Hi, I really need a holistic/human perspective because I’m under horrible pressure and can’t work out whether I’m protecting my children or destabilising them.
We currently live in a small village, two doors away from my parents. Mum has stage 4 cancer, Dad has had strokes, and they effectively helped raise my children from birth. This has always been the children’s family base.
The OH and I are separated but live very close by, mainly because it has made access to the children easy. The relationship is completely dead and the proximity has become unbearable. I also own a house in a nearby city, and I’m considering moving their mum and the children there while dividing my own week between the children and my parents.
Educationally, the city offers a large, academically much stronger state school with broader opportunities and support.
My son is 16 and has just started A-levels. He’s a typical teenage boy — bright but struggles to focus, organise himself and apply himself consistently. He has places at both schools. His current school is a small private school where he has been for years, is known, comfortable and now says he wants to stay. The city school potentially offers greater independence and broader opportunities, but moving means uprooting him several weeks into A-levels.
My daughter is 13. She was settled at her local comperehesive school after a very difficult first year. She now has a place at the academically stronger city school. She found the visit quite overwhelming and didn’t particularly warm to the Head of Year, but says she is happy to start there on Monday. She also spent a day at another city school, loved it and immediately made friends.
My biggest fear is that I’m effectively depositing the children in the city with the OH. I don't want my resentment towards OH to distort my judgement, but historically my parents and I have provided much of the structure around the children. OH has always worked and, from my perspective, spends much all free time on phone with friends/family and has very little involvement with homework, activities, cooking with them or creating the routines they need.
My parents filled that gap for years — and now Mum is dying and Dad has been ill.
My proposed compromise is to spend around three days a week sleeping at the city house, remain heavily involved with the children and bring them back to their grandparents at least twice a week.
But then I’m terrified that every night I spend in the city is time with Mum I can never get back. And when I’m with Mum, I’ll worry that I’ve abandoned my children.
So underneath all the school decisions, my real question is: do I preserve the children’s stability, village life and daily relationship with the grandparents who raised them during possibly the last part of Mum’s life — while remaining trapped in a family situation that has become unbearable? Or accept significant disruption now, move the children towards a city life with greater independence and potentially better educational opportunities, and somehow divide myself between being the father they need and the son I desperately want to be while I still have my mum?
Every option feels like protecting someone by hurting someone else. I genuinely cannot tell anymore whether I'm making decisions from love, fear, anger, guilt or exhaustion. I’d really value your perspective on what is healthiest for the children and for me.