Hi all
I need to vent and get some views on this please I’ll try and keep it short as there is so much to this story.
My DD has just turned 1 and is due to start overnights with her father next week which we have been building up to for a while now.
Me and her father haven’t had the easiest relationship, I find him incredibly unreasonable and hard to deal with. Hes always up and down emotionally and I seem to be the person who gets the brunt of his frustration. I’ve had battles with him since the beginning of finding out I was pregnant as it wasn’t planned, he had a go at me for not being on a pill which he knew about anyway and took no responsibility for it either. We split whilst I was pregnant because he was too up and down. He got a new girlfriend when I was four months pregnant but still always asked to take me on dates and every time I declined I’d get messages of abuse, he’d put words in my mouth and says things like ‘I can’t believe you don’t want me to be a dad to our daughter’ when we argued even though I never ever said anything of the sort. When she was 6 weeks old he sent me message after message demanding to take her for the whole day even though she was EBF, he said I breastfed on purpose to stop their bond and it was selfish, has repeatedly cancelled visits to see her including because he had IBS 4 times, once was food poisoning, once was because he had a leak in his bathroom, once because his mum was unwell, once because his gran fell over and he had to look after her (he never ever sees his gran otherwise), once because he hurt his hand and couldn’t drive to see our DD so I offered to drive her to him, he said no to that. He took me to mediation when she was 5 months old because I said no to him having her the whole weekend Friday to Sunday including overnight stays as at the time he’d never had her on his own longer than 6 hours. He always tells me he’s going to be angry if I get in another relationship even though he’s had others since we split. But despite this after the 2nd mediation I agreed to everything he wanted, and we have made progress to starting the overnights soon as he has been consistent recently. He asked for extra days during the lockdown to which I agreed - he’s had everything he wants. Recently though little things have cropped up like him forgetting to give her a bottle in the afternoon and I said to him thanks for being honest but please remember next time as she does usually drink the whole thing. I went out and bought him a set of bath and moisturisers that I use for DD thinking it was a nice thing to do and basically that was a mistake as he then messaged saying he feels I’m controlling and don’t trust him because I pick at him all the time. This couldn’t be less true, I hold my tongue all the time to avoid arguing. I said I had to mention the milk thing because it’s important - it was never about nit picking at all! Anyway now he’s saying he will not be messaging me to tell me how DD is when she stays there except the first night which I find really hard to deal with. I am still battling PND so I am quite emotional a lot of the time and he knows this I never ask for lots of messages I just ask him to send me one to let me know how she is when she’s with him but he’s saying he won’t be doing this because it’s only for my mental benefit and not in the interest of our DD for me to know how she is. He will only contact me if there’s an emergency. I just feel like he’s punishing me and I don’t know why. It’s been like this since the beginning and I’ve never denied him one single thing. He tells me I’m impossible to reason with and I should consider myself lucky because some dads would make my life extremely difficult.
I guess I want to know if I’m unreasonable to want to know how she is just by a simple text when she stays the whole weekend, she’s only 1 and it is a big step as he has never lived with us so he’s never spent a night with her and it’s such a big transition for everyone involved.
Thank you for reading sorry it’s such a long post I’m just feeling very overwhelmed.