AIBU to be LIVID at my DSS mother

[Gooodmorningusa]

A long post. im livid and upset and I can’t sleep. I think I know how this is going to go but oh my god I need to vent.

my DSS mum, I feel is taking the absolute piss and I think she’s an audacious cow.

the back story is, we have DSS (8) EOW, I have been in his life since he was 2.5 and me and DH share a 2 year old boy. I work in a school office so I am fortunate enough to have most of the school holidays off (literally 12 weeks out of the 13!) so in the school holidays I step up and have DSS extra. So on the weekend he comes EOW, he comes on Friday morning, and we keep him till Tuesday evening and he goes home before bed time. I have always done this since he started in reception class and I do this for two reasons, so he has more time with us and also to help out his mum who is single and has to cut her hours during the school hols. In term time it returns to the normal EOW.

last week my 2yo DS was poorly with chicken pox and it floored him, early hours of Saturday morning he had a fever, had a funny turn, his eyes rolled into the back of his head and we couldn’t bring him round. It was horrible and he was rushed in an ambulance with me and DH stayed at home till MIL arrived to sit in the house with DSS as he was sleeping upstairs. DH came to hospital soon as he could. I was hysterical and have never seen my son so poorly and it frightened me, i thought he was gone when his eyes rolled into the back of his head. Anyways he was kept in hospital till Sunday night, we got home at 8pm. DH stayed with us most of the time while we waited for tests and DSS stayed with MIL (his grandma) then went back to his mums on Sunday evening. Just to add his cousins were there at grandmas too so not like he was the only child there.

anyways DH ex has booted off basically. Ringing up calling DH a selfish dad for staying at hospital all weekend and shipping DSS off to grandmas 🤯 so anyways DSS has come back this weekend as he was upset his missed his weekend last week. So I get a text earlier today off his mother ‘it makes sense for you to keep him till Tuesday as you needed to give it a miss this week’ ….. 😵‍💫so I reply saying no actually that wasnt the agreement, i have plans including an appointment of my own, wedding dress shopping with my SIL on Monday and I am going into work on Tuesday to do my admin. My mum will be looking after DS for these.
she then proceeds to call me selfish and tells me how I’m ‘palming my own son off’ and that ‘she knows I secretly hate her DS’ plus loads of other shit which I don’t think I deserve. In her opinion I should be making up for
the time I missed earlier this week. I reminded her my DS was very poorly and I also reminded her DH was in work on those two days so it’s always me who facilitates the extra contact.
my DH is fuming and has confronted her and she has repeated the same shit to him.
shes basically annoyed that she had To cancel her plans / work on Monday and Tuesday. But my DS was poorly and I didn’t sleep a wink all weekend with checking on him and being on a hospital ward. I admit that on Monday and Tuesday this week I didn’t think about DSS at all, I was shattered and I just let me DS sleep in my arms all day.

Would I be wrong if I told her to suck my big toe from now on?

He went to work and forced her to take emergency days off her work

One shift and one cancelled day out the child wasn’t invited to.

Stop providing free childcare

For Christ's sake if you act like a doormat you can't be surprised if people wipe their feet on you.

Childcare is between your OH and his ex to sort out, the end.

One is a lot when you ordinarily only do 4 a month.

OP said it was Monday and Tuesday. That’s two days. And the mum already has to cut her hours to cover the school holidays because the dad doesn’t take any time off to help cover the school holidays.

The problem is that the “favour days” have become a 3-year-old routine. It’s realistic that they’re now an expectation.

If this went back to court, a judge would regard those extra days in the summer as routine and part of the contract arrangement the parents mutually agreed. They’d see those days as the DH’s part of the arrangement regardless of the fact the OP is doing much of the childcare on those two extra days.

That doesn’t make it OK for the ex to speak to the OP like she has. But to regard these as favour days when it’s very different to doing a favour on the odd day is minimising this.

There’s an 8 year old in the middle who doesn’t deserve to have his long-standing arrangement of extra contact with his dad and brother abruptly stopped. It’s up to the DH to solve this and sort.

I do think you need to stop covering for your DH. it's put you in an awkward position now with his ex. Step back and tell DH to step up as a father, apologise and reconcile with his ex, and offer cover 50% in school holidays himself would be a good start. He needs to show more care towards DSS. Sending money does not make a father son relationship.

Sorry…there is absolutely no way my husband would accept seeing his children EOW only, even if it was what I wanted. It’s a pathetic amount of time.

Ex wife sounds awful and your husband must have a penis made of solid gold. I can’t think of any other reason that you’d be willing to ignore the reality of this situation to this extent.

She didn't take parental leave when her mother was in an accident. She allowed OP to cover her childcare.

Apologise? For what? OP please don't apologise whatever you do.

What of it? If the OP had refused and the mother couldn’t get anyone else to look after her child, the mother would have had to take parental leave but the point is she would have been entitled to it.

@Gooodmorningusa she's being a twat now but she's angry and I think she has a right to be.

This is on your husband and not you. He let his child down last week and he cost her money and ruined her plans.

I would tell him he has to sort it out. He has to admit HE fucked up (not you), apologise sincerely and cover any lost wages.

He also needs to tell her to stop being vile to you and about your child. That's not ok.

That you all need a reset and stop all this awfulness because it seems like it's been working relatively ok so far.

If anything like this happens again, he sorts childcare to cover his time or he takes time off.

He's not treating his children equally and he's not being a good father to his child who was here first and doesn't deserve shitty parenting.

Like other people have pointed out here, the issue is actually your DH.

The only people responsible for your DSS is your DH and his mother. Your DH uses you for childcare on the days that he has agreed to have his son but can't do himself. So when you can't cover for him, it is still his responsibility to sort out childcare for his son on his days (like how his mother covered for him while he was at the hospital). Your DH did not do that. Nor did he inconvenience himself by taking time off work to look after his son himself. And in failing to do that, he fucked over his ex. She has every right to be angry at that. She is wrong to be taking that out on you, though, because it isn't actually you responsibility to provide childcare. It is your DH's. Let him sort this out.

There’s an 8 year old in the middle who doesn’t deserve to have his long-standing arrangement of extra contact with his dad and brother abruptly stopped

What they need to do is sort the court order to 50:50

Stop payments and have him over at tea time when his father is back from work.

They mean for the DH to apologise…

I understand but her anger is misdirected at OP, should be at ops hubby. Thing is ex can go to court but it won’t be OP that is taken to court and bound by a legal agreement, it will be her husband. So my point is don’t speak to her like shit when she can retract her help whenever she wants because she is not legally or emotionally obligated to provide for this child. Whilst it is OP doing the childcare, it is a favour and what happens when you help someone and they treat this way? You stop helping them because people don’t like to be mistreated and taken for granted. If the child’s contact time is reduced that is on his father not on OP. If his father is so keen to show up, he will find a way to make it happen. If that means annual leave or additional days in the week or EOW and Sundays that aren’t his. All that’s fine but it’s for the dad to do not the OP and I would end my help because I would not tolerate being spoken to like that. OP has bigger problems than a twat ex wife tho

Not the OP apologise, the DH apologise.

Presumably for admittedly not giving his son a second thought and being a shitty father.

"What of it?" 😂😂😂
Ok, just ignore the huge double standards. The entitlement of the ex.

I am interested in how this would work.

50-50 but the child only comes ‘over’ at tea time when the dad is home from work. Where would he be coming over from if the dad has 50-50? He would be sleeping there every other week. Dad would have to start doing school runs, prepare breakfast, homework, laundry, doctors appointments, school interviews etc 50% of the time. He would be parenting, not having a random child ‘over’ when it is convenient

Sorry but your partner is doing sod all for his kid. Her timing for venting wasn't great, but no doubt she has kept a lid on it for years.

The ex doesn't deserve an apology from anyone after stalking Facebook, getting someone to send her photos of OPs child and harassing OP.

The point is that they have an agreement in place that the ex relies on.

If there was an emergency then no problem with asking the ex to cancel plans/shifts because good co-parenting involves give and take.

However, there was no emergency. He just didn’t want to take days off work. He made his ex cancel her work shift instead - on days where he normally has the child.

If he’d needed to be at home to help OP or was exhausted then fine. But that wasn’t the case.

The ex deals with everything for the child 12 days out of every 14 days, all year round - except during the holidays where she gets an extra four nights off. Thats a lot on her shoulders, and exhausting doing it solo.

There’s also the issue of how many shifts has she had to cancel due to her child already? He does NOTHING in the week during term time. That means every childhood illness, every time there’s a problem, it’s the ex having to take time off work to look after the child. This will never fall on the dad, because he doesn’t see the child during the working week.

So the ex having to cancel yet another work shift might be a much bigger problem than the actual dad taking a day off work when he’s supposed to be having his child…. And of course, bear in mind she’s the only earner in her household.

I can’t see why you’re so determined to defend him? It’s hard to understand why you think he can cancel an agreement to have his child at the last minute because he wanted to go to work? OP admits he didn’t even think about his elder son.

OP has done nothing wrong but the dad has been really unfair to his ex.

Exactly.

He will be doing what he's taken for granted that the women in his life have been doing for him for years.

Any money he would never agree to 50/50.

If one cancelled work shift is no big deal, why couldn't he do it?

Asking if the DH or OP can have her son when she has an emergency isn’t entitlement; they could say no.

Expecting the DH and OP to not cancel at short notice an arrangement that has been going on for at least 3 years isn’t entitlement either.

As I’ve repeatedly said, the ex having a go at the OP isn’t right. But, especially since this is the only issue the OP has ever had with her in about 6 years, the ex doesn’t sound entitled. She sounds like she’s responding unreasonably here and being emotive, and it seems both her and the OP are getting at each other rather than dealing with the big problem which is the DH.

Yeah I mean the ex wife has lost any moral high ground she may have had in this situation.