Holidays: The least wonderful time of the year

[Penny Lane]

I think probably like many PDs, our BM is especially bad around the holidays. Our fun holiday season lasts Halloween-Christmas, and then there's some additional nastiness for a couple months while she has no money to pay for anything because she's spent it all on age-inappropriate gifts. She's also bad around Valentines Day, the kids' birthdays, the beginning of the school year ... so pretty much all year. But the holiday season is the worst. Let's have a thread to discuss what's going on! And reminisce about insane things they've done in previous years.

I'll start! This year BM has already caused a scene at school and implied that she was going to call CPS on us (separate incidents). And she wound DSS up over literally nothing so that he was FURIOUS at DH when he came back. I expect more of that for the next month or so. My stress level is already 8/10 and we're not even to December. I feel so sorry for the kids that they have to deal with this every year.

I think the peak of our holiday shenanigans historically is that one year DH let her borrow something for the kids - I want to say it was bathing suits? or ski stuff? - and asked to make sure they had it all when he picked them up for his part of Christmas. She told him that "it's not her job to pack for our vacation." (She was mad that we were all going on a trip together.) This was several years ago, he would never lend her stuff like that nowadays.

That same year she sent the kids to our house with presents for DH. It was several years after they had gotten divorced, and every year she had said she was going to do this but she never did. It also happened to be the first year that the kids and I all decided together what to get him. So they showed up with these beautifully wrapped presents that she obviously intended to upstage me. He opened them and they were like ... nothing he would have wanted. They were in fact something that SHE would want, even in her favorite colors etc. We still use them because they were "from the kids" but that made me laugh. Like uh ma'am you did not upstage me in fact I think this was a reminder for DH of why he's with me and not you.

Last year she bought DSD an expensive gift and tried to get DH to pay for half of it after the fact. And THEN for like 2-3 months she told him she couldn't reimburse him for ANYTHING, including medical bills, because she'd overspent (my word not hers) on Christmas.

Every year she calls on Christmas or the first night they're with us and tries to disparage the gifts we got them. If the kids don't really engage she stops calling for the rest of the holiday time. UNLESS we're on vacation, in which case she invariably calls every single night.

So, everyone! What are your most absurd PD coparenting holiday stories? What have they done this year? Do you have any happy news to report?

[Coyote23]

Hi Penny, it’s me from the Working on Us Holiday Roll Call thread. Thanks for encouraging me to visit the board. To be completely honest-my NPD father and BPD mom and scapegoating siblings were such a big thing to deal with, I’ve kind of ignored the step family issues for the most part, at least on the forum. I guess now that my parents are both deceased, it gives me room to deal with the next tier of manipulative people. 

Anyway, I don’t have a story as dramatically awful-sounding as yours, but I do have a funny one. BM makes these printed personalized photo calendars every year for SS. They are always chock full of photos of BM and her second husband and their friends (you can fill the box of individual calendar days with photos as well as in the big photo at the top). She even got photos of us and put them in random spots plus on our birthdays. It’s the kind of thing that might seem sweet if we were all friends and coparenting like an actual team. But given that she would be lawyering up, criticizing/blaming, and attempting to alienate SS at the same time that the calendar was being made, it was the stuff of nightmares. Not only that, but SS would give them to us for Christmas gifts. Both DH and I got them, despite the fact that we live in the same house; as if we would want DH’s ex’s face hanging in our home, his office, or mine.

We have never hung them. DH will usually throw his away and I will sort of guiltily shove mine in a closet until enough time has passed in my mind for me to justify recycling them. SS16 seems clueless, and also like he forgets he gave the calendars. He’s not really observant or sentimental and I’m sure the calendars as gifts was a convenient ide and if someone walked him through it he’d get it. But I don’t do that because I love SS and don’t want to hurt his feelings, but OMG. I will not allow her face to infiltrate my calendar year.

I recently told a fairly new friend that story and she was like, oh man, that’s ALL HER, when I asked why SS would give us the calendars. Then my friend proceeded to say that she got it because HER MOM was the awful BM and that her stepmom had to put up with a ton of petty BS for years! It cheered me up so much to hear about a step kid who is an adult who knows what is up!! Plus to have a friend so clearly “get “ it and not say something like “oh, maybe she was just trying to be nice and bring SS’s worlds together!”

[Stillirise]

OMG. I will not allow her face to infiltrate my calendar year.

This has me cracking up right now. Thanks for that. It's absurd the lengths some folks will go to, to insert themselves into our lives!  Also, I can relate to the tiers of disordered people, although mine are sort of opposite. Now that I'm divorced from updxh, I'm seeing things differently in my FOO.

On my end, so far uPDxh is at his baseline normal level of crazy-making for this time of year. I do anticipate some additional action on that front as the month moves on. The big thing of the moment is he's contacting me about his "concern" for DS12, who must be going through something big.  He's distant and disengaged when they're together, and won't talk about it. The truth is DS is well on his way Out of the FOG, and really doesn't enjoy spending time with his uPdf all that much right now.  I just go with I'm not sure, and I hadn't noticed an issue.

Stay tuned, PL, and others. I'm sure I'll have something wild to report on before the month is over! 'Tis the season!

[gfuertes]

Yikes!  Both of you (Penny and Coyote) have exes (or husband's exes) giving passive-aggressive gifts.  While it is funny, it also creates such an annoying type of stress, because it's so unnecessary - having to figure out what to do with calendars full of photos of your husband's ex, or what to do with gifts for your husband that were meant to remind him of his ex.

So far, I'm feeling pretty positive about the holidays.  As I've mentioned in other posts, my ex went to prison for 2 years and has been back for about a year and a half.  When he left, we were still living together, so the first Christmas was kind of miserable.  Our kids missed him. I felt weird, wanting to divorce him, but wondering if doing so while he was in prison made me a jerk.  And money was so tight that I handmade gifts for everyone except our youngest son.  The next one was better.  Then there was covid.  But finally this year, we're hosting my big, childhood family again (unless this new virus variant becomes a big problem.)

I'm clear-headed enough, now, to remember how hard holidays were, with my ex.  I love holidays, and felt total responsibility to make them enjoyable for everyone.  So when my ex was a jerk, I was so focused on getting through it and minimizing drama for everyone else - and then getting past it and back to normal life - that I didn't think about it much, until now, when it's safer.  But many Christmases, he would drink too much and become really fun, until he went over the edge and became aggressive...but really mostly to me, in private moments where he'd say something scathing, or be physically intimidating, like backing me up against a wall.  But no one else would see it, and with rare exception, he just seemed really fun, to them. 

So I'd be back in our bedroom or the hallway, wanting to curl up into a ball and cry...but I was hosting everyone, and I knew I needed to come back out and be friendly.  If I was open about what was going on, it would make everyone else uncomfortable - on Christmas - and it would feel - to them - like I was the one creating drama, by bringing up unpleasantness they hadn't otherwise been aware of.  Like I wanted to start a fight.  And my mother - who will do anything to avoid being made emotionally uncomfortable, and who feels allied with anyone else I have conflict with (since it proves I'm the problem, not her) - would inevitably defend him.  So I wouldn't say anything, except maybe to my sister, if she was the last to leave.  And what was she going to do, except sympathize with me?

One of our last Christmases together, my step-son (who lived with us) bought his dad a model car kit, with his own money.  After my ex opened it, I tucked it away in our bedroom so the littles in the family wouldn't get into the paints.  At the end of the night, just my ex and his enabling mother were together in the front of the house.  His mother was so impressed with him, for giving me a diamond pendant.  She didn't know he always bought my gifts on Christmas Eve, and just a few days before that he and I had seen that necklace, and I'd said it was remarkably ugly; that I couldn't understand why someone would do that with diamonds.  Plus, we hadn't had money for that.  He had unilaterally decided to throw a bunch of our money away, on something he knew I didn't like, to impress everyone else, knowing I would look like a jerk to everyone if I didn't act thrilled about it.  There's no way to prove it, but I sense that he specifically enjoys creating situations where someone else feels pressured to fake feeling the way he wants them to act, when he knows they feel the opposite.

Then, while his mother was already nonplussed with me, for not seeming sufficiently over the moon about his gift, my ex began looking for his model car, and became enraged and scary, accusing me of hiding or disposing of it, to be mean to my step-son.  I was so surprised by how unreasonable that was, and overwhelmed by his fury, that my brain completely shut down when I tried to remember where I'd put it - which only made it look like I had done something wrong.  When he stormed off, with his equally angry mother, to drive her home, I immediately remembered where it was. 

Looking back, there were a number of times like that, when my brain literally did not function as normal, in response to him.  After he left for prison, I found notes hidden throughout my house that I'd written to myself, setting out the facts of how an incident had happened - incidents I'd completely blocked from memory, but which came flooding back upon reading these.  In a number of ways - financially and in terms of our children - I felt very trapped, and that the potential fallout of divorcing him would be catastrophic.  So I must have realized, at those times, that the only way to not divorce him was to block those things out of my memory; yet a part of my brain wanted to leave the truth written down somewhere.  That makes me sound mentally ill.  Only with regard to him have I ever behaved that way.  It alarms me.

I'm sorry.  I started down this rabbit hole, and at this point I'm writing it for me.  My original point was that sometimes past Christmases were kind of nightmarish with my ex, but I feel pretty good about the coming one, now that I've left him.  He's still dramatic, or gaslighting, or frustrating sometimes, but when he has fits of rage I only know about them from text messages.  And a lot of the stuff I hear about from him now is pretty small.  And I have a choice about whether to respond to it or not.

[Penny Lane]

I am DYING at the calendar. On what planet would anyone want that??

gfuertes, I'm so glad you're out and that you can create the holiday experience that you truly deserve!

BM seems to have calmed down for now. I was feeling very petty about her. However, the kids wanted our help buying her a present, and we helped them even though she was being so terrible to DH. In a small way I got to get my pettiness out. I got to be the bigger person while also knowing that she would HATE that we helped get her a present. (I imagine she sees presents as some kind of attempted power move, although that wasn't actually our intent). So it kind of felt like a victory at a time when we weren't having a lot of victories.

I'm hoping that the recent radio silence is because she has a new boyfriend, and that it will continue for weeks. (Is months too much to hope for?)

I worry that the kids are going to internalize the idea that holidays are stressful, so I've been trying to double down on doing low key fun activities (gingerbread houses, that kind of stuff) with the kids. It seems to be a success even if I constantly feel like I'm rushing around.

[oak_tree]

PL, the view is great from the moral high ground 

DSS will spend a total of 5 "extra" hours with us compared to the usual schedule (Wednesday evenings, EOW). SO and his uNPDex are NC so the drama is low. And I come here and it reminds me I need to appreciate the NC a lot. The other side of that coin is that the manipulation is quiet. We don't know what it's like for DSS at all. He has fun here, that's for sure. But his steadfast adherence to the idiotic/archaic/stupid schedule is frustrating. So, this Christmas, instead of last year when he spent a whole "extra" 36 hours with us, we're down to an extra 5.

Anyway, we will have a blast and conjure up some chill/awesome activities. So...yeah, sorry, not sure what craziness is going on  Kind of glad I don't have much to add to this thread

[Penny Lane]

This year for Christmas, BM managed to top herself: She knowingly and recklessly gave the kids COVID! And was so negligent in caring for them that we felt like we had to bring them back to our house, exposing ourselves. I won't even get into how bad all her decisions were - but they were so, so bad.

Now we're entering the part of the year where she is "too broke" to pay for things like medical care and school lunches. Wheeee!