I'll try and keep this from turning into an epic rant, although that is what I feel like doing. I split from my children's father around 7 years ago, when my daughter was 6 months old. She is 7 and we also have a 9 year old son. Contact for almost all of the time since then has been sporadic, only when he felt like seeing them and even then it often seemed like a chore for him. There has been little in the way of financial support from him, and I've not had a penny from him for at least a year.
A couple of years ago he met a woman and they have subsequently had a child together. During the early days of their relationship we seemed to be building a better relationship, he saw the children and we occasionally all spent time together. I liked the woman and built up what I would class as a friendship with her. Her children from a previous relationship are the same age as my two and attend the same primary school, although in different classes.
Long story short, the friendship we all formed broke down quite quickly, he reverted back to his old ways and contact became less and less, he always had excuses for why he couldn't see his children or needed me to pick them up early. This has now led to him not seeing them properly for around 9 months. There were no Christmas or birthday presents, despite me contacting him and asking if he wanted to see them, first over Christmas and then again around 3 months ago.
This has been extremely difficult for both of my children but especially my daughter. They have to see him at school picking up his partners children! It's heartbreaking to hear my daughter ask over and over again when she'll see her Dad, and I simply don't know what to tell her. I did contact his partner (I didn't have his contact details as he had a new number) to tell her that I thought it was inappropriate for him to be at the school and even confronted him about it face to face on one occasion but all he had to say was that I needed to call him. I then found out that before I had got there he had spoken to both of my children and told them to tell me to call him. This is clearly his way of making my children think that I'm the bad guy who's stopping him from seeing them, which is completely untrue.
My Mum recently offered to contact him to try to arrange contact between them with her as a mediator of sorts, taking the children to a park for example and letting him spend an hour with them. The phone number his partner provided me with continually goes straight to voicemail and texts have been unanswered. I don't know where they live as they've recently moved. This has been over the past couple of days.
Today my son had a father's day performance at school along with the rest of the year group. At my son's request, my two brothers came along to the performance this afternoon and he was brilliant, he shared a memory about his uncle in front of everybody and looked happy and confident. I happened to turn around during the performance and his dad was there at the back of the hall with his partner. I had a feeling he'd show up, but obviously hoped he wouldn't. When his partner's daughter stood up to share her poem, I was stunned to hear her say 'my superhero is my step-dad', she then went on to say why he is her hero. Even my son's teacher looked shocked and turned to look at me almost apologetically. I just couldn't believe that I (and my son!!) were listening to this girl talk about how fantastic her step dad is when he has basically abandoned his own biological children. Am I unreasonable in thinking that somebody at some point during the planning of this performance should have realised that this was insensitive and could cause serious upset to my child?! The school are aware of the situation. She would have mentioned it to her Mum beforehand. Why was she allowed to do this?! Just to add, his partners children do have a relationship with their own Dad, he sees them every other weekend, so it isn't like she had no-one else to speak about. I'm so, so angry about the entire situation, and this today was the icing on top of a massive pile of shit. I'm seriously considering taking my children out of the school and moving away, I want to get as far away from him as possible.
What I'm asking is, am I overreacting to this father's day performance thing? I feel like speaking to the school about it, I just think that it shouldn't have been allowed to happen.