Need to know if I’m wrong

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msmia

New member
I feel like I’m loosing my mind a little here & am so happy I found this thread to be able to speak freely. Me, my kids, my kids father, his wife & their children all moved out of the state we were living in to a new one. My ex has a habit & by habit I mean extreme need to control everyone & everything around him but I hoped moving to a new place would be good for all of us a step in the right direction. Well over the last few months things once again have gone south because I won’t give in to his demands anymore. I don’t have much parenting time with my kids this month between his parenting time & his week vacation he will have our kids. I only had yesterday (the 7th) & the 28th to take our kids pumpkin picking & there would have been nothing left by the 28th. So I took them yesterday. His wife texts me late last night to tell me that because I went first they went with their brother & sister so my kids had to “miss out” (her literal wording) but they picked pumpkins for them to carve. So now because I went first my kids will not pumpkin pick with their dad & siblings. I am being made out as this horrible person just for going first. I told his wife I don’t care if they had gone first it wouldn’t have made any difference to my life I still would have taken them. Am I wrong for going first? I don’t understand what I did wrong here & am so sick of living with this anxiety he puts me under

I was now told today by my 11 year old that he said I am NOT allowed to trick or treat on “his side” of town during my time with our kids on Halloween…
 
@msmia You can choose not to have a relationship with this lady that involves her contacting you about your child since she's clearly very emotionally immature.

You can choose not to respond and perpetuate these kinds of conversations.

Entertaining the convo with her about the content of her message, is setting a precedent for these kinds of interactions to continue.

You both could benefit from stronger boundaries.
 
@msmia That is a conflict avoidant mindset aka let me do this thing I'm not comfortable doing in this moment to avoid exacerbating the conflict.

When in reality it's - let me do this thing in this moment because I don't think I can handle this person getting very upset with me.

Boundaries are how we reduce conflict; entertaining the conflict is counterintuitive.
 
@halterfr33 I see what you’re saying. I personally have a very hard time setting boundaries & sticking to them which isn’t a them problem that’s a me problem
 
@msmia
I personally have a very hard time setting boundaries & sticking to them which isn’t a them problem that’s a me problem
Click to expand...

Hey! That's a huge acknowledgement and excellent accountability.

I think the vast majority of us start out that way since there's not a whole lot of parenting around how to set and maintain boundaries. Knowing that me having poor boundaries would mean I wouldn't know how to teach my child differently, is a big motivator for me to change.

If you have the emotional space to work on your boundaries, Dr. Lerner's - The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships, is a super easy read.
 
@msmia Do you want your kids to know how to set boundaries or let people walk over them? Then you need to show them how by doing it yourself. That's how I'd frame it!
 
@msmia Let it be a bigger issue. As you said, damned if you do, damned if you don't. So, if you're going to be damned either way, do what works best for you.
 
@toysernis1 To be completely honest it’s because I didn’t want our kids to be separated from not only their dad but their siblings..so I put myself in a position knowing how it could go unfortunately so my kids could not feel torn
 
@msmia That makes sense.

Did they have kiddo(s) stay home with childcare while they took the other kiddos to go to pumpkin patch? Or, did they simply go when it wasn’t their parenting time?
 
@msmia So, that seems fine, yeah?

Like, he may have preferred for all of the kids in his household to go together, and that’s fine. But it doesn’t give him the right to deny you from taking your own children on another occasion. After all, you may want to decorate and carve pumpkins at home, right? And his decision to do a separate trip with just the ‘other’ kids seems fine, too, assuming that the whole group of kids hadn’t already been given the impression that they would do the pumpkin activity as a group.

But in no way did you do ANYTHING wrong in this scenario. Well, unless you had previously agreed with his plan, and deliberately gone early just to mess with him. It doesn’t sound like that is the case.

Instead, it sounds as if he had some particular plan in mind, and you inadvertently added a small change to how he had envisioned it. Rather than just roll with the change (which is about 98% of parenting!), he acted out, and tried to make you the bad guy.

This all sounds terribly familiar.

In my experience, just continue to manage your household and your own children, and your relationship with them. You can’t dictate what he does in his household, and neither should he dictate what you do in yours. Certainly you should strive to work in harmony, but if he chooses to ‘punish’ your kids whenever things don’t go exactly as he liked, well… his childish behavior is really out of your control.
 
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