How to handle wedding plans with ongoing contact issues over the children

[doodleanddiablo]

Looking for advice! I’m getting married next year. I have 2 children and my partner has 4, two adult girls and 2 younger children 8 and 10 from a different relationship. Their mother is very difficult when it comes to contact. Dad had to get a court order to see them outside of her home, and she currently won’t allow overnights or holidays so another court application is in process. There are no genuine concerns, she won’t give a reason and just seeks control and to hurt dad.

I don’t imagine she will be happy when she finds out we’re getting married (they spilt 4 years before we met so nothing to do with me) and I think she will try to stop the kids coming or make it so difficult with arrangements that it becomes impossible. How do you navigate this without putting the kids in a situation where they end up being really upset and missing their dad’s wedding? Their 2 older half sisters will be there along with my two daughters who they love. I want all girls to be bridesmaids and the son to be groomsman. We already have to hide family holiday pictures so they are not upset they were not there.

This is a very condescending tone. I know exactly what a blended family entails as we already are blended. We’ve lived together for 4 years. It’s our wedding day and I’m allowed to have one day that isn’t dictated by an ex.

God knows our lives have been massively affected by the 3 ex partners we have to coparent with, and every weekend we spend juggling kids and teens with all sorts of mental health issues arising from behaviours in the other homes. Most people wouldn’t believe it if I tried to tell them.

I also think it’s incredibly rude that you’d ask how much money we are spending. As if it would compare to the cost of moving house. You have no idea what our financial situation is and I’m not going to sit here and explain it to you in any detail. What a weird thing to ask!

My DSS’s mum is extremely high conflict. We gave her the date of our wedding a year in advance and asked if we could have them for 3 extra hours to accommodate them attending. (They would otherwise have been dropped off by us at 10 am on a bank holiday -we asked for 1pm as the wedding was a few hours drive away) .She claimed she had plans for those three hours ( a year in advance) and so they wouldn’t be able to come. She was and remains so unreasonable that we knew she would use our wedding to create further issues and we couldn’t face dealing with her over it (after all the other things we have had to deal with from her). We cancelled the big wedding and got married on our own with two witnesses and had a family party at a later date, which the children attended (and even then not without her making a huge issue of it despite it falling completely on our time).
You will never get a person like this to behave in a reasonable manner so don’t expect them to. Everything by the court order and be sure to make that court order as detailed as possible re holidays, bank holidays, over nights, travel arrangements and pick up/drop off, family occasions and days such as Mothers/Fathers day and birthdays -anything that is important to you-because otherwise you will have to negotiate each and every one of these which will lead to inevitable conflict and upset. It’s not an easy life when dealing with a high conflict parent like this, so you will need to be prepared for the long haul in terms of stress and dealing with the emotional fall out in the children.
best of luck OP.

If you knew anything about post separations abuse you’d know this has nothing to do with the extra bedroom. I fully expect once we do move she will then say they can’t stay in one room together because they are a boy and a girl. Because we couldn’t move house we bought bunkbeds so they could stay when my daughters were with their dad. She said no. make it make sense!!

If you are moving house soon after why don’t you do the big wedding after that (or do registry office legal bit first) and have big party later. Then she may be more amenable and court order might be easier.

Gosh I really do feel for you. All sounds very familiar unfortunately. I will never understand it and it’s post separation abuse/coercive control and it’s miserable at times. Did your DSS come to the wedding party and did she kick up a fuss? I’m convinced any wedding of any size will cause the same reaction

I feel sorry for the DC in all of this, how many times are they going to have blended families foisted on them

Curious as to why you think this would make a difference to her reaction? We’ve had police involved because she is so unhinged. It’s not about the house it’s about control and she wants to spoil it for us so she will. She will also absolutely hate it when we get a bigger house. The wedding is happening, this is not up for negotiation.

If I was your SC, I’d be devastated if I discovered that you spent £ on a wedding as a priority over getting a bigger house so I could stay overnight.

equally, I’d be devastated that my Dad planned his wedding knowing there’s a good possibility I’d not be able to attend.

add that to the bitter and difficult mum, I think you’re SCs deserve to be made no 1 priority right now, which includes putting the house move before the wedding.

note - I wasn’t at my dad’s wedding to my SM when I was a child. My SB was there. I carry the hurt and blatant favouritism many years later.

We were planning around 5 times just to really mess them up 🤯

Should you not be more concerned with the mother and her behaviour which causes great psychological harm to her children? not a word from you about that😂

For 4 of the children this is their first experience of a Blended family. The other 2 are adults and all the children love each other and have been asking for us to get married for years. So your comment is actually total bull but thanks for your input. Have a great day on that ivory tower 🙂

Why weren’t you at the wedding?

You are getting very shirty with posters who are suggesting you have your priorities all wrong. Your story doesn’t add up. The youngest SC is 8, yet you and your partner got together four years after he broke up with that child’s mother (according to your OP) and have been together for five years (according to your other posts)? Unless he left the mother when she was newly pregnant your timeline is wrong which suggests you are not necessarily telling the truth about the rest. And isn’t it interesting that all
the children have issues arising entirely from the three other parties involved in these complicated blended arrangements, but the common factor (you and your partner) are completely blameless in all this? And any suggestion that you prioritise a bigger house so these poor SC can come and stay with you over a big wedding is met with a pouting princess “don’t I deserve my special day?”

Poor kids, is all I can say. When you have children, especially when you have taken the decision to break up their original family, you need to put them first.

I would get married nearer where they live, and then he takes them home at the appointed time.

They came to it and she was as horrible as she could possibly be.
we asked if we could pick them up from nearer her house as we would be passing to get to where the wedding party was (and it would save them , and her actually, an hour round trip in a car going south to the usual pick up point to then drive up the literal same road back in the same direction). She said no. And was then late by half an hour to the pick up point with no explanation, presumably as she knew we were going to spend the evening doing stuff for the party the day after.
.
She dropped them off without things they needed for school on Monday (their school bags which go between houses) which meant we had to be in touch with her negotiating about how to get these things in time for Monday morning (which had to happen over the course of the whole weekend with increasing nastiness from her whatever we suggested whilst we were trying to
enjoy our celebrations.

We found out on the Wednesday after the party (the next time we had DSS’s-we have them near enough 50/50), that as soon as they got back to hers she started questioning them relentlessly. She later emailed to accuse Dh of ‘slagging her off in his wedding speech which was emotionally abusive to their children’ and which she informed Cafcass about. (Quite clearly DH hadn’t mentioned his ex wife during his speech at his wedding party to his second wife. And obviously we had a video to prove it. He had said ‘I feel so lucky in life to feel loved so totally and to love someone else back in return and to have the blessing of our four children in our lives as well’ -which having got that (and probably a mangled version) out of then 9 year old DSS1, she took as a direct insult to herself and accused DH of emotionally abusing the children as a result.

She also told the DSS’s that they were only good enough to be invited to the party and not our actual wedding (the tiny one we had because she had kicked off about the other one we had planned and had very much wanted them at), so clearly we don’t care about them.

This woman had two affairs that ended her marriage to DH, long before he met me. There is zero reason for her to be like this. She just can be. So she is. People don’t get that people can be like this unless they have experienced it for themselves. The stress is unreal. And I get you feeling you want one day for yourselves that’s nice. But I learned that it’s not worth the bother tbh. I just try as hard as possible not to give her the opportunity to mess things up or to put the children in the middle.

Or he does the 2-hour round trip. If that is the blocker, there are ways round it.

Kind of rubbish to have to leave your own actual wedding for two hours just because someone else is choosing to be totally unpleasant and unreasonable though surely?
Which is why I’m advising the op to not even bother with the whole thing, sad as it is. It’s just a road to being stressed and upset.

Funny thing though-
If it were an ex husband trying to mess up his ex wife’s wedding, everyone would be up in arms saying how abusive and controlling he was being. There is always a double standard when it’s a woman causing the issue and/or a step mum asking for advice.

@doodleanddiablo if mum is damaging her DC so much I’m amazed she has them so much.

How much custody did your partner have before he met you?

Because my Dad believed it was more important to have his wedding than to prioritise his DC.

Your priorities are all wrong and I feel sorry for all of the DC stuck in this situation. He has been split up more than long enough to get overnights if he actually wanted them.

Or they get married closer. 🤷

Assuming there is somewhere closer they can get married-they are getting married an hour from the children’s house. Not unreasonable. We have no idea where they live or what wedding venues there are available.
I mean the children’s mum could also just choose to be reasonable I suppose as another alternative.

Speaking as the child of parents who divorced when I was 5, a very high conflict mother and of parents on both sides who got married and prioritised their weddings over me (sibs and I were not invited), I think the OP is getting a bit of a rough ride here. It would be lovely if OP could get to a position where all of the children are at the wedding and having the additional bedroom might help - but I can tell you now it wouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference to my mother, who was dead set on ensuring we all suffered for my father’s awful choices. It sounds as if everyone else in this scenario have good relationships and I can understand why OP suspects nothing will be good enough for this woman. Like @piscofrisco I can assure you these people are out there.

You may well be right, but I do find it odd that OP describes all six children having mental health and other issues caused by their respective other parents yet everyone is happy as larry with OP and her partner, all the children love each other etc.. Perhaps OP and her partner just happen to attract difficult people, but OP’s partner leaving his last wife when she was pregnant can’t have been easy for the wife.

I didn’t see the bit about splitting up whist pregnant but my point is I am in my mid 50s now and went through all of this and a lot, lot more. Life continues and people who do not want to move on after so many years cannot be controlled. It’s a shame but four years as a couple is a reasonable time to get married and more than enough time for people to move on, if not for themselves, then for their children. My mother never did and we continued to suffer until she lost control of us when the scales fell from our eyes as adults.

Who is taking these dc home at 7? I’d definitely prioritise a house and no, a girl snd boy should not share a room. The dad is prioritising his wedding over youngest dc and hasn’t provided a stable home for them.

Would you advise a pregnant woman to stay with an abusive partner? Why should a man stay with an abusive woman just because she’s pregnant with an unplanned (on his part) baby? It’s not ideal and it’s not something he would have chosen.

He paid all the household bills for 4 years after they split so she could stay at home with the children. This includes full time nursery fees, whilst she was at home. He bought all their groceries during Covid and hand delivered them. He’s been stopped from seeing the children a few times, included when she saw him walking through the park with a female friend. You can judge all you want from a few short sentences and assume the man is at fault. It’s not the case. Things didn’t work and she won’t move on.

my ex husband was financially and emotionally abusive during our 13 year marriage, including a physical assault in public. Is that my fault too? He doesn’t pay his CMS and my youngest doesn’t want to stay at his home because of his shouting. Is that also my fault?

you really need to keep your judgements to yourself. Nobody is perfect, including you!