50/50 Parallel Parenting

[cgr68311]

Some of you have read my gripes dealing with PD exmom. Here is an update.

As you may have read,  last couple months since she began to work, PD mom has gone from:

- trying to rekindle/befriend me and spend time with me/my mom (our boy's paternal grandma), because that was her way of spending/achieving more parenting time/contact hours with our boy now that she's working. Every one of my weekends she would ask and I would say no or just ignore. So much pressure.

-  to going bat s** on audio recording at one of our last exchanges, saying she has no energy and patience to parent our boy.

- to currently  hardly talking to me,  since she found I had been recording our exchanges all along, she has stopped asking to come over to visit, or even sit in my car during exchanges. She is also communicating very little. For the record, I would never invite myself over or sit in her home/car.  If I had known she would back off because of my audio recordings, I would have told her a long time ago!

She has also backed off on asking me to switch our parenting schedule, so far she has preliminarily agreed on the same 50/50 but with some fixed days so she can have a nanny to help her while she works from home. I did not want to push for full custody or more custody at my lawyer's advice, since lawyer felt audio recordings are not sufficient.

I also stopped communicating to her via text except for exchange arrivals. Now strictly using Talking Parents. She's been complying so far. When she does not and communicates via text, I text her back and say "Check TP"

I am enjoying this quiet time, but unsure how long it will last. Currently she's in the nasty phase, where she won't even send me updates on our boy or will take 1-2 days to respond and uses excuses that her (brand new) iphone died, or ran out of space (right), I don't  react or respond to any of that, just thank her for updates.

My question is: Will she try to befriend me again, push my boundaries once more and invite herself over? Come up with a new scheme aka Velociraptor?

[Penny Lane]

I think it's safe to say that she has not ended the encroachment of your boundaries. It's hard to say what that looks like. With DH's ex, she seems to have three strategies she uses: charm, aggressive behavior, and ignoring the problem. Eventually she got to the point where she rarely tries the charm tactic with him. So her boundary encroachment efforts are more along the scary escalating behavior than the befriending. Even that seems to be decreasing as she learns that it doesn't really work. But it's taken years and years of solid boundaries for things to get to this less-bad state.

Fortunately your goal here isn't (or shouldn't be) that your ex stop all bad behaviors. You can't control that anyway. Your goal should be that you work around her bad behaviors (or, when she's doing well, you work with her) to make sure that your son gets what he needs at least during your parenting time.

I think what you're describing is good progress. From our experience, where you will eventually end up is that you won't be sharing many updates about your son anyway. That's a lot harder to work around when he's so little than my stepkids who are preteens. But the reality is that even when she does send you updates, they might be missing important information. You can't really rely on the accuracy of her updates when you're making decisions. So you're learning now how to work around her and how to effectively parallel parent without having information from her about what's happening at her house.

A sidenote: This sucks. It sucks when the kids are little, because if you're not comparing notes with the other parent you it might take longer to catch an issue. It sucks when they're older because things like school projects easily fall through the cracks. And it sucks when they're teenagers because the kids learn they can most likely get away with stuff because they KNOW their parents won't discuss it. But it is what it is, and I wish we had internalized earlier on that DH was never going to have a reasonable coparenting relationship with BM where they work together on fixing common goals; their interactions will always, to some degree, be about her proving to herself that she's a better parent than he is, even though she knows deep down that that's not true. So we live without the updates, and we know there's bad stuff going on but we don't know exactly what it is, and we just try to do our best with the information we have combined with our best guesses about the real situation.

Anyway it sounds like you're doing great! I think it was very smart to not potentially overplay your hand with custody. It's amazing that you've been able to move away from text. And you deserve to enjoy the peace of her leaving you alone, no matter how long or short it lasts! Use your extra time/energy to focus on your son, focus on building your new life, maybe step up your parenting game a bit or start doing something just for yourself. You've earned it!

[cgr68311]

Thank you, Penny. Yes, definitely see those three phases, charming, threatening and ignoring/passive aggressive.

What would be a good healthy norm? Genuine, transparent and assertive?

I know I can exhibit some of those traits but definitely more conscientious and refrain from threats or ignoring or retaining child's updates to hurt her. Last night for example I sent her a couple updates as I usually do despite the fact that she hardly updated me on her time. I did so because it was best for him, to share updates and get some info around sitting down during meal times for example. As you say, I'll do me and focus on my boy when he's with me, and cannot control her

[Penny Lane]

Our standard - I don't know if it qualifies as "healthy," more like "the best we can do" - is that DH will tell her anything she needs to know in order to make decisions at her house. If there's a question we err on the side of, is this something we would want to know if the situations were reversed?

He also tries, mostly, to never ask her anything or ask her for anything. If he asks her for information she often lies, so it's sort of pointless. When he asks her for things he has to wait for an answer that sometimes never comes, so a better strategy we've found is to tell her what he is/isn't willing to do, and then stick to that whether or not she responds or does the thing he wants her to do.

He does answer any of her questions, provided it's about the kids, even if it's something he knows she wouldn't tell him if the situations were reversed. He doesn't answer her questions that are unrelated to the kids ("Where does Penny Lane work" even though she already knows) or if he's already answered a question several times ("What did you say to DSD about X topic" five messages in a row with the question copy and pasted = eventually he says "I've already answered this").

This is not perfect and there are definitely trade-offs. I do think that he could be in more regular contact with her, put up with more of her scary outbursts, and have slightly more communication about the kids. In fact I know that's the case because he used to do that and he evolved more in this direction. When I met him, they were in constant communication, and it was terrible. (Our new relationship would not have lasted if things had continued that way). Over the years he's tried a variety of ways to try to make communication more productive, and there are certainly some things that have made interactions more pleasant (stuff like the BIFF method). But nothing he did really changed the underlying unproductive nature of their back and forth. No matter how nicely he asks questions, there's a pretty good chance she will lie anyway. She always punishes the kids for telling us stuff. Etc. So over the years and as the kids grew, we arrived at this as the best system.

There are some areas where this is mostly successful (he can just schedule doctors appointments for his time and then tell her when they are, in the past trying to get her to agree to a specific date has caused huge problems) and some where it is not so much (extracurriculars are always a huge headache and what do we do when she inevitably stops reimbursing him for anything?). I'm sure she hates this system and tells her friends and lawyer that DH refuses to communicate with her about the kids. I know she tells the kids that their dad won't communicate with her and she doesn't know anything about what they do over here, although that is not true. But the reality is that this system is so much better for the kids than when their parents were constantly arguing with each other and not getting anything solved anyway.

My guess is that you won't jump to such an extreme communication style right away. Your son is much younger than my stepkids and that alone requires much more coordination than what we do. YMMV, but I do think there is some benefit to starting out with more communication and then lessening the parts that aren't helpful.

Overall it's really about finding the right balance for you. What are areas where you can work with her, and what are areas where you need to let go of the idea that you're going to work together? And to what degree can you structure things so that you can just take care of stuff during your parenting time without her weighing in? How does it impact your mental health to have contact with her, and if it's taking your focus from your son, can you mitigate that by limiting contact?

I think you're on the right track, sending her updates even though she's not sending them back. I think a good next step would be, every time you send her a question, ask yourself if you really NEED the answer. Assume you're not going to get it, what would you do then? If it's not a big deal, maybe you don't send the question in the first place.

Eventually, I think you will get to a place where you don't even worry about the velociraptor coming. Or you worry less. You will make plans for what happens if she acts terrible, hope she chooses not to do that, and then live your life. It will probably take a long time, and it's not an easy mindset shift, but my point is that things will get easier for you than they are right now.

[cgr68311]

Great points. Yes, definitely need to find a middle ground where I can keep her informed without me contributing to inviting the velociraptor over (boundaries). I did that a couple times today, because I was in a rush to file in court our new parenting schedule and could not wait for her to reply via talking parents. So just need to be mindful of staying within the boundaries.

Hopefully the new schedule will give her what she believes our boy needs. It's still 50/50, with full rotating weekends but we did it in a way that she always a fixed non-rotating weekday which she plans for our boy to stay home with a nanny instead of being away for 9+ hours in daycare.

I hope it works out for her, less travel for our boy and less complaining and threats hopefully from her, because she feels this way she will have more contact with him (she feels she sees him very little).

[Penny Lane]

I thought of one more thing that might be helpful as your son gets older. Part of the reason that DH is able to go even somewhat LC is because he's getting communication directly from schools, doctors, etc. It used to be that BM would put herself as the only contact on forms, so she would be the only point of contact with important providers. This was unworkable; DH would spend soooo much energy on trying to get information from her, trying to add his name, make sure teachers were emailing both of them, etc. It was a really effective way for her to force him to pay attention to her. So, make sure your contact information is on all forms! If you're both getting the same emails, this will really reduce the need to communicate.

[cgr68311]

It is on all forms. So this week once again she has blocked me.

She blocked me after she sent a 2am text asking me I could watch our son while she went to see a friend on an emergency surgery. I didn't see the text until the next morning and was upset.

So now back to square 1. I don't mind being blocked, but she's not even reading or replying via Talking Parents. I am thinking of having lawyer sending a compliance demand letter but knowing her, that may just be what she's looking for.

I guess if this is what parallel parenting is, then I may just need to live with it, and do my thing on my time and if she doesn't want to communicate via TP then that's on her. I'll knock on her door for exchange or call civil standby if needed and that's it.. unless I'm missing something?

[Penny Lane]

I do not think that's a normal part of parallel parenting for the record.

But I do think that for the purposes of working with PDs it's smart to find workarounds to their bad behavior, rather than trying to force them to behave better. (I would recommend documenting this though, just in case it comes up in the future).

When you say you were upset, do you mean you maybe sent an angry response? If I'm misreading, ignore this. But if so, I really suggest you work on getting that under control. If a communication from her makes you angry, take a break before you respond, reread the BIFF rules, or run your intended response by a friend who you know will tell you the truth. I know it feels good to express frustration sometimes - and I really do know how frustrating it is - but in the long run you really don't want to be contributing to the bad relationship between you two. Especially because she's doing a good enough job of creating that bad relationship all on her own. It's really unfair, like she is behaving badly and you have to do the right thing every single time. But eventually you will create habits and patterns around your communication and you want those to be good patterns. Eventually, if you keep practicing good communication, these strategies will be second nature to you.

[cgr68311]

I meant she was upset.

I get upset all the time, but I refrain myself from sending her angry or emotional messages, unless I express my feelings in a healthy concerning way and only as it relates to our child. But that still does not work.

[Penny Lane]

Ohhhh that makes a lot more sense. Ignore everything I said. You can't do anything about her getting upset about you not seeing a 2 am text. I think you have a great attitude here re: working around it and finding ways to parallel parent. Did she ever unblock you?