And I think my anger may FINALLY be directed at the right person. For the first time ever.

DH is the one who is responsible for all of the BM drama. I really thought I was smart enough to step back and see things objectively. I've been fooling myself.

If anyone has paid attention to my posts they would see that I've directed all of my anger towards this awful woman. I've hated her for all of her interference, her intrusiveness, her demands, her sense of entitlement to him, his time, his money, his sympathies. I have hated her for being an unwanted presence in our lives. I have no idea why, up til now, I've allowed myself to make excuses for him and completely ignore the part he played in all of this. He made her this way and he allowed it to continue even as my protests became louder and louder over time. My love for him clouded my vision.

This realization hit me while I was reading about various levels of co-parenting between exes. It finally dawned on me that everyone in my situation has a very different definition of what that means. Even worse than that, DH knew that BM and I had fundamentally huge differences in opinion on the matter and sat by, ball-less, trying to appease both of us rather than clearly define the route he actually planned to take.

In re-reading correspondences between the two of them that I was copied on, I can see how vague he really was with her when he was "setting boundaries". He didn't give concrete examples of how they were to maintain those boundaries. When he spoke of keeping correspondences limited to kid related business, of course I knew what he meant because we talked about it, right? Of course she knew what that meant because they had already talked about it, right? Maybe not.

I'm not excusing bad BM behavior but after reading about how some people choose to co-parent, it isn't entirely out of the question that he led her to believe they would interact on a level he wasn't prepared to follow through with. And likewise, when it came to explaining his parenting role to me, he may not have been entirely honest about the level of contact HE wanted to have with his ex since my default position has always been ZERO contact with exes.

Do I think he did this consciously and deliberately? Probably not. I think he was too chicken shit to voice his own desires. When I met him, he was a beaten down, broken man. He had spent a long time trying to get rid of this woman and it was a struggle to get her to even agree to a divorce even after a long, long separation. He lived in fear (and ignorance) as she made threat after threat regarding his rights to his children. He was so used to living this way that it took me an excruciatingly long time to convince him that he wasn't always in trouble with me. That every time I expressed displeasure or we had a disagreement, I wasn't going to go completely batshit crazy on him.

I'm living with a man who appears to be terrified of the wrath of a woman. How do I deal with that?