ADK writes: "A Sincere Thank You"
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LM & DW,
Hi there. I just want to thank you for your insight.
I sit here with tears in my eyes, as my 3 soon-to-be stepsons were just taken from our nanny at their school by our own PEW. My boyfriend is performing surgery and can’t answer the phone, and I was on the phone with the nanny when the PEW said “I’m taking my sons,” and got them out of the car. When asked if she wanted to speak with me, she just rolled her eyes and answered “no.”
It has been a horrible road for us.
When I stumbled upon your website a few days ago, I was amazed at the similarities - not even similarities - it was almost verbatim. Last night, I showed my boyfriend page, after page, after page, after page from your site and after much reading and much silence and flabbergasted looks, he cried and told me he loved me for finding this site for him. No one has believed him when he says the way she acts, the horrible, unspeakable, poisonous things she does. He has questioned his own sanity, wondered if it was him all along. Your website has been a validation that has been priceless.
My boyfriend and I have been looking at engagement rings, and plan to be married within the year. But I dread the e-mails, the texts, the phone calls when she finds out we are engaged and tries to destroy what should be a happy time for us. We do the low-contact thing. He picks up her calls only on Wednesdays and other than that, only if there is an emergency. She texts and e-mails all the time, but most of them go without a response from him. But the low-contact has now “poked the skunk,” if you will. She’s angry. Very, very, very angry. She needs the attention. She craves it. Last month she told us the 4-year-olds mouth was bleeding and he had a fever. None of it was true. Do you have any advice?
We don’t know how to handle this person. She has such a volatile personality disorder. There is zero consistency unless she has constant access to my boyfriend and/or gets her way 100% of the time.
If you have any pearls of wisdom you can offer us, we will devour them. We are not the happy people we used to be. We now obsess, and worry, and are consumed with contempt for this person, and don’t know how to remove her from our lives to the point that we can survive.
~ADK
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ADK & Partner,
You have our sympathies. We understand what you’re going through. We do have some pearls of wisdom which we will preface by saying these are mere suggestions based upon our experiences and contacts with others. We are not experts as much as experienced veterans of a “divorce & custody war” that doesn’t seem to have an end. The suggestions we make may not be the perfect fit for your circumstances. Some, you or others you may speak to, may not be something you wish to try at all. Several will prove very difficult for you to act upon because it goes against one’s general good-nature.
Low-Contact can agitate the PEW. Too bad for her. As for you two, it’s a matter of managing it the best you can. Much of her parenting, actions, reactions, etc. will trouble you to the depths of your very soul and you’ll have to dig deep to be able to identify what is worth responding to and what is worth maintaining silence. You can only control the things you can control. You cannot control her parenting. You cannot control her reactions to your activities and parenting.
Suggestions:
- Make all contact via email only. Though you’ll still have to weed through her viciousness, if there is anything that qualifies for a response (emergency related to the children or some other court sanctioned contact), you reply to that only and treat the rest as if it never existed. Copy yourself on every email you send and keep them filed and organized along with everything she sends you. If nothing in the email warrants a response - don’t respond.
- If phone contact must be made, you stay on a single specific topic. If she goes on a tangent, hang up the phone. If she says one cross word, hang up the phone. I do this all the time to the point now that actual phone contact is rare. Very rare.
- If the child is sick on her custody time - it’s “her problem.” On the surface that sounds callous. It’s not. It’s part of the parallel parenting process. What happens on her time is dealt with by her on her time. What happens on your time is dealt with by you on your time. Regular sicknesses don’t require anything but an informative contact, if that. I don’t even like that because in our case, the PEW then has all kinds of suggestions and demands which is something I don’t ask for and don’t need. If she escalates, I ignore it.
The other very big part of the equation is your relationship. I can absolutely assure you that our relationship has experienced incredible frustrations associated with my PEW. You and your partner have to maintain open dialogue on how you’re feeling. Try to avoid having PEW become the “most-common” thread between you - it’s unhealthy and it’s not a positive contribution to your relationship. I highly suggest you have a phrase you use or some activity you do when you’ve had enough of talking about the PEW. Both of you must respect one another’s “stop sign.”
Your partner must be able to hear and understand your frustrations with the situation without being defensive. You must be able to communicate your frustrations without being judgemental or becoming a blamer. He knows he’s made a humongous mistake in choosing and marrying the PEW. It will stick with him forever. He doesn’t need constant reminders.
Your partner must be able to put up and maintain boundaries under maximum “attack” from the PEW. Not only must he shield himself from the constant barrage of chaos and terror, he must shield you from it, and whenever he reasonably can - shield the children from it.
Block her phone number if you can. Get another number (2nd-line) which she can call to blather on into voice mail. Inform her that only calls to that line will get attention (maybe). Block her from texting you. Block block block.
The nanny pick-up interference has me alarmed, but without knowing the specifics of your custody order/arrangement, I can’t give you any suggestions for that beyond - if she violates the custody order - you take action. Every single time, you take action. It may seem like a waste of time and money, but without showing her you’re serious, she will continue to do it and get away with it. For a while, even the court may let her get away with it. Press on until you just can’t emotionally or financially.
If you want to reply here with court order specifics regarding custody, we can discuss more about that here. In the meantime, click on the labels on the left here. Some of the topics that could prove helpful include: low-contact, borderline personality disorder, book reviews (the two I’ve done are very good and enlightening reading), fleas (will show some of how our relationship has been affected), step-parenting.
Your relationship will have this cancer on it as long as she lives and breathes. How you manage it will determine its success. You and your partner will have to be stronger than it seems you can be in order to navigate these rough waters.
Best wishes.
~LM & DW.
March 16th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Cancer…that is a good way of describing the PEW. I strongly agree with the suggestion to openly discuss, with each other, your tolerance for discussing the situation and then when to wrap it up and get back to your own lives, yourselves, your relationship. Don’t let her poison bleed into your relationship with each other.
March 19th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
“Every single time, you take action. It may seem like a waste of time and money, but without showing her you’re serious, she will continue to do it and get away with it. For a while, even the court may let her get away with it. Press on until you just can’t emotionally or financially.”
I would say, on the financial front, press on even then. We have far more power than we know and we can do many, many things on our own, or with the advice of an attorney, but without actual representation. I’m not advocating that someone should never have an attorney, just that you’re not helpless if you can’t afford one.
And on the “cancer” front? I completely agree. I expressed it, just this past weekend, as “constant pain, without the benefit of medication.” But cancer fits so much better!
March 19th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Hi!! Thank you for your response, we really took it to heart as we had been trying to maintain low-contact even before we discovered your website. You had asked about the particular custody situation at hand so you could comment further……….so here we go…………
PEW is Primary Residential Parent. Our schedule is as follows:
Week A:
Wednesday: Pick kids up from school, they spend the night, we take them to school in the morning
Thursday: Pick kids up from school again, they spend the night, we take them to school in the morning
Week B:
Wednesday: We pick kids up from school, they spend the night, we take them to school in the morning
Friday: Same as above.
Saturday: Ours all day and all night
Sunday: Ours all day and all night and we drop them off at school on Monday morning.
In the past two weeks, two interferences have happened…………she has not attempted this previously, but she’s getting brave I guess.
One day was our day when we were supposed to get them from school. I was supposed to pick them up since my boyfriend was working and she knew this. She picked all 3 of them up from their 2 schools an hour and a half early. She never called or texted, nothing…………when it was 3:30 and one of us was at one school and one of us was at the other, we realized that they were gone and the schools told us she had picked them up early. My b/f called the police, who told us it was between us and a judge, and that the police would contact her but the policy is that if the children are safe and their whereabouts known and they are not in danger, they will not remove them!!!! We were SHOCKED. Of course her attorney said she was confused on whether we needed her to get the kids or not (we NEVER said we did) and in an “abundance of caution,” picked up the children. Sure. Right.
The other incident was a few days ago, when the nanny went to pick up the children on OUR day. Apparently the PEW had called the school saying she was on her way to pick them up and not to release them to our nanny. She took all 3 (the youngest one was asleep in our nanny’s car until she wrenched him out), refused to speak with me on the phone and told the nanny that if “Their father wants his kids tell him he can call me.” Mind you the schools have the copies of the MSA but take the “we don’t want to get involved in confrontation” approach so pretty much do whatever she says. It’s infuriating.
Any further advice??? The schools don’t seem to care about the custodial interference and seem to view us as making trouble over something small, and the police implied that they have their hands tied. They saw the MSA and everything, and still said they could not go and reclaim the children from her after she took them on our day. Recommendations?
Thanks again,
ADK
March 22nd, 2008 at 2:57 pm
ADK-
We are having the same problem. My bf has every other weekend and wed dinners. He is also supposed to have the right of first refusal meaning anytime his ex needs a sitter or daycare for more than an hour she is to contact him and offer him the children. She has done this maybe 2 of 50 possible times. She lets the kids sit in daycare while she works until late. Her boyfriend will pick them up from daycare. My bf has a court order that says he gets this right and the school won’t inforce this because they are not want to piss off the PEW and the police won’t inforce it because they says its a civil matter, not criminal. We have been to court 6+ times on this issue alone and the judge never holds her in contempt and does nothing more to inforce the order. Her and her lawyer will file all these bs charges to “muddy the waters” so the judge always sides somewhere in the middle. I know what you are going through, it is sooooo frustrating. We have been told to go back to court and request the order is written in a way that allows us to pick the kids up from daycare and we have also been told our only choice is to file more motions to try and hold her in contempt. Good luck!