl and Jeff Scruggs, 2008) where even after divorce a couple returned to God and to each other.