I'll try and keep this to the point, as a lot happened and I need some advice on how to go about this. I've been with my man for 9 months now. He was a single father to a 8 year old girl when I met him. He is the man of my dreams. Unfortunately, he got his ex pregnant by mistake during a drunken one-night stand for the 2nd time (before we met) and she insisted on keeping it. I was OK with his situation because he’s a great guy, treats me so well and I'm 38 and not too bothered about having kids of my own (he is 35). Prior to the one-night-stand he had been broken up with her for over a year. She put him through hell, cheated on him, dragged him through court for access to his daughter, called the police on him for things he didn't do and so on. He's always been far too nice for his own good and decided to forgive her and stay friends with her for the sake of his daughter after a court custody agreement had been reached. This friendship led them to hook up one drunken night. He received a call about 6 weeks later from her informing him that he was going to be a dad again.
So, after 3 months of dating, she found out about me and went into a jealous frenzy. She stopped giving him access to his daughter and it caused a lot of problems, as the girl is very attached to her father. Over a period of almost a month, every time he went to pick her up she would stand in the door way and force her daughter back into the house and lock the door whilst screaming abuse at him in the street for all to hear. She’d tell him how pathetic he was, bring up the past etc etc and create arguments from nothing. She made him choose between having access to his daughter and having me in his life. Needless to say, this made him hate her again and was the cause of him choosing to no longer be friends. She realised later that this wasn't in her favour, as she was pregnant.
It was clear that she had hoped/expected that he would leave me and choose to prioritise her by moving back in with her to offer support with the pregnancy, birth and baby and my presence in his life had clearly ruined her plans, especially as she saw that we were getting serious as her pregnancy flew by. She trapped him into a relationship with his first child by going off her pills without telling him after he told her he wanted to break up. She believed that keeping the 2nd baby would reel him back in with guilt too, like the first time, but it didn’t happen and she’s now ANGRY that she's doing this alone. She put him through a toxic cycle of abuse before he left her when the first baby was a few months old and he had a long, stressful and expensive battle in court for visitation rights as punishment.
Since the court order agreement (when his daughter was 4), his daughter has spent a lot of time with us and she loves being with us as we provide her with a very loving, stable and healthy family environment and her mother hates this when she hears about it. We know this because recently she cries in the car when he picks her up and tells her dad that her mum is horrible to her when she talks positively about us. Her mum forces her to talk about everything she does with us after she's dropped off and tells her that I’m lying when I tell her I love her, that I want to steal her dad from her, not to listen to me etc etc. She’s a very traumatised and sad child who is made to feel guilty by her mother for being happy with us and for being happy that her father has moved on with a woman she loves too. I don’t act like her mother when we have her and I tell her that she has a mum and I’m not trying to take her place and she always replies with “I know but I wish you were my mummy, my real mummy is horrible to me and daddy”.
During the pregnancy he asked her for a DNA test to prove the child was his (she was livid) and informed her that he won’t be doing anything for the baby until it’s proven the child is his. He stopped being Mr. Nice Guy to her when she showed her nasty side again after she found out about me, so he didn’t go with her to scans, the birth or to her house afterwards to support her with the baby. She agreed to do a paternity test about 10 days after the child was born and it turned out the baby is his. Since then she has been playing mind games, sometimes she will let him briefly see the child when he picks up/drops off the other one and at other times she won’t at all. It’s almost as if she’s bipolar, very nice one week and horrible the next. The baby is a month old now, she’s put him on the birth certificate, as he told her he wants to be involved in his child’s life, but she has not demanded any child maintenance (during the pregnancy she kept going on and on about how much he was going to pay her) and after the birth she was silent. She didn’t give him a say in the baby’s first or last name (she chose a different last name to his). She has also chosen to breastfeed this baby to prolong his rights to access and continues to poison her child’s mind against me.
He’s very formal with her in communication, they only talk about the kids as he has placed a boundary with her where she’s unable to talk about anything else with him, which is good and I know that even if she did try or want to have him back he wouldn’t allow that. There is no insecurity or feeling threatened by her, so that’s not the issue. The issue is how to deal with the daughter situation of her being brainwashed by her mum and what is she playing at with the baby? What could we expect from her behaviour in the future? Why do some mums act this way? I would have expected that she milk him for money and physical support with the baby, but it’s the opposite. Why demand him to claim his child and nag for months for money and support only to go silent afterwards? I feel that it’s finally sunk in with her (after the baby was born) that I’m not going anywhere and that me and him are long term, but what’s the worst she could do? I know she was hoping I’d run for the hills and be heartbroken after finding out the baby is his, but I'm fine and have no intention on doing so and I think this has put her in a new dilemma. I just want to know what I need to potentially prepare for.
Thank you so much for reading all this!