Difficult husbands ex...

[Yasmin1994]

Needing some advice…
we have my step daughter every other weekend.
we do have a court order in place as my husbands ex partner was very difficult with us seeing my husbands child.
this weekend his ex messaged to say that their daughter has a sickness bug.
we asked when she was last sick and it was early Friday morning so we asked if we could pick her up after 48 hours.
i myself has lots of health conditions and cannot risk being poorly if I can help it and I am also awaiting a major operation.
his ex has kicked off saying we will never be allowed to see her again.
where do we go with this?
are we being unreasonable asking her not to come to out home with a sickness bug?

Im with her it should be treated as her home crowd. I understand your health but you cant just refuse to have her if shes ill. You have to take the bad with the good.

FFS. The mum does 26-27 days parenting to the dad’s 4 per month. That includes mum doing EVERY school run, and (no doubt) the school uniform, pe kit, homework and school project management with that. Mum has to deal with the knock on effect to her career, work around school times and sickness in the week and take days off from work accordingly and Dad can’t even be arsed to see HIS child on HIS time because the child is under the weather 🙄

Parenting isn’t just taking your kid to the park once a fortnight and watching a movie. It’s the difficult bits too, including looking after them when they are ill.

Dad should be offering to step up and do MORE parenting when his child is sick, not less.

The bar is so low for non-resident fathers, it’s in hell.

I have a feeling this isn't the first time mum has had to cope with this, so you want a 48 hour gap, so you just want to do the Sunday. A lot of the time sm's are total grief. If the child is well enough, she goes to her dads and the other child (sm) stays elsewhere.

Whys it ok for her mum to be around her when she's got a nig buy not her dad?

It's a bit much tbh if you've been to court to force the mum to send her DD to your house EOW, but the two of you are happy to blow off contact whenever it's convenient for you. It smacks of "Do as I say, not as I do".

If there's a court order in place, your husband really should be sticking to the terms of it if possible. Otherwise the flexibility is all one-sided, isn't it?

It's different if you've got the sort of relationship between the two homes where you're both happy to be flexible. But it doesn't sound like you have that so you should stick to the order.

It seems pointless to have a court order so the child can visit four days a month.
That's not parenting, why isn't he raising his child 50/50?

He barely sees her, so of course he shouldn't have even less time, provided she's well enough to travel etc.

Right? All those saying you can't just send your child away if you both lied with her... I think people have forgotten COVID! Where one parent lived in a hotel for months because they were a frontline worker, and didn't want to risk their children and partner. When my son and husband caught it early on, they were confined to the top floor of the house and I dropped them off food and drink etc, because my other child was medically vulnerable and we tried to limit their risk as much as possible. That's one family in the same house! When you live a medically complex life, things aren't always fair. Fair doesn't mean equal, it means the fairest way to protect somebody. People saying she's a right to be angry after him fighting so hard to have custody every other week and now doesn't want her as she's sick need to remember, mum fought just as hard not to let him see her, and now doesn't want the opportunity to keep her for extra days when she is sick and probably wants her mum! Everyone is unreasonable tbh. If it was amicable , fair and best for everybody she would stay home until not contagious, and dad would have her for extra days at a time to suit mum and give her an extra rest after taking care of her when she was sick. Life isn't always fair. Sometimes you just got to do what makes sense to protect actually sick people.

Got a feeling we won’t be seeing the OP again.

Yeah im afraid you are being unreasonable here. It’s one thing to say let her stay where she is so as not to disturb/disrupt her whilst she’s feeling unwell. But saying you don’t want to to see her because you don’t want to get ill is a bit much. Kids don’t get sick at convenient times. If she was ill during a stay with you would you send her back to mums house?

Why did he only get every other weekend?
Tbh she could have been going away or something.

YABU. Your partner needs to put his child first and actually do some parenting.

He only sees his child 4 days a month 😐 He is already a deadbeat.

I have step children but a full 50/50 arrangement.

After some painful trial and error over the years (d&v bugs primarily), it has been established that the unwell child stays at the home they became unwell at until they’re better.

When they’re unwell (and contagious) their comfort is important. Not spreading illness across households is important.

I think good parenting means communicating in a positive way and everyone being flexible where possible and necessary to accommodate everyone's needs. Me and my ex regularly deviate from the court ordered contact arrangements when we're in agreement (which we generally are). Sometimes compromises are necessary in order to serve the child's best interest.

I understand your predicament but what would you do if dsd got sick while she was at your house? Would you send her home immediately, or as per the scheduled arrangements, or keep her longer until she's recovered? What if her mum said to you that she can't come back to her mum's until dsd is all clear? Does it work the same both ways?

I'd agree with you were it not that the father actually went to court to get a court order to force the mum to send the child EOW.

While ideally everyone would be flexible, that makes the flexibility somewhat one-sided imo. It's tough but they need to stick to the terms of the court order so everyone knows where they are. It would be different if arrangements were amicable.

I have suffered with emetophobia (phobia of vomiting) for a long time - had lots of therapy, and the exact scenario happened to us.

Arrived at the car park by the mums house, child was ill, got told she had bad diarrhea too and was in need of a good scrub. I had to call my husband back and say I couldn't do it. Access was stopped. She took us to court for abuse.

We saw it through. Spoke with CAFCASS (UK) and the court order now states if the child is ill within 72 hours that we rearrange the weekends.

It's hard at the time, but see it through. You're not unreasonable if it's for a legitimate reason.

Your husband’s responsibility towards his child far outweighs anything else, including you. He doesn’t get to opt out of parenthood because of normal childhood illnesses. If you can’t deal with that then don’t be a stepparent.

What if the mother has planned stuff precisely because she has two homes?

Perhaps because that was what the daughter was happy with? This is the arrangement with my stepchildren but in reverse, they see their mum every other weekend because that is what they asked for when it went to court.

Nobody should have to “force” contact with their own children. The fact he had to apply to court and it was granted kind of corroborates that the ex wife was being obstructive or difficult as per OPs explanation.

Anyway, there isn’t enough detail involved for any of us to make an informed judgement. We don’t know how old SD is, being 6 or 14 makes an enormous difference. We also don’t know if SD actually wanted to leave mum’s house whilst poorly or whether she wanted to see her dad on that day.

The important question is whether OP and her partner would be happy to keep their poorly
SD/DD for longer if she got sick in their care?

If they would it’s not one sided at all.

This is absolutely insane.