difficult / lazy / passive aggressive ex

[ponybark]

hi all, my ex (we have 1 DS aged 2.4) is hard work and I am finding it exhausting...long story but I got PG (unplanned) 4m after meeting and things went downhill. His behaviour became really weird and all these mental health probs came out of the closet. He lost his job when I was 9m PG (he was a temp) and hasn't been able/bothered to try get another since. He has long term mental (PTSD, OCD, Depression, Anxiety) and physical (severe IBS) issues rendering work almost impossible.

For 1.5 years after he lost his job he relied on me to support him financially saying he was applying for work and that claiming benefits would affect his forthcoming British passport application. I believed this and supported him for a time.

He lied to me about job progress (thwarting any efforts to help him) and fed me a sob story about his mental / physical health (which are bad but he does not do himself any favours - or indeed do anything!!).

He refused to move in and virtually lived at my place eating all my food and not lifting a finger, blaming it all on his mental health issues. He still owes me £3k (not including all the food etc) - he is slowly paying a bit back.

I had a horrific birth and depression through PG; when DS was born ex went into a breakdown and became increasingly emotionally abusive, gaslighting (saying I was crazy); not lifting a finger, passive aggressive etc. blaming it all on his MH or me. I got severe PND. We split up when DS was 5m.

I eventually forced him to register for benefits and for mental health support but it took an extreme amount of wrangling and lies on his behalf to get this sorted.

It was a complete nightmare and all at a time when I had a newborn child and trying to juggle a house move, a self employed job, running a household and sorting out my mental ex on top of my own PND.

Now DS is older, ex is much better as he has some money and seems to have come out of his pit of despair a bit. We get on a lot better yet he still refuses to be truly responsible.

I rely on his help as I am isolated with no family nearby and few mates (I have my own MH issues I am working on) so need his support so I can find some time to work. (Ex gives me zero £).

As ex's place is a mess he stays at mine to help and all he does is plays with DS and lets me run around cleaning and cooking and working like a lunatic; when I ask for help it gets delayed and delayed and he can get really passive aggresive e.g. swearing nastily to himself in another room about something he's pissed off with e.g. that I haven't bought any coffee; nightmare in the mornings; goes to bed late, gets up late (I have to haul him out of bed).

I need ways of making him help more and ways of dealing with his verbal abuse (in the mornings when he's in a grump it's horrible). He just acts like he's entitled. I try so hard and things have got slowly better on most fronts but it's the occasional bouts of verbal abuse I can't deal with.

We do have some nice times as a family and when he's being nice he can be a good support to me. He's much more like the guy I met and I put the last 2 years behaviour down to him having a mental breakdown (at least in part).

That said the nice times come at a price and I am constantly exhausted and trying so hard to get him to help out more and he acts like he is doing me a favour with the childcare - like I should be grateful despite it being his duty and also despite the fact he does not lift a finger while he is here and eats for free etc. I do my best to get him to help to little avail.

I know about co-dependency and have really pulled back over the last year or so in terms of the support I provide. I am just wary of his mental health getting really bad again so some of the support I provide is done in a preventative way as he really slides down quickly and my life becomes a nightmare as well by proxy when it happens.

Arghh, he is really crazy making!! Any support or thoughts are welcome.

Look, chuck this lazy freeloader out of your house. Stop feeding him, picking up after him and supporting him. He is your ex, why should he get domestic and emotional service from you? Particularly when he is clearly an absolute prick.
He's not going to help more, or treat you decently because he is an absolute prick. He always was.

Also, given that you are not a couple, having him round at your house all the time could affect any benefits you recieve (you should be getting tax credit as a working single parent). Have a chat with your own GP or whoever is treating your MH issues about what support might be available to you: nurseries, childminders etc. You might even be able to get a lodger who could help with childcare. But don't waste any more time or emotional energy on this useless man.He will never be a good partner or a decent father, and the more you can detach from him, the better.

thanks solid. Wise words and very true!!

He stays over a couple of nights to help with childcare; DS is very attached to him (he does play with him a lot) and I wouldn't trust him to have him at his (inappropriate flat; also his MH issues don't always mean he's up to childcare alone).

So I am quite stuck with him being around unfortunately, at least while DS is young. I just try to make the best of a bad situation. It's getting SLOWLY better.

I do get some nursery hours but they are quite limited and I always feel I am running on empty trying to fit stuff in.

I do like the idea of having a lodger (more likely flatmate as it's rented!) but I'm not sure it would work with my MH problems.

I think I just need to be better at setting boundaries and having rules with ex.

What solidgoldbrass said! Ok, so you need his help parenting 2 evenings a week and that has the added bonus that DS has a relationship with his DF. It happens at yours because his is a mess. What I don't understand is why he has to eat at yours, still less sleep at yours. If you know about co dependency, you will be aware that you are enabling him to behave this way, which, frankly is not good behaviour and gives DS a poor role model. Why not make the boundary: xdp comes for 3 hours, 2 evenings a week, to play with DS? He feeds himself before or after, he goes home to sleep at the end of 3 hours. The 3 hours could include bath and bedtime routine for DS.

Sorry, why is he hanging out at your flat and sleeping over at your flat when he has chosen not to live with you or support you or your son and has been verbally abusive to you? And why are you running around like a lunatic after him and financing him? And what the feck has it to do with him if you do or don't buy coffee?

Amicable contact post-split and doing things together with your child is admirable but this is not what this is about... he is basically trying to get all the benefits of being with you without lifting a finger to help or providing you any financial support.

You need to learn some boundaries and put them in place. And if he doesn't like it then he needs to get out and fend for himself.

Meant to say also that his mental health is for him to sort out, not you. Mainly because it is only him who can sort it out. Please do not assume responsibility for it. In particular, do not blame yourself if it worsens as a result of you sticking to some very reasonable boundaries.

contact should not take place in your home. Why can he sort his own home out rather than spending his time at yours abusing you. Your only way to deal with him is stop letting him in your home and stop spending any time with him. And claim for child maintenance too. Amicable, yet he pays no money and lives part time in your home. Hardly helping you is it? And you are showing your child what a relationship is and how men treat women - not good is it?

cheapskate - thanks... :)

I think a part of it is I rely on his company - I've got few mates and have issues with social stuff due to MH problems of my own (am really trying to work through these). If he weren't here I would be completely isolated most of the week. We talk and get on pretty well of an evening. It's mornings or times he's ill that he can be nasty.

Also due to his illness (debilitating IBS) he runs a completely unreliable schedule. I can never rely on him being there when I need him as he might be stuck on the loo. It can go on for days and days, so when he's available I take my chance as I usually have a massive backlog of work (am self employed).

I would like him to stay at his more when he's helping but he lives a good hour's walk away so for him to come and go is time consuming (and as he's on benefits he never has any cash for the bus).

He's also terrible at getting up so it's a way of ensuring he is available the next day otherwise I could miss out on a whole day of childcare help as he'd be asleep!! (partly due to his IBS which means he can be stuck on the loo all night and sleeping schedule is all out of whack). I have tried so hard on this but he just doesn't hear his alarm or answer his phone to come and help. He drives me to insanity.

I have emailed him tonight to ask him for more assistance with things I need help with. I'll keep bringing the point home. I'm going to have to be stronger in getting him to run to my schedule and bring his own food over though. I've also asked him to go home sooner if he's feeling ill (this is when he can get nasty).

You are right in that I am being an enabler though. I must must must be stronger at asserting boundaries. I have come a long way over the last two years with this but got to get better!! Trying so hard.

Cherryapple - appreciate what you are saying but there is no way I would want DS at his. It's a nightmare tiny studio flat with hoarded stuff everywhere completely unsuitable for a toddler. Ex's MH issues are so extreme he can't bring himself to sort anything out let alone his flat so its much easier that he has contact at mine. I could wait ten years for him to put up a poster let alone sort his flat out.

DS does love him and he's becoming a good dad in many ways - reading to him, playing with him, having fun etc, so I don't have many worries on that front other than how he behaves towards me when he's in a mood.

But I do hear you on the showing DS how men treat women thing. Although these days the verbal abuse is pretty limited it's still way out of order. I thought that we had made a lot of progress as compared to a year ago we get on 1000 times better. So I feel like things are getting better. It just worries me that there are these incidents in between that still come up now and again (although a lot less in frequency).

It is getting easier as DS gets bigger. I found the baby stage unbelievably hard and with work on top had to take what help I could get. Now DS is bigger balancing the workload is easier and I need a bit less help. So hopefully that will mean less reliance on my ex.

also just a point that during my PG I had really bad depression and when DS was born I also had PND which I think retrospectively made it very hard for me to understand what was going on or realise how to deal with my ex. Probably how bad habits set in. (I also think my ex was probably the major cause of this!).

When you're dealing with 1000s of things every day (work, house stuff, own MH issues) on top of a baby/toddler DS as a LP with virtually no support, decision making can be hard and when someone is treating you in that way and guilt tripping you it can be hard to see the wood for the trees about what is going on.

I see it much more clearly now and the situation has improved a lot since I set a few boundaries. But this advice really helps me to see it more clearly.

I don't want to start a war with my ex and I don't want to cut off his contact time with DS. I do need to be clearer on boundaries though for the sake of DS (and me). Maybe it's time to cut down his contact time and find other ways to manage my workload better. (Easier said than done but I hope to find a way).