To make DH choose between us and old family?

[WashwithCare]

DH previously had a 10 yr living together relationship with a woman who already had 2 kids from 2 different dads. Children were 1 and 3 when she moved in with DH. They do not see their own fathers and call DH dad.

DH left his ex when we met (bit of a whirl wind romance) and 6 mths later, we married. I'm expected our first baby this month.

DH tried to be reasonable, and let his ex-gf stay in his house. He is a super high earner, and also paid child support at well above CSA rates, and more besides. HIs ex is always demanding more money, despite the fact that he is not he kid's father, and they weren't married.

Last 2 years have been a nightmare re his old family. His ex turns up screaming on teh door step, kids scream abuse at me - and oldest has now started stealing stuff from our house. Contact is patchy, and mum either changes arrangemetn at last minute, so expensive hols, show tickets etc are lost or literally dumps the kids on our doorstep.

She hasn't worked in years, and has made no attempt to train or find work.

I have had enough. I am seriously considering telling DH (and I do love him so much) that it't either them or me.. Unless he evicts them from his house, has no further contact and stops any more payments, I will walk!

Am I being unreasonable?

yabvu - you knew he felt financially responsible for them when you met. You need him onside to set the ground rules not make him choose. 2 years isn't so very long in the eyes of young teens - he was part of their lives for 10 years and will probably think he has betrayed them, because of you rightly or wrongly.

can i ask one thing? , do the ex`s kids know that your dh is not their biological dad? . im only asking ,because if they dont then it might explain why they are acting this way.

Yes - they know.

slightly off the original thread but as we all know people become single parents for various reasons.

i personally find it offensive with comments such as

There seem to be an awful lot of children with various fathers which must be awful for them. has noone heard of contraception?

just because a child calls their step father Dad, this doesn't mean there are various fathers. My son has only seen his "father" once in four years does he deserve the title "dad" over my DP who has helped raise DS1 for the last 4 years?

Going back to the OP it is unreasonable to want your DH to choose, at the end of the day he has raised the children for 10 yrs and in their minds he is there dad if not their father. I wonder if the shoe was suddenly on the other foot whether you would feel the same as the EX does?? If DH met someone else in lets say 5 yrs time, left you and the DDs and remarried, would you feel ok if the new wife wanted him to throw you out on the streets? How do you think it would affect your DD who will have by then grown to love and trust him as her "daddy".

I too wonder do these children know he is not their bilogical father? although tbh that doesn't matter much to children who are growing/grown up with someone who has been there every day for them.

I think your dh actually needs to get his back bone working and put his foot down, he needs to deal with the school direct with regard to financing their education, this then takes the mothers opportunity to periodically say they have to leave as he won't pay away from her, as the school will be aware that he is paying.

If he doesn't want to give his EX the money because he doesn't want to finance her then what has stopped him opening bank accounts for the DC, and giving them the cash card/book while he pays in a set amount every month. They are not babies and know if they need new shoes etc.

wash - thank goodness for that! at least they (kids) arent getting their heads picked too.
i totally agree with you about explaining the situation to your own kids. Families are complex these days.
im a stepmum as well as a bio-mum and i was at loggerheads with dh when we first got together. He wanted his kids to call me " mummydrlove" i was horrified, where is the respect for their own mum?. i love my stepkids like my own kids i really do, because regardless where they came from they are "ours" ,but they have only one mum. im just an extra to help. - so i understand why your dh acts the way he does, hes bonded with the kids. I too would give my all to help my step-kids ,but if i split from DH i would not be handing over cash to their mum.(even though she and i have become friends over the years).

oh and neither would i want or let dh pay maintenence for the 3 kids i have from my first marriage.
good point about single parents TLE, who knows how someone came to have kids by different dads , so dont judge. you could have someone who married and divorce a twat , or was widowed and then met a b`stard .No one has kids with someone they think is unreliable - jees if that happened we'd all be virgins!

Can I suggest a couple of practical things:

1. Your dh pays the school fees direct to the school (then he won't have any more of this "leaving party" crap)

1. Your dh sits down with the kids and tells them (if you decide this) that he is going to provide financially for them until they are 18; shows them the bank account where the money is going to account for this; pays off the mortgage etc. Then he writes them both a letter outlining all of this, because they may not accept it coming from his mouth.

They're teens so they're old enough to be told all of this in an adult way.

I've only read the first page and a few other bits but you've got loads of stick on this thread.

You are the OW so expect her and the kids to hate you. Anyone would. It's not a fantasy, it's real life.

If you're going through all this then it needs to go through a legal process.

If he considers them to be his children, you need to consider them to be his children. This should all have been discussed between you before you ran off together.

She will feel threatened that you are having his baby.

You are probably hormonal but you seem to resent the family he already had. It's you who came along and broke that up. You and your H are to blame.

Talking directly with the school doesn't help. The Headteacher of one of the schools is a personal friend who comes for Sunday lunch quite often, and they are well aware that finance is not an issue. However DH does not have parental responsbility for the children, so he cannot ultimately make decisions about things like schooling. If the ex wants to remove the kids that is her call.

Parental responsbility is an automatic right for natural parents, or you can get a court to order it - however, we spoke to a lawyer and were told DH had no chance, as he is not their dad.

totally - the ex isnt threatened by the op`s pregnancy , shes + .
the ex is a boiler imo.

please read the thread

Wash at least youve got the understanding of the school then.
This whole situ must be so exhausting for you.
Is your DH afraid of his ex? or what she`ll do next?
you sound as if your on eggshells.

I am amazed and fascinated at the majority of opinion here ( which I think is mostly right) in saying the children should be emotionally & financially supported etc.

The reason for my amazement is that it seems that when the majority of women part company from their partners, they all instantly think they are the only people with a divine right to full time residence of the kids.

That seems to be standard practice.

Then, in a huge proportion of cases, the mothers make it awkward/difficult/even impossible for the father to have reasonable access to his own kids.

Then, and this is where it gets really nasty, quite a large number of women actively set out to poison their kids minds against their father in a deliberate campaign to 'alienate' or brainwash their children against their other parent. Some fathers do it too.

I have the experience of my much loved and pampered wife being a psychowreck emotionally due to her upbringing.

After her weird affairs and several stomping outs in various degrees of pointless, meaningless, without any cause or reason huffs over 19 years of marriage, she finally ran off with another man permanently.

There was no warning, no visible signs etc, at all times it seemed the marriage was OK & I loved her, looked after etc. She had no cause to complain and the problem could only have been her inner demons - which gradually became crystal clear over many years and a huge amount of our exposure to top notch psychotherapy etc.

Then, wait for it. From giving me the appearance of a loving relationship she just suddenly flipped & left overnight. Then she became the angriest person you could ever imagine; being angry at me as though it had been me being the vilest husband imaginable (when I was absolutely not).

It became impossible to talk to her. She refused to cooperative with any divorce issue just in order to be spiteful and angry. She completely ignored the fact that as I agreed unequivocably with her obvious desire for divorce so she could carry on with the professional philanderer and serial family wrecker slob she ran off with, all the legal issues could have been settled with minimum legal expense.

Instead, she encouraged her lawyers to make a meal out of what was a nothing legal issue as I disputed nothing, agreed with everything and just wanted to minimise the legal nonsense.

this cost us both tens, and tens of thousands of pounds in legal fees alone. then lots, lots, more was lost in other ways.

But, the truly astounding thing about this was her utterly, utterly false claim of domestic violence. I am constitutionally an unviolent person physically, and very definitely unviolent emotionally too. I cannot hurt people close to me at all.

That kind of thing really makes me cringe because of my own childhood of emotional abuse from a truly wicked stepmother and the most bizarre of unloving, emotionally nonexistent and distant fathers.

That childhood & my knowledge of psychology & myself, makes me the absolute opposite of my wicked stepmother and distant totally unloving father. My whole focus in life has been to create the happy Dickensian myth of the perfect marriage & happy family etc.

That is what I gave my ex-wife. But she trashed it completely because of problems she obviously had when she was growing up. But she had no insight at all and had been brought up to echo the immense self-centred selfishness of both her parents (who both provided a number of discernable and very, very serious traumas for her).

But here comes the real killer. On leaving me this women was as grossly abusive as any human being could be. She screamed repeatedly how she was going to deliberately alienate my two daughters from me and make sure they learn to hate me and never have anything to do with me.

I was very close to both of them and my ex-wife was totally aware of this and knew it would be the thing she could do to hurt me the most.

So she did it. My youngest daughter was 12, and was easily manipulated by her mum to think she should live with her mum purely on the grounds that she was conned into thinking she would be going to a better school.

If my ex hadn't deliberately used that school scenario to manipulate that chlld she almost certainly would have opted to stay with me because both kids were well aware of how their mum was completely wrong to do what she was doing.

The eldest 15 year old daughter wanted to stay with me (without me ever even asking her or even discussing it).

After two years of constant emotional pressure on my daughter from her mum ( I cry myself to sleep every night because you are living with your dad, stuff & more), my eldest daughter had been sufficiently brainwashed into disappearing without telling me to go and live with her mum.

I still had a brilliant relationship with this daughter, and did not question what she did or even really disagree or discuss it. I just accepted it and I never, ever produced the slightest ripple of conflict into any aspect whatever of any part of the divorce or toing and froing or custody of the two kids.

So, no custody battle then.

But, cutting a long story short, my ex-wife eventually succeeded in so thoroughly brainwashing my eldest daughter, that she now refuses to communicate with me at all and hasn't done so for the last eight years since she left university.

She is now 29, lives on another continent, and has married and made a point of not inviting me to the wedding.

It is an appalling story of the emotional abuse my ex-wife has inflicted on this 29 year old daughter, as well as the younger (now 26 year old) daughter whom I get along with absolutely fine and just stayed at her house this Christmas last.

the younger daughter thinks her sister is completely bonkers.

This ghastly emotional wreck of a women (the ex-wife) has caused irreparable damage to our eldest daughter who is already suffering some psychological problems which may get much worse and could end up with severe depression and suicide at any stage of her life, unless things are changed.

The realities of parents (mostly mothers) alienating their children from the other parent is horrific lifelong damage done to the kids.

It is truly,truly awful - and very common.

But, wwc, if he pays the fees in advance then when she tries to pull another stunt, the school can say "but the fees have been paid" and if he tells the kids that's what he's doing, the ex wouldn't be able to play games with their heads on this.

good point squeaver.
second pay the school direct , and if she changes schools would the money be returned to you instead of her?

Totally - I accept what you say about how she feels...

However, I'm just getting a bit bored of it all. I did not run away with her bf - he had already left her, though I accept she feels I stopped him coming back - though I don't think it's true!

I accept also she probably feels insecure becasue she DH has no legal requirement to contribute financially - but that is HER PROBLEM. She chose to have a long relationship with a man, and let him father her kids, whilst not marrying him...

As for me having a baby... DH was desperate for his own kids all the time they were together, and she just kept saying not yet, maybe later... So, I don't see how she can resent the situation now... well, ok, I can see how she feels miffed, but it's not reasonable of her to feel like that...

I had no problem with the children being part of DH's life, but I never envisaged the on-going strife - the line has got to be drawn somewhere!

Wash its sounds like your DH was just a mealticket to her(or at least a big financial step-up) , and she is angry because she thinks its all going to stop when your baby is born.
i honestly dont know how you have been so patient.

It's a bit unreasonable to expect children who were only 1 and 3 when they first starting living with your DH to be able to understand in any real 'emotional' way that they're not his children. My DC don't love my DH because he's their biological dad, they love him becasue he's there for them, he tucks them in, he loves them, etc.

The XP might be behaving badly and was foolish to rely financially on someone who wasn't legally responsiable for her but try not to make the children suffer. The legal aspects, etc, are things adults can understand, they must just feel like their dad has walked out on them, and that feeling of rejection must be awful. Particularly if people are saying, 'aah but he isn't your real dad'.

I can see you and your DH are being generous with money towards them, but perhaps you could be a bit more generous towards their feelings too. Morally, I can't see any real differences between how he should behave towards them if they were his kids.

Im sorry OP i thought he left her for you

cant comment further though as totally confused by thread, just wanted to apologise for being too harsh as i thought you were OW

Tbh op I think the reason why you've had such a hard time over this is because your op was badly worded and came across as bitter and resentful.

You would have imo got a lot more support if you'd based your op on the behavior of the ex rather than the issuing of ultimatums etc.

It does sound as if the ex is ve unbalanced, and tbh if I were your dh I would be inclined to cut contact with her, although I appreciate this might then impact his access to the children. But perhaps there is a way around it at least?

Can I ask, what is the arrangement re the house? You say it's his house, does he pay the full mortgage? Had he ever planned for her to move out when the children are eighteen? or had he planned to let them stay there indefinitely? I don't think that throwing them out will help matters, but rather than pay maintanence to the ex, could your dh set up bank accounts for the children and pay the money he would have paid her into those instead? That way he is giving them money, it's just not going into ex's pocket.

very badly worded title and OP

"choose between old family and new family..."

"DH left his ex when we met..."

oh dear, and since those statements there has been a certain amount of backtracking and re-wording

rather too much emphasis on "super high earner" and "finance obviously not an issue"

I have no idea if you are a troll or not (I suspect not now, actually) but you certainly don't sound like a very nice person

was bit braggy about money and smugalicious.hence consternation

I think you're in a sticky situation wash and can't understand why people have been so mean!

He has cared for and financially supported children (and their mother) which are not his own for over a decade without taking any steps to sort these things out. I think you need to step away from the ex, deal with the kids when they come to you but let your husband deal with his ex and only talk to him about it if you can.

What I believe is that it is wrong of your DH, nice man as he sounds, to have been taking the role of father away from these chidlren's real fathers for so long. They may well be wastes of space who will not bother but the children are theirs not your DH's and really what he has done is steal them and create this whole situation for you all. When he was with the ex he should have married her, got a residency order which gave him parental responsibility or adopted them so that they were legally his children before he began to treat them as though they were his, especially after it became apparent he was going to be positioned as their only father. This would have protected you all from this hurt now as he'd have rights to see them.

Really the mother is the only one with parental responsibility, they have their own fathers but have never met them, this can only be the fault of the mother for allowing the children to go without contact for so long and then allowing another man to treat them as his own without providing him with some sort of legal protection. Your DH needs to accept that he is not their father, I think. This doesn't mean he can't attempt to care for them or to support them all financially but it does mean that he shouldn't expect to have any input at all if the mother decides against it.

Because your DH didn't sort things whilst he was with his ex he has no rights to the children now. You basically, as I see it, have three options to move on from here;

1. What you suggested - cutting all ties.

1. Leaving everything as is and tolerating it till the chidlren grow past the age of majority - 18.

1. Trying to sort things out to be more manageable.

I would do the third. If the children are old enough I would get DH to either give the school fees directly to the children (maybe by way of a cheque payable to the mother) regularly so that they knew DH was paying or pay the school directly and get the children to check up with the school that the fees were paid when the mother said they weren't.

I would accept everything the mother decided as your DH has no legal right to contact and so cannot demand it on his own terms. I would accept that I might pay to support the children and then not see them depending on how the mother felt that day and that as a consequence we might lose expensive tickets and holidays and bear this in mind when booking them.

If I was DH I would try to see myself as a kindly benefactor to two children he was heavily involved with but not as their father. They have fathers and their mother should be attempting to facilitate relationships with their fathers. Sounds like she doesn't want a father in the picture at all and is just using your DH as a meal ticket.

I would not let the ex live in the house rent free or financially support her at all. I would expect her to earn her own money or claim benefits she was entitled to and pay a nominal amount of rent for use of the house at least.

If your husband wants to contribute financially that is his choice but now he has chosen to move on from his relationship with their mother without any rights over the children the only thing he can have any control over is giving them money I'm afraid.

Rocketone - I agree with a lot of what you said but I think your experience is colouring your feelings towards women. There are an increasing number of useless mothers and fathers out there who play with their children's lives and it is only really any good to look at your own personal situation or it can make you very coloured in your subsequent relationships. I think it is almost always the parent who leaves who messes the ex and the children around, whoever that may be. Sounds like you have had a terrible time.

agree with drloves8, responsible parents don't let an ex who has no legal right to the children pay maintenance.

Christ there's a lot of nastyness here.

YANBU OP.

I can see your point, they are not his children, she has his house and his money.
I think you need to set some very very strong ground rules with your DH.

Hopefully when he has his own child he will stop being a meal ticket to the Ex and her kids.