I’m 7 months pregnant and have three daughters. My husband left us and is telling everyone I was abusive. We fought a lot and he did a lot of gaslighting and treated me pretty badly, but I wouldn’t say he was abusive and I wasn’t either. I cried a lot, yelled sometimes, but wasn’t abusive. I found all these phone calls and a friend saw him with someone else that has been talking to for hours a day so I’m trying to wrap my mind around this pregnancy, getting my girls through a divorce, him cheating and leaving with no warning, and now telling everyone I was abusive. I don’t even know what to do. It’s so stressful and it’s such a huge allegation.. the only thing he can reference is this text chain where I blew up on him but obviously it doesn’t show the context or the verbal argument leading up to it or him telling me I’m acting like a baby while I was crying, etc. I don’t know how I’m supposed to coparent with someone who’s spreading this stuff about me. I’ve tried to be civil and friendly and I genuinely just want to let go and work through our next steps as a separated couple raising a new baby but I feel he wants to drag my name through the mud and fight and vilify me to gain sympathy and garner support and resources. One of his friends reached out to me because they said what he said didn’t seem consistent with what happened. He’s telling all these mischaracterizations about me isolating him from friends when there was only one friend that I didn’t feel comfortable with because she didn’t respect or have any boundaries- otherwise I bent over backwards to reach out to his friends and try to plan trips for him with them and tried to invite them for dinner (even the one friend I tried and tried and tried to reach out to and communicate with). I did the same with his parents until they crazy enabled him when I caught him lying about a bunch of stuff, and told him we needed space from them because he has a very toxic relationship with his mom and she encourages him to run away from his problems which has caused him to to be very irresponsible and unable to handle adversity. He also said she was abusive when he was a teen/kid because she screamed at him all the time and he had thoughts of suicide. He’s now blowing everything out of proportion and saying that I wouldn’t allow him to talk to anyone and isn’t mentioning the part where he himself was fed up with their lack of effort or cut contact with certain exes he lied about because I wanted to break up over it and he said over and over that they weren’t worth breaking up over- he didn’t respect my boundaries and lied to me and is now acting I forced him when he insisted and begged in order to keep the relationship. He’s telling his family blatant lies and quarter truths about things that have happened and I can’t sink my teeth into why he would do this to me after everything we’ve been through. He’s hurt me so much and broken so many promises and now he’s playing the victim because I had moments where I lashed out and yelled at him or cried and told him he was an asshole and made my life so hard because every time I tried to open up to him about how I felt he gaslighted me and was so dismissive and gave me the silent treatment. I’m just at such a loss and so sad. I stood by his side through friends who hurt him and excluded him, unemployment, two new jobs, school, him treating me like garbage and being mean to me when he was stressed, losing a baby halfway through a pregnancy last year, countless lies and hidden relationships... I just don’t know how he can convince himself that I was abusive because I had the audacity to show sadness or anger or frustration. I have said things I shouldn’t have said. But so has he, and I’ve endured so much and been hurt so much by him. I just don’t know what to do or how to move forward without anxiety that he’s going to continue this narrative and convince himself our relationship was something it wasn’t so it’s easier to move on and excuse giving up, ultimately hurting our son and making him think he’s a product of abuse. I have endured a lot of abuse in my life and my husband has never had anything bad happen to him outside of us losing a baby, his mom yelling at him, and a grandfather he never knew dying, so it’s hard to hear him accuse me of being abusive when I really don’t think he understands what abuse is or how abusive some of his own characteristics, responses, and manipulation tactics were.