Hey Choco, I've been travelling and out of the loop. Sorry to hear you're having a down swing. Lack of sleep as Beryl says is a form of torture. It's going to make everything else seem much worse, which probably doesn't seem possible given that it keeps getting worse. We were all hoping that the universe would intervene and they wouldn't get their jobs but they have. And whilst that's another blow on many levels, as Bamboozled says, better not to be the one living with the fucker and in long run for your boys, and for you, it might be more convenient, even if it feels like a gross violation and you want to distance yourself from them.
I thought of you last night when my children were listening to Harry Potter before bed! Dumbledore said (in relation to Harry after some particularly difficult shenanigans), along the lines of "without understanding, there cannot be acceptance, without acceptance, there cannot be recovery" -I thought of you because sometime back we talked about acceptance not meaning defeat but a means for moving on.
Apologies if this sounds incredibly trite but given how you're feeling about OW at the moment, maybe there is some wisdom we can all borrow from Dumbledore!
If OW and Ex were the type of people to apologise, perhaps you wouldn't be here in the first place. You're expecting them to display some moral fibre. They don't have that. If they did, they would not be doing what they are doing.
The OW does not have integrity. She will not be able to see she should apologise. Or if she does, she is not prepared to apologise because it will confirm that what she did was wrong. But she can't or won't want to do that as she's in denial. She has your sloppy seconds. She is risking everything to be with your Ex and to try and make a go of it. New job, new home, right by you. This isn't really the stuff of romance.
If you need answers, they need to come from your ex. Would you consider counselling or mediation for the two of you, the goal being that you can focus on bringing up your boys together as constructively as possible for your sake and for the boys?
When you hand over your boys to your ex, that's what you are doing, handing them to their dad, not OW. I know it's all too easy for me to say this but Choco, if you can shift your perception and see that OW is a bit of a red herring, perhaps it might help. In all probability you and and your ex would have come unstuck some how. If it hadn't been OW, it would have been someone or something else. She was the catalyst.
The issues you need to overcome are with Twunt. He rather naively thought you could just forgive, forget and embrace this new modern family. He owes it to you to make this new scenario work as best it can for you. But given his emotional ineptitude, he has no clue on how to go about this.
For your sake, Choco, I wonder if you need to ask him if he would be willing to have a mediation session with you so you can work out respectful boundaries and a strategy for achieving your common goal, which is the happiness and well being of your boys. He needs to understand that this is something that the two of you need to figure out independently, without OW and inlaws so you can both move on with your lives constructively. Who he chooses to bring into his sons' lives unfortunately is not something you can control or vice versa.
But perhaps you can carve out some common understanding but on neutral territory using a professional mediator.
For all his faults and major character flaws, he appears to want to be active in the lives of his sons. This is double edged for you but as it is what it is, you have control here of how things shape. He wanted you to embrace this new scenario and was pretty crass and naive about how he went about it (he sounds incredibly immature) but at some stage, it is going to mean a more peaceful life for you if you can reach some sort of understanding of how things are going to work out.
For your peace of mind and your sanctuary, maybe you and he need to sit down together, in a safe environment, with a neutral third party to talk about how you want to handle this new situation given they will be on your doorstep.
It is not a sign of failure or defeat if you want to reach some kind of harmony with your ex. You need to do this for very selfish reasons, for your self preservation and recovery.
I'm not sure if you have tried this before and it's been unsuccessful. I know you have wanted to limit contact with your ex as he has been so incapable of understanding what this is doing to you and is so insensitive.
A friend of mine has been through something similar albeit older children. She wants to have some kind of mediation or counselling to be able to reach "closure" and to move on, her ex refuses and is being a complete Twunt too.
But my impression with your Twunt and I could have misread this, is that he might be more amenable to taking some steps if he thinks there is something in it for him too, ie you both want some harmony. He thought you could be friends now and all muck in together.
The message he needs to understand is that for now, that is too much to ask of you but you want to have a harmonious relationship with the father of your children and confidence that your boys are happy and well when they are with him.
That this is a goal you both wish to strive for and that you might benefit from having a session to express how you both feel and what you both want because regardless of the breakdown of your marriage you both want what is best for your boys. Once again, Choco, you need to be the adult here and take the lead to make that happen. This is entirely about self preservation and recovery which you so desperately deserve.
You have an amazing ability to inspire Choco, taking steps which might be seen to T&T as you caving and giving in to them will be quite the opposite. You have forced them to move, change jobs and adapt their lives to the choices you have now made.
They lost control when you moved away and set up a new home with your boys. Their lives are dictated now by your choices and how you choose to act and approach things.
You have more power than you think and OW no doubt resents having to give up her life in order to slot in with yours.
I'm wondering if I'm being naive in suggesting you try and work things out with your ex through mediation. You'd need to make it clear that you have the same goal as him and that this will be in his interests too. If that turns out to be in OW's too then so be it. The bottom line is, you need peace and harmony for your sake because if you don't have it, no one else will. You're the lynch pin. But if you do this, it's for your sake and your boys.
In the meantime, I hope you can get over your exhaustion and can sort out your work. Hopefully your mum can help out. You might not be ready for the boys to have over night stays yet with your ex, plus that might be tough on DS2 in particular, so any discussion is not necessarily about that. It needs to be about understanding where you both are, establishing a common goal and then a strategy for achieving it.
Mammoth post, sorry, got carried away and I might be off the mark. I can't recall if you did try some sort of mediation before. It might be that you can tackle this with him directly but given the track record he has in crassness, using a neutral third party at least initially might help get the ball rolling in the right direction. You may well catch him off guard if you tell him that you want to try and move things onto a more harmonious plain. It requires a huge amount of strength and leadership to be able to orchestrate that but you have that Choco, in bucket loads!