Does anyone else....?

[wirral]

Have a totally irrational reaction to.. their friends letting your ex have their children to tea with your child? I know that I am being totally mad but I take it as a personal affront and a lack of loyalty to myself that they allow their children to have fun with my ex. Help! I am in danger of having no friends and alienating myself from everyone.

Also what would you do if .... ex picks daughter up from school on Monday eve and has her until 6.30pm. She has the chance to start sailing lessons with her friends on Monday but ex will only let her go if I agree to 'repay' him the time at a later date of his choosing. I am so loathe to do this as it then ends up that we never agree on the date and amount of time etc.

Am I sounding like a child? Am just so fed up at the moment that I suspect that my judgement is skewed!

I don't have any experience of this, not being divorced, but am trying to see what your objection is re the children to tea thing. Is it the grown ups being friendly with your ex that hurts, or something to do with the children themselves? A bit puzzling to me.

Re the sailing: can you not agree the payback time in advance? In other words, ex drops the regular Monday for a regular, say, Tuesday slot instead. If regular times are not agreed in advance, that leaves a lot of scope for disagreement.

Yes - it is the fact that I feel that no one should like my ex and make life nice for him by having their children to stay. I am so horrible. I just see it as being disloyal to me as he has been so horrible to me

Re the Sailing thing. Again I am probably being really unreasonable but why should I 'repay' time to him. At the end of the day I am not going to see her more. If the class was on a day when I had her I wouldn't expect him to ' repay' me the time.

Also it is nigh on impossible to sort things out in advance as he works irregular shifts

Seems to me that your main problem is hating your ex. Maybe you have good reason to do so, but hating him is hurting you. Maybe the split is too recent and the hurts too raw. Don't let the hatred eat you up.

Is the culpability for the end of your relationship all, 100% his? Would it help if he apologised to you?

Gosh yes it would help but I think hell would freeze over first. He left with no explanation other than he was unhappy then sent me a text meant for his new girlfriend although ever since then there has been no evidence of a new partner. You are right that I am ruining things by my hatred but I can't help the way that I feel. I made a decision that I would try not to go with what I feel but to try and put a smiley face on things and hope that eventually I will FEEL smiley and not just on the outside.

Thanks for trying to empathise it is very good of you to let me witter on

Clearly he has behaved very badly. Crass is the word that springs to mind for that thing with the text message. Very hard to forgive, esp if you've done nothing wrong yourself.

Perhaps he was trying, in his own way, to make you stop loving him so that he would feel less guilty about leaving you in the lurch. So that you would move on and find some one else. What could he have done instead, to free himself from the family responsibilities which had become irksome? Murdered you? - It happens. Told you he was leaving, and then hung about trying to make the break less sudden, like my friend's husband? Some would say that's an even worse way to do it.

There's no nice way to walk away from your responsibilities and break your marriage vows, and he's done it in no nice way. At least he wants contact with his dc (is there just the one?). Many lone parents complain that the ex shows no interest at all in the children, and that is not only sad for the children, but puts a huge burden on the lone parent.

Your ex has done a bad thing and I think he knows it. Let his own conscience torture him. Try to look ahead with your own life in a positive way, make plans. See the plus side of not having him around, even if it's just regaining control of the remote, and less in the laundry basket.

Re the sailing thing, I think you have to put your DD's needs before your own.

Your ex, clearly, is not prepared to do this. (His wish to see his child in this time comes above her opportunity to learn a great activity.)

But you're better than him, aren't you?

It can't be a date of his choosing, it has to be a regular day agreed in advance. What's so difficult about simply swopping days and saying, OK, you don't want to have her on a Monday for the next x weeks, you can collect her on Wednedays instead (for example)? If he won't agree, then he has to explain to his DD why he won't allow her to go sailing. You can't let him mess you about on contact times, this is how it starts.

Also, avoid getting into a sort of "power struggle" with him about the contact.

Be the grown up here. It may be unfair, but if you're not, he most certainly won't be, and a power struggle will be very unfair on your DD.