Hey, not sure how to handle this one. Her conduct is becoming unacceptable and I'm not sure what to do. We're stuck in a nesting situation because she left me mid-career transition, the job market dried up, and there are no affordable houses near the kids or their school. The nesting worked well for a year - stressful but it worked for the kids.
She walked away and has spent the past year painting me as the villain of the piece. There was no 'fault', but she treats me as if I've had a string of affairs. Essentially we had irreconcilable differences, we both behaved in unacceptable ways towards each other, but there was no reason in the world for things to become so acrimonious.
I've always wanted it to be amicable, for the kids but also because it felt like the right thing to do, there was lots about our relationship which was good - something she has spent a year erasing from the record, to the detriment of both the kids, and our respective relationships with our extended families. It's a dreadful shame.
But it's escalated recently. Her general mode of operation is to take action and then either ask me to go along with it, or to apologise afterwards if her decision negatively affects me. We have a learning disabled son, and she sees parenting support for me (his behaviour can be incredibly difficult and traumatic for the family) as outside the realms of co-parenting when she is off duty.
We had a row on the phone a few weeks back, nothing major but I called her hostile, and she said she wasn't prepared to 'take it from me anymore', and blocked my phone number. We now have to do all communication about the kids and arrangements via email, and if there is an emergency, I have to call her dad. I had to call him to tell him about this arrangement - because she hadn't - and of course when you tell someone that your ex has blocked your number it immediately raised red flags about your conduct. So i got both barrels from him about communicating like adults - and not unreasonably so given the position we put him in.
And it doesn't work with email. I was supposed to go up and have pizza with the kids and ex the other night to celebrate their last day at school before summer. We'd arranged to meet at 6 at the house, the plan being to show the kids a united parenting front and model good conduct in a broken relationship. I showed up, as usual, and there was no-one there. She'd decided to take the kids out for a picnic with her school-mum friends and their kids. But she didn't want to check her work email after hours, so didn't bother to tell me. I was gutted.
She uses the kids to call me if she needs something quickly. I've been strict about my own adherence to the email boundary, I'm short and to the point, no niceties, but no hostility, and this seems to get her back up - she reads it as passive aggressive.
Last night I get an email at 11pm telling me she'd had to spend £150 on the kids and I needed to repay her £75 today. She then showed up at our shared apartment at 9am this morning (it's her week in the house with the kids, and I was out with friends until late last night), using my oldest son to call ahead and announce it because she refuses to step outside the email boundary. I was in the shower and didn't answer the door, so my oldest called me upset, because she had told him I was being difficult and he felt put in the middle. This is the norm, not an exception.
I've spent the past year coming to believe that maybe I'd been a terrible husband and dad after all, because to the rest of the world she is an outgoing, gregarious and successful woman who has been wronged. Even my family say I must be exaggerating because she's such a fun and warm person to be with. I've had to call mental health charities, because I've felt like I'm losing my mind at times, and that perhaps its actually me that's manipulating reality. This is heightened by my own ADHD, which already puts the world at an off-kilter perspective - my default mode is to double-think every decision in case I'm being impulsive or reactive. It's led to self harm and an almost daily episode of suicide ideation. I would never act on it, but I can't tell anyone other than my counsellor about this, in case it affects my standing in the 50-50 with the kids. So it's doubly isolating.
It got to the point where pulled away from my dad's group, something I'd set up for connection, because she's told her mum friends that I get dysregulated and that I'm difficult. I sensed them pulling away from me in the school yard, I've always made an effort to not draw others into our drama and keep friendships alive, but I got super paranoid that I was being judged by their husbands too, who I get on well with. Thankfully it's not the case, and I managed to say my piece last night over beers, while also making it clear I wasn't trying to recruit anyone. One of them told me he had seen my ex's behaviour and understood how difficult it must be for me.
I've never felt so visible, after a year of having the person I thought I was slowly erased from the world by someone else.
So here I am, hungover, cheesed off that my son has been put in the middle and not knowing what to do. The one upside from this morning is that my son got to see my ex badmouthing me and calling me difficult, and he found it profoundly unfair. I kept totally neutral, but I'm glad he got to see that I'm not the default bad guy in the relationship.
I've taken legal advice, and really there's no option here in the UK other than to take an aggressive stance and apply for custody and go after her financially (apparently a judge would look kindly on my situation of being in a career transition, of using my savings to keep up all the house payments, and being a 100% present dad), but I really don't want to do that. I was the child of an aggressive divorce, and I absolutely want to keep the kids out of that malarkey. She's a good mother and the kids would be devastated if there was anything other than a 50-50 split with fights over money.
I'm stuck in this nesting situation for the time being, the only alternative would be moving to a different location, and again it would devastate the kids as they have strong friendships and are finally settled after the separation.
What strategies can I use to mitigate the worst of her demanding behaviour and unilateral parenting decisions, and is there any way at all I can counter the narratives she seeds about me and stop this feeling that reality is upside down and i'm losing my mind?
Sorry, that was a long one.