What's reasonable?

[Rainingpurpleglitter]

OH has kids with his ex - their relationship has never been great and contact between them is only ever about problems to do with the children.

But Just recently she's moved and is now asking him to go over to do bits round the house - fit blinds etc. when he drops the kids off. Theres been various other calls for other things in past couple of weeks too

Is this normal? Shouldn't she be finding someone else to do things like this for her? Maybe I'm wrong, I don't want to be jumped on and abused for posting just curious as to where you draw a line with things like this....

interesting - when Ex first left I never asked him for any help, probably because I knew he would not and then would report back to the dragon and ti would be plastered over facebook.

Example - can you pick up meds from the chemist for your child please. Complete vitriolic abuse appeared on FB ( I do not have an account - reported back by friends) about my lack of parenting, neglect, abuse not to plan and make sure I had them.
I had a broken ankle - could not drive, sure as hell could not do 2 miles on crutches !

Now 4 yrs down the line - I do say can you change the smoke alarm which you stuck so high up I can not reach and oh can you reach the fuse box because I can not, next door neighbour is away and we have no elec downstairs. Latter one he refused to do - so we had a v v cold weekend as could not afford emergency electrician and next door neighbour came back Monday morning who then took 10 seconds to do.

Reality check as to the nature of the request surely.

satinthedark that isn't fair either. I would go out of my way to help if there was a medical reason why SS mum couldn't do something.

LadyVamp - most reasonable people would, but apparently I should have planned better and not left it to pick up after I broke my ankle!!!!

Yet another example of my poor parenting!

I seriously do not expect him to do anything - hell I have hung blinds, unblocked bogs, change the flush mechanism on the toilet - done all sorts of "men things" but he now asks me if I need anything done!!

That there are still children just muddies the waters.

Those waters will always be muddied I'm afraid. The children are not going to disappear.

I did not mention the insecurity issue out of nowhere (or to be nasty/belittling etc) the OP herself said she had fears that this extra contact would bring them closer.

The dynamic between a neighbour and ExW is of course very different, however I would hope that my (theoretical) ExH would give me (the mother of his children) priority over a neighbour if something needed done in the house, as it would be his children he was doing it for.

I've never asked my ex to do any jobs for me in 14 years and he's never asked me. It's actually never occurred to me to ask him, I went to friends and family if I needed anything. He's done punctures on bikes for the dcs, but they asked him. We separated and went our own ways, communicated about the children and that was that. I'm not saying that's the right or only way, but we split up because we couldn't spend time together without arguing, what would be the point in recreating the conditions in which those arguments took place?