Should I Tell My Ex’s New Girlfriend to Stay Away from My Daughter?
She worries that her daughter will get attached to her ex’s new girlfriend and then be upset when the relationship ends. There’s been a destabilizing history of cheat-and-repeat situations. Should she intervene?
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Dear Chump Lady,
My D-day was four and a half years ago, and I have been happily divorced for three and half years. Although I am extremely grateful for my freedom after 20 years of FW’s abuse and cheating with numerous other women, I am not at complete “meh.” I don’t expect to get there until I can go No Contact when our daughter is an adult.
I still hate my FW.
Not the all-encompassing visceral hate and adrenaline-rush rage that accompanied the initial revelations, but a quiet, comfortable hate that coasts along below the surface. There is a benefit to that non-meh-hate — it is what fuels me into action to protect my daughter.
My D-day arrived because our daughter discovered FW’s cheating (she saw his sexting) and shared her discovery with me. I kicked him out instantly because it was the proof of what I had long suspected. My daughter was 10 years old at the time. And needless to say, it was a traumatic revelation and precipitous family change.
After an initial period of her living only with me, we eventually landed on a co-parenting plan made with a professional mediator that included week-abouts at each house; this schedule lasted for almost three years.
My daughter is now a teenager and she has been living only with me for the past 5 months because her FW-dad cheated on his girlfriend.
It was his third relationship since D-day, and my daughter is done dealing with that crap again. She currently sees FW once a week for dinner, and she wants to do that. She is taking hits from the hopium pipe because she both loves and hates her dad.
My FW is now on relationship [appliance] #4 since D-day, which he recently announced to our daughter. She promptly told him that she did not want to meet his new girlfriend, ever. The first three relationships ended rather catastrophically, and those endings have been hard on my daughter (especially #3 noted above).
She built relationships with these women, and then they left her life.
This exacerbated her feelings of abandonment and added more trauma, which landed her in the psych ward at the hospital for a weekend. My daughter suffers from significant and evolving mental health challenges, including anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts, and I blame FW. I am extremely fortunate that my daughter has excellent health care support.
I don’t want my daughter to meet FW’s #4 or any of his future girlfriends; I don’t want to risk her experiencing yet another relationship breakdown. It is not easy to sit back and watch FW repeatedly model shitty relationships to our daughter.
I am well-versed in Chapter 17 of Leave a Cheater, Gain a Life: I know I can’t control FW’s behaviors; I know I’m supposed to be the “sane parent” and let things play out because my daughter will eventually see his reality (she already does). But how can I do that when I worry daily about my daughter’s emotional well-being?
I am thinking about directly contacting my ex’s new girlfriend and telling her to keep the f**k away from my daughter.
I have asked my daughter if she wants me to have the co-parenting plan legally changed such that she officially lives only with me, but hopium and guilt won’t let her go down that road. Because she is a teenager, what she wants plays a large role in any court decisions about custody, and she has declared openly that she wants to live only with me.
So far FW has not pushed back or insisted we return to the co-parenting plan, and for the moment things are okay. I don’t want to pursue court orders behind my daughter’s back because that would break her trust in me.
So, do I continue to just let it play out? I don’t trust FW not to introduce #4 to our daughter in some inadvertent-yet-contrived way. What would you do? Do you have some advice on how I can protect my daughter from another FW-induced nuclear fallout, especially now that her mental health is of great concern? Oh, how I wish he lived on another planet.
Thanks,
BetterNow
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Dear BetterNow,
Absolutely do NOT reach out to girlfriend #4 (or #6,352).
I understand the impulse to protect your daughter and throw yourself on the grenade of your ex’s stupidity. Anyone who has ever bred with a FW understands that feeling of powerlessness as the FW detonates their life once again. To be a chump is to be the chaos janitor. Clean up on aisle 5! Get the mops and police tape! We’re coming in with reinforcements!
But BetterNow, you need to stand back. Not only would it look bad to the court (she’s harassing my girlfriends, Your Honor!), it won’t ultimately help your child.
This is not your battle to fight. It’s your daughter’s.
She needs to learn how to have boundaries and protect her own heart. But you can do a lot to help on that front.
- Be the sane and steady parent.
- Teach her how to disengage from FWs.
- Practice boundary scripts.
- Get her professional support.
I am well-versed in Chapter 17 of Leave a Cheater, Gain a Life: I know I can’t control FW’s behaviors; I know I’m supposed to be the “sane parent” and let things play out because my daughter will eventually see his reality (she already does). But how can I do that when I worry daily about my daughter’s emotional well-being?
Girlfriend, we are ALL worried about our children’s emotional well-being. I do not give my sane parenting advice lightly. I’ve LIVED it. I got sued for a decade by a mentally ill man. A guy who rarely paid support and hasn’t reimbursed me for a single medical or extracurricular expense in his life. A hoarder. A weirdo. At times he had roommates and couldn’t remember their last names in court. I could list a thousand horrors. Even though I had physical custody and decision making, the court still believed Children Need Both Parents.
So please listen, I was in family court with documented mental illness. You’ve got My Ex is a Man-Slut. Four girlfriends in four years? They don’t care. Now, I’m not a lawyer and I can’t give you legal advice. I’m just telling you what I experienced and what I’ve seen play out on this blog for years. You need some very compelling evidence that he’s unfit to keep him away from your child. So, don’t be chasing off his girlfriends like a wild loon.
Focus on what you DO control.
You control your parenting and how you choose to support your daughter. You do not control your ex’s wandering dick and the emotional fallout.
Be the sane parent.
My daughter is now a teenager and she has been living only with me for the past 5 months because her FW-dad cheated on his girlfriend.
I’d approach this as your daughter is living with you because that’s her preference, not because of some glaring moral deficiency in your ex. You can present it to us that way, we get it. But to your ex, the court, or anyone else — you are respecting your daughter’s wishes. Often kids get tired of the back and forth. Teenagers are about their friends and activities. Just focus on being her stable home. Less focus on dad’s wandering dick. We are decentering him.
Disengage from his drama.
Focusing on whose heart he’s breaking now — yours, the girlfriend’s, your daughters — is centrality to the FW. Model “he’s not that important.” FWs gotta FW. Shrug.
She currently sees FW once a week for dinner, and she wants to do that. She is taking hits from the hopium pipe because she both loves and hates her dad.
That’s her right, to love and hate him. Think of how long it took you to figure out your ex was a FW. She’s just a kid. It’s her right to love him, as unjust and fucked up as that feels. Anyone who has bred with a FW understands the competing feelings of wanting to protect our children from harm, and respecting their relationship. Alas, people have a right to their shitty relationships. Don’t bring it up, unless it’s something that would rise to the level of danger with the courts, like physical, sexual, or financial abuse or addiction. (And even then it’s pretty grim, ask many of us how we know.) You’ve gotten her excellent mental health support — great. She can work out her dad issues with her therapist.
You do you. Be the sane, show up parent. That pays dividends. Parenting is a long game.
Practice boundary scripts.
My FW is now on relationship [appliance] #4 since D-day, which he recently announced to our daughter. She promptly told him that she did not want to meet his new girlfriend, ever.
This is where you can help your daughter. Let her know she has agency. It’s okay to tell dad no. Explain that when you set boundaries like “I don’t want to meet the girlfriend” you have to let go of how that boundary is received. (Dad gets mad.) That’s how boundaries work. You can figure out scripts — ChatGPT is great for this. You can offer to pick her up if she needs to leave suddenly. Or find a friend to call. The point is — she has POWER and choices. It’s not up to you to save her and swoop in like a Valkyrie avenging his girlfriends. No, your daughter is the decider. SHE is her own Valkyrie.
I am thinking about directly contacting my ex’s new girlfriend and telling her to keep the f**k away from my daughter.
This is a terrible idea. First of all, your daughter can and should express her own boundaries. Second, this woman is an innocent. Her only crime is having the poor judgement to date your ex. (And you are the last person to judge her here, you bred with the guy.) It’s futile to warn the next one and you just come off looking like the crazy ex. Not a good look if you wind up back in court.
Get her professional support.
This exacerbated her feelings of abandonment and added more trauma, which landed her in the psych ward at the hospital for a weekend. My daughter suffers from significant and evolving mental health challenges, including anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts, and I blame FW. I am extremely fortunate that my daughter has excellent health care support.
I can see how this situation would be terrifying for you. But you’ve done the best you can in a terrible situation — you got your daughter excellent help. Trust her care team and keep being an awesome mom.
I don’t want my daughter to meet FW’s #4 or any of his future girlfriends; I don’t want to risk her experiencing yet another relationship breakdown. It is not easy to sit back and watch FW repeatedly model shitty relationships to our daughter.
Yeah, I didn’t want my son to invite his father to his wedding. (Not my call.) I don’t think politicians should give billionaires tax breaks. I hate reality TV shows. Life is feeling helpless while shitty people model shitty behavior. The antidote is realizing we can’t change them, we can only change ourselves.
So have boundaries and the courage to say, hey, this is unacceptable to me. That’s what you modeled to your daughter when you left her father. You’ve already taught her so much.
BetterNow,
If I were to try and say what I think in one sentence, it would be “Ensure that your daughter always feels empowered to, and supported in, articulating what it is that she wants to her father and that her right to say ‘No’ is inalienable and enduring.”
As CL states, your daughter’s relationship with her father (and his partners) is for her to control and to navigate. I suspect that her telling him that she does not want to meet the new girlfriend demonstrates that she both knows this and is finding her voice.
All you can do is stay sane and support her.
LFTT
This is the next thing I would say⬆️⬆️⬆️
Your daughter is at an age where she is developmentally pulling away from parents. She needs to know that you are “centered” enough to provide a safe landing place, with boundaries and without adding any drama. That’s alot of progress post-divorce. She’s fortunate to have you and access to mental health resources.
Excellent advice from CL.
When my teen decided to cut an important male mentor (and father figure of several years) from his life, he practiced a script, had me join him at his therapy appointment, then I recorded as he made the phone call on speaker while we listened. He had our silent support during it, got immediate feedback from us after the call, and we were able to play it back and dissect the man’s reaction. (For what it’s worth, he was shocked and sorry.)
This occurred because the man brought his girlfriend into their relationship; she was awful to teen and to me, in what she said and did, including thefts from us, yet he backed her.
Kudos to you for modeling boundary-setting behavior, and to your daughter for following your example by telling her dad that she does not want to meet his girlfriend ever. If he violates her boundary, or if she wants to reinforce it, she could also call him from her therapist’s office.
BTW, we live in a “one-party state” which means it’s legal to record a phone call as long as one party on the call knows it’s being recorded. Other states differ.
In my case my kids were old enough to tell dad they didn’t ever want to meet any of his “trash goblins” after learning about what the AP was like.
But the bit in the story I relate to is that I thought my daughter had a mental health issue for a while but it actually turned out to be a gaming addiction coupled with the side effects of being coercively controlled by dad.
This is why my daughter asked me to help find a therapist for her who is versed in coercive control– because she didn’t want to internalize “Dad’s bullshit” as she called it. This was after she recognized that she was developing a gaming fixation and was, in her own words, “starting to treat other people like pop-up ads”… just like dear old addicted, mood-swingy dad.
She even found herself spouting the same blameshifting, raging word salads when I naturally curtailed her access to electronic gadgets. Worse, in anger she started grossly distorting what I was doing and saying just like dad.
Because I have zero interest in video games or games in general (I honestly don’t care who wins anything other than important elections, votes or wars), I didn’t recognize at first that my daughter was sneakily bending the rules for screen time. I thought she was having some kind of neuro-allergy issue or the start of a focal seizure disorder because of the frequent meltdowns, wakefulness and uncharacteristic rudeness. Thank God her music teacher– who’s a technical whizz and went through his own gaming fixation in high school– recognized that it was all much simpler than I thought. In reality, my daughter was a classic gaming junkie. The bit that turned out to be complicated related to how and why she became addicted.
In any event, the “intervention” and “detox” stage went very smoothly and quickly because all the adults around were completely on the same page regarding what to do about it: cold turkey. Sociology 101: people more quickly accept things that are presented as inevitable but will continue to fuss, protest and rebel if they suspect there’s any wiggle room. But my daughter was given no wiggle room and consequently cycled out of her withdrawal tizzy with record speed and regained her senses.
My daughter also quickly became quite lucid about her fixation, saying that she was stressed out by what dad did among other things (launch anxiety) and this probably led to escapism. But then she dropped a bomb by confessing that, all along, FW had been completely undermining my limits on electronics and games by buying and sending her games that bypassed the parental controls.
In other words, he was encouraging her addiction as a means of grooming and control– basically setting himself up as her “dealer” to foster dependency on him– and also setting up the dynamics for parental alienation since I would automatically be working against this.
Thankfully my daughter is brilliant and sophisticated beyond her years. It probably didn’t hurt that I’ve raised her from birth to see through mindf*ckery and machinations like this in an abstract sense (not directly aimed at FW). She felt terribly ashamed that she had almost been used as a weapon against the one parent she could really rely on but I said it wasn’t her fault and I’m hardly going to take it personally. She said “Dad never really listens to me unless I’m crying about you!” Then she added, “This makes me think he doesn’t even love me.”
Of course when I made the “no games” pronouncement, FW texted some raging, blithering word salad in defense of his undermining and grooming and spewed some ignorant bullshit about addiction, saying I was too harsh and was making my daughter “suffer” too much. But by then my daughter was beyond his reach. She opined that he was probably still addicted to porn himself which made him blind to addiction in anyone else. She said she didn’t want to be around him anymore and that it was “tough love” that he could lose the daughter he was mistreating. I suggested she communicate this to him with a therapist present but she knew her mind and just didn’t want to see or spend time with him.
In any event, this is why she wanted to see a therapist who fully understands these abuse dynamics and what people like this do to children. She went online and read and viewed everything she could find on weaponizing children and coercive control and decided that she didn’t want a stupid therapist who would pressure her to reconcile if she instinctively didn’t want this. Furthermore, she wanted a kind of “exorcism” to make sure she doesn’t repeat generational patterns.
This is timely.
I have a FW of the domestically abusive/ child abusing/ deadbeat/ drug addict/ felon variety who also hasn’t paid a dime for court-ordered medical or extracurriculars since I broke up with him over a decade ago. We still split legal custody… He hasn’t asked about our kid in the entire time, and he has also been able to drag out court proceedings for years with zero accountability. My kid from FW is, for the most part, a well-adjusted, sociable, and athletic teenager, all because of sane parenting, time, and distance. To watch that disappear the moment FW’s crazy behavior resurfaces in our lives is really upsetting, and it’s happened frequently enough that we now have a system in place to handle it.
The one thing I have going for me is that we live in a completely different state, hundreds of miles away. This doesn’t stop the cyberstalking, spoofing, and swatting by those in his inner circle ( including my brother, who is a friend of his). I went no contact with all surviving family, who acted like Switzerland Forgiveness Trolls who failed to see the safety issues in sharing life updates.
FW’s deranged ex-bunny boiler from a few years ago, who was obsessed with FW and my kid to the point she paid for his lawyers to help FW regain physical custody, popped up again last week. I called the police immediately and worked with the school again on an updated safety plan. Police are finally investigating it. Apparently, the woman has a history of stalking on a Baby Reindeer level locally.
Moral of the story. If something feels off, it probably is. If your daughter doesn’t want to deal with dad anymore, follow Chump Lady’s advice with he caveat of getting the court order updated to reflect the changes. If for no other reason, to protect yourselves in case GF# ∞ winds up being a Baby Reindeer level Bunny Boiler obsessed with your kid, they have never even met…
I will say I became pretty jaded pretty fast after he went through one girlfriend, then another, and another, and a wife, and now a soon to be other wife (not even sure I’ve listed them all). At first, I met them, because it was new, because my daughter was so little. And then, after I saw them all come and go, and daughter was older and could express herself, I stopped. I wish so much that she were not exposed to this bad example of a man. But I know I don’t control his choices. Unless there was a danger or something was happening that required legal intervention (and I pray always that it never will come to that), I have had to let that shit go. When my daughter was really young, it didn’t really hit, and then, after the second divorce and sale of the house, she had some big feelings and needed to talk with someone. So I provided that outlet and told her that I understood her feelings would be complicated and it wouldn’t necessarily be easy to talk with me about all of it (she knows how I feel on a higher, age appropriate level). Whenever the opportunity arises, I also talk with her about relationships and what is appropriate or acceptable and other best practices so she can see for herself that some things are not OK. These FWs suck and will keep on sucking, imposing that suck upon all in their orbit, to unfortunately include their children. Just keep being there.
Also, I remember one instance where I did reach out after I found out that FW was clearly cheating on his current live in girlfriend of a couple years with the person who would become wife #2 (in the middle of the pandemic to boot – I guess it was a courtesy to have FW say he’s actually living/quarantining somewhere else and could daughter stay with him there) to say I’m sorry that this happened and to thank her for being there for my daughter. I asked my daughter if she wanted to say goodbye and arranged that meet up, since what her father did was so abrupt and it was likely daughter would never see this woman again. When FW found out, he told me she was unstable, but it was a lie and terrible attempt at preventing me from circumnavigating his continued poor choices, even if it would have helped his daughter have some closure. (See above about how much they suck.)
Be very careful with vetting any therapist so that you don’t end up with a cheater apologist, incompetent, pick me girl type that would make things worse.
Your FW is using your daughter for image management (what a great girl dad BS).
A friend’s teenager was in therapy but the ex deftly manipulated everyone including the young therapist, so it benefitted his fake narratives in court.
Amen. The fields of psychology and psychiatry have a speckled history regarding misogyny and victim-blaming and it pays to be very, very careful in choosing a therapist for a minor child while dealing with an abusive parent. I was even given this warning by my own trauma therapist when I asked for references for my kids. Bottom line, a therapist has to be trained to recognize and understand coercive control and also never victim-blame even by default.
In any case, I thought the post CL published about the inherent victim-blamingness of applying “family systems” theory or the “dyadic” theory of domestic abuse (the idea that each member of the family contributes equally to dysfunction so each must be held accountable by therapists) was right on the money. What’s more, several states actually bar therapists (at least the ones who take state funding or participate in state intervention programs) from applying the “family systems” theory to situations involving abuse.
The following article actually tries to argue against the total ban but I’m sharing the excerpt to outline the legal issue involved:
https://scispace.com/pdf/controversy-constraints-and-context-understanding-family-9ec4jqf7vf.pdf
Based on this critique, family systems theory has been banned by several state laws that regulate batterer intervention programs (Saunders, 2001). For example, the North Carolina Administrative Code (2004; 01 NCAC 17.0708a.3) states, “The following methods shall not be used by abuser treatment programs … any theoretical approaches that treat the violence as a mutual process.” As another example, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1995) lists as inappropriate methods “systems theory approaches which treat the violence as a
mutually circular process, blaming the victim” (p. 11). In the State of Michigan (1998), the Batterer Intervention
Standards indicates that a systemic approach to batterer intervention programs is a “potentially harmful
technique” (p. 11) that has “been criticized for contributing to a belief in victim responsibility for violence” (p.
12). It is important to note that not all states mandate that all programs must follow these guidelines (Saunders,
2001). However, in many states in which guidelines exist, programs must meet these regulations to be
recognized by the state (i.e., to be acceptable programs within the judicial system; Saunders, 200 1). Therefore,
practitioners who provide such programs must often modify their programs to meet state requirements to
receive adequate funding and referral bases to support their programs.
My daughter was ten when DDay happened, and we both were shattered to learn that Traitor Ex was not who he pretends to be.
She is almost nineteen now.
She had been with our very good trusted family therapist since she was in utero.
A year after he left, it was suggested I get her a therapist of her own, which I did. It was up to them to work out the relationship with her dad.
He continued to lie to her and the involved therapists, including the very expensive very competent co-parenting therapist which he badgered me, for a full year and a half, to go to, until I finally caved. That therapist’s words to him in the final session were, “Your dishonesty is profound.” My daughter, whom she met in a couple of sessions, got very high praise for “not sugarcoating, being straightforward, and not being mean.” For being emotionally mature and psychologically savvy. Very unlike “adult” dad.
(She estimated that, developmentally, he was about twelve years old…)
The daughter of today’s letter writer set a very clear boundary with her father about meeting the latest girlfriend. If he ignores it, it only digs his grave deeper with her and validates his untrustworthiness. I wanted my daughter to make up her own mind about him, based on her own experiences with him. All he has done for eight years is dig his grave deeper, she sees it, she has nothing to do with him, and my hands are clean. Perfect.
The worst thing you can do to a dog is withdraw attention. This is also the best response to cheaters and side pieces.
The chump is the secret sauce, the third leg on a three-legged stool, that is an integral part of the betrayal and what makes it so delicious to them. The oxygen for the fire they are getting off on.
Withdraw your energy and attention and use it for rebuilding you, helping your daughter heal, and rebuilding a jerk-free life.
Don’t do anything that compromises your dignity, integrity, or credibility.
I like the self-knowledge I sense in this sentence. For me, I describe it as “Chronic low-level distain”.
Because of the 3 previous girlfriends of her fathers that she has had to process through, it seems to me there is a very wide open window to discuss this topic and invite her to invent and discuss solutions with you.
But CL is right, this is not the time to rage on #4 with angst carried over from FW’s earlier breakups.
I noticed that too.
Sadly the naive vision folks have of peaceful Utopia post divorce does not apply to narcopath. Post divorce abuse and gaslighting continues as CN knows too well.
Divorced, FW continues to lie to all of us and financially abuse me. Most days I don’t even call out his lying just to keep peace in my life.
Until narcopath is six feet under I’m unlikely to ever be truly 100% at peace, due to sharing a disabled child. Therefore I too live with my anger just under the surface, ready for self defense. He is a creature who was planning a fatal accident for me, after all.
There is nothing in heaven or he’ll you can do about girlfriends or OW/Wives. My #1 Ex married his AP 38 years ago and my daughter is attached to the lifestyle at dads house that I do not have. Both my adult children will be caring for her in her old age since OW couldn’t have kids( a selling point for my ex as he was terrible with his own) Yes he bragged at DDay that his AP couldn’t have children but I had my two for company??? What a? So I had no say for the 5 years they lived together and for the flight to a wedding in Las Vegas with the kids..of which I was never notified. Yes I could have dragged him to court for abduction but that and legal fees..not worth it. I’m sorry to say this! CL is right and whatever she says goes..but I just learned how to cry hard, pull up my britches and be mighty. Keep going!!!
Unsurprisingly, I agree with CL. Your daughter is a teenager. She can tell her dad she doesn’t want to meet his GF and just stick to those dinners rather than go to his place where GF might be.
Absolutely do not contact FW’s latest victim. That gives FW an opening to claim that you’re harassing him. Don’t give a FW an inch of an opportunity to mess with you, because they will take 100 miles.
I have never contacted FW’s live in appliance and never will. I understand that she knows he cheated, thanks to his gossipy, passive-agressive family, so it’s her life to ruin. If she wanted to meet my daughter, DD is more than capable of giving that a hell no reaction. So let your daughter handle it, with your support and guidance of course.
I wanted to speak to something specific here, which is allowing these FW to drop the ball even when you know it will hurt your kid mentally/emotionally. I find that I am actually running point a lot. What I thought I was doing on behalf of my daughter’s well being ends up benefiting his ass too, because now he doesn’t need to commute over an hour and half to bring her to this or that — essentially he does not need to step up and take responsibility for his choices (i.e. to move so far away or, going all the way back, to even have put her in this position in the first place). It was innocuous, because I was thinking of her and easing her day and schedule and it’s not that hard to rearrange a weekend here or there, etc etc. My counselor pointed out what I was doing and suggested that maybe more things do need to drop because it’s not all on me to keep it all together when all this running point becomes draining (particularly stressful month with life and schedules here). Then kiddo will see that dad is too far away (by choice!) to really be integrated into her life in ways that count on a daily basis. I think this applies to the letter writer, as it seems she is trying to do something similar with what she sees as an impending train wreck with the new relationship and the pain that will cause. There is a really powerful instinct to protect and in doing so, sometimes it can harm us (burn out, making us look crazy) and sometimes it’s not even needed effort anyway…at least not at the level you think it is (OP’s daughter already says she doesn’t want to meet this woman). There are some thing we can and should let drop — because the kids will see who the show up parent is versus the parent in name only. Yes, there will be disappointments and heartache. What will never change is that we will be here to help them navigate through this. Dropping some doesn’t mean you’re dropping it all.
Yes, and it’s also teaching the kids how the Chump is the clean up crew doormat doing everything while FW gets away scot free. Obviously we mean well but it can unintentionally teach kids an unhealthy lack of self respect and boundaries.
Then they grow up to be a cheating narc themselves, or marry one.
I never thought this was me, because what I do felt like it had no bearing on him, and because I chose to parent all-in, which ended up looking like parenting as if I were a single parent because no other parent existed. My daughter and I largely live our separate lives and I manage the schedule, ergo if I see a conflict I approach and fix it with him. Does he ever look at what she has going on in her life – school (we get the same emails), extracurriculars, friends…? Nope. I have always planned for her sake, but she is old enough (10) to start keep track of and communicating some of this herself (we have started in hard on time management) and he is certainly seeing what is happening at least with school (I will share invitations I receive directly to things if it falls on his weekend and leave him to manage it from there). He has never once been proactive with her life and maybe it’s time to let that go entirely. My baby steps toward letting not-me issues drop are to indicate a conflict and then leave it there. “Daughter can’t be there this weekend because [event]” – full stop. Never thought of this being a doormat, but at the very least it feels like me picking up all the work in a group project where my at least one person in my group isn’t doing any of the work (the concept of which I’ve recently explained to daughter in a school context). I’m doing the best I can do, but sometimes to my detriment and there is where it needs to stop.
How timely. I learned over the weekend that when klootzak and I both moved from the marital home in August 2025, klootzak moved the Latest Not the Greatest into his new house immediately. DS10 has been exposed to her ever since. DS10 is diplomatic and as I had spoken with him before about what happens at each house (except for health/safety issues) is none of the business of anyone outside that home, he never bothered telling me. DS10 said klootzak told him this is someone he works with. The latest lie as this female is someone he went to high school with over 30 years ago. They do not work in the same or even similar fields. He dredged her up when the AP who I caught him with dumped him at the end of 2024.
Anyway, the lies will come home to roost. I suspect the latest might last another year or so before she catches on and leaves. I don’t care. I have DS10 on a wait list for therapy should the need arise as it is not my place to manage this scenario. But I do expect the current affair will end and not so sure how DS10 will feel about that. I can’t control the madness. I can only stand in quiet support of kiddo.
I agree with CL she is an older teen and needs to fight her own battles. Its a good lesson to learn. Not all friendships are gonna last, not all boyfriends are gonna last. Life is all about change. And you have to let people go. Even your parents, when you go to college. Even your kids when they go to college. You gotta be resilient and not crumble when people leave or die on you. And then recognize those who are constants and appreciate them, like a grandmother or your mom or a friend. Celebrate them when it happens. Life is tough. The fact that your daughter doesnt want to meet GF shows tremendous insight and growth. Good job mom!