Firstly, I have a solicitor and I am working with her to resolve this shit. So I very definitely have good legal advice. And I am resigned to this simply costing loads.
This is mostly a thread where I can moan about STBXH and to prevent anything he says getting inside my head. He’s
abusive. And very good at manipulating.
Short version: getting divorced because he’s an absolute shit. We have a 3 year old. He has two primary aged kids from a previous relationship. I have a teenager from a previous relationship too.
He is doing everything he can to resist a proper contact arrangement. Up til now I’ve been really flexible and accommodating but he utterly takes the piss. So I’ve drawn a boundary and asked for a regular, consistent and sustainable (given his work and his other contact arrangement - which is EOW and one night in the week for children who live and attend school 20 miles from where I live, which is the former marital home).
He’s insisting it needs to be flexible and that he wants to agree contact on a week by week basis (to suit him and fit around his work, involving regular trips away, and other things he cares about). Now he’s started making threats about how if I insist on a formal and structured arrangement, he will go for maximising his contact and arrange his work around it.
its bullshit. I know it is. But still, he just wants to upset me. He tried for 50-50 in 2019 with his other two but it lasted less than 6 weeks. He couldn’t manage it. Since we’ve separated he’s dropped his contact with them to just two rather than three nights on the contact weekend, and far less in the holidays. Because he couldn’t sustain more.
He simply isn’t capable of more than one night a week and EOW (but only the Saturday because he cannot do a school run and a nursery run 20 miles apart on a Monday morning).
And he’s always been clear that his career is more important than anything. He goes on and on about how he can’t stay in this city long term and needs to move (would have moved away already if it was just his older kids!!). He’s also going on and on about how he needs to buy a house and work til 68 because he’s not made a decent financial decision in his entire life.
But he loves to make threats. ‘Be amicable [do exactly what I want] or …’
Aaargh.
My solicitor has informed him that an inflexible arrangement is exactly what he’ll get if he seeks a CAO. Because that’s in DS’s best interests and how court orders work. So this is how he’s countering. It’s manipulation. I hate it. There’s no need for this shit and it’s not going to get him
what he wants.