Last Sunday we had a fight, mostly because I had the temerity to be obviously unhappy at his unilateral decision that he was taking DS2 to the beach.
He had spent the first part of the morning with DS2 playing video games. Ex makes it obvious that I am not welcome and so I just stay away. Then I took DS2 to his swim training and we stopped by Aldi on the way home to grab something for lunch. The aisle of miraculous tat had children’s wetsuits so I bought one for DS2. He was delighted and we talked about going to the beach to try it out on the way home.
At home I made lunch and DS2 went to play more video games with ex (the me doing drudge work while he gets the fun stuff is an enduring feature of the family dynamic). I served lunch and while we were eating ex announce to DS2 that he was talking him to the beach. In my car. With my petrol. To try out the wetsuit I just bought. And with no discussion of this with me whatsoever.
Ex had decided that I had ‘had’ my time with DS2 (doing taxi service to swimming, waiting around while he swam, and going to Aldi to buy some cheese) and it was his ‘turn’. The hours he’d spent playing video games with him (and making it clear I was unwelcome) didn’t count. Obviously.
I’ve come to the conclusion that ex thinks of my time with DS2 using the same logic that means that men decide that women are ‘taking over’ whenever they reach some meagre proportion of the workforce (that’s still well below 50%) and that is fundamentally unfair to them. It’s fine with ex if I am doing drudge work on DS2’s behalf but how dare I expect to have any of the fun time? That’s clearly the reserve of super bloody dad.
So ex decided that we needed to talk about this, and sent DS2 to his room. The talk involved him responding to any of the perfectly reasonable points I made passive aggressively. He just does this martyred sigh and mutters about how there’s no point talking to me about any of this (because I’m so unreasonable and abusive).
Also I have no right to be annoyed about the finances because he has made it very clear several times that I should just tell him what I’ve spent on petrol or things for DS2 and he’ll transfer the money to me. I am being completely unreasonable for not wanting to report (and have to justify as a result) my spending to him. He in no way accepts that there is any legacy of financial abuse in the relationship (or that his attitude is an example of it continuing).
He has completely rewritten the history of the relationship using the logic that I am intrinsically financially incompetent and untrustworthy (whereas he is totally wonderful and so generous because he used his inheritance for the whole family, and didn’t begrudge it going to DS1 too - except he did!).
Apparently my organising a joint account with him when we first moved in together was because I was too irresponsible and needed him to manage the money. It wasn’t because I was the only one of us with a job and I didn’t want to be a financially abusuve arsehole who withheld money from him. No. It couldn’t be that.
Obviously I was the financially irresponsible one (who, when he met me at 27, had just started a permanent academic job before finishing my PhD, who owned a flat and paid the mortgage on it reliably, owned a car, and had just paid off my student loan) and he was a model of financal responsibility who needed to sort me out (a 4th year PhD student living off savings because you only get 3 years of a stipend, who lived in a room in a shared flat and owned no assets whatsoever, and had £15k or so of student loans that he hadn’t even started paying off).
We moved in together because of an unplanned pregnancy. Ex didn’t have a job so I was willing to financially support us all and to return to work after 5 months of maternity leave (because we couldn’t afford to drop down to SMP) while he tried to find an academic job. I didn’t suggest he just look for any job or anything - I was totally supportive of his career. He (magnanimously) was going to look after DS2 while I worked.
A few weeks before I was due to return to work, ex managed to get himself a temporary job in the university I worked at. (He’d never have even known about it been considered for it if I hadn’t worked there). So I had to find childcare for little tiny DS2 and still go back to work because there was no suggestion that actually we could now afford for me to take the full year. No. That was never a vague consideration. (And in hindsight I realise that ex was being a selfish shit).
Anyway, he got the job and decided that he would be paid into his sole account, which he had retained (along with not sharing any of his savings). I only had a joint account, so I was paid into this, and all the bills and spending came out of it. If funds were running out in there, ex would transfer the minimum he could get away with into it. He’d also question my spending all the time - I’d have to explain why I’d spent £90 in the supermarket rather than whatever figure he’d decided it should be (without actually doing the shopping and knowing how much things cost, of course).
But this wasn’t financial abuse; it was him being responsible and looking after the finances. This shitty pattern (including him keeping all the savings in his name) continued until the counselling where the counsellor made it clear that if we were going to pool finances they should all be shared accounts. But, ex decided he still needed to use his ISA for savings because that’s financially prudent. (Splitting them equally between two ISAs was as much not a consideration as him supporting me to have more maternity leave had been). Even then, it was clear which of the one joint accounts was his and which was the ‘main’ one. I have never had a debit card for ‘his’ account and wouldn’t have dared to use it if I did. But he was totally fine to use the ‘main’ account.
Getting back to the actual story... this is just another example of him gaslighting me. Apparently I’m abusive towards him, and ‘we just have very different perspectives’ on the relationship. Except that the bare facts about the organisation of accounts above make it clear that he is financially controlling. And his narrative that I couldn’t be trusted and needed him to organise the finances is exactly the logic a financial abuser would use to justify it.
Because he’s so determined to use abusive tactics (including telling me that it’s my fault for upsetting DS2 when he’s the one who decreed we must ‘discuss’ it - all because I refused to find the suncream like a good little woman so he could take DS2 to the beach) the conversation went nowhere. He took DS2 to the beach with a threat/promise that we’d finish the discussion later.
When he did come back the discussion was lots more of the abusive gaslighting and martyr act but there was an agreement that, until the move happens, we’d each take one day of the weekend and it would swap around so that one of us (me, obviously) didn’t end up with swimming duty and not a full day while the other (him, inevitably) got to have a whole day to do what they like.
So we come to this weekend and it starts with ex asking me to confirm that I was having DS2 on Sunday. No. I did Sunday last week, so I was having Saturday this week. I had a lovely day yesterday with DS2. I took him to his snowboarding lesson and then we went sea kayaking (really fun, but I am achey today). Ex couldn’t sneak in a morning of video games with DS2 because we left the house at 8.15. After sea kayaking I took DS2 to Nando’s (DS1 wanted to stay in bed so he got leftover curry for lunch instead) and then we can’t home.
Ex was out and DS2 and I watched minecraft shite on amazon prime in the living room. At about 5 ex came back and, while I was making tea for the boys, persuaded DS2 that he wanted to watch stuff on an iPad sitting on exes bed. This is classic ex; he refuses to see this as a power play to prevent me spending time with DS2. Not is he willing to understand that it’s not acceptable on my day.