Dealing with his psycho ex!
Hello... i found this site while looking for help... I love a kind, wonderful man, we are to be married next year. He has two little kids. The kids are great, they are amazing, bright, and creative, we get along very well! But his Ex... It took a while to recognize, but he had severe battered spouse symptoms when I first met him. She was verbally abusive, emotionally manipulative, and outright cruel to him for most of their many years of marriage. He has had a long road of recovering his sense of self worth. And she tries anything she can to tear him down! She calls to berate him, nothing he does is good enough. The kids told me last time they wee here that their mom "thinks you're bad-- but she doesn't know like we do!" So we know she badmouths me to them, though I have only met her in person once and talked on the phone about three times! Now she is stalking me on facebook, though I never talk about her or the family situation or court there, and I have her blocked, she used someone else's account to spy on me and scoured MONTHS of my posts to pick out two vague posts she thinks were about her( they weren't) so she could get outraged and say that clearly I was a bad influence on her kids. This woman shamelessly uses the kids as leverage, she told my guy that he would never speak to his children again if he didn't get a lawyer, and when we finally GOT a lawyer she freaked and said "she didn't MEAN it, and we overreacted!" She has insinuated herself with a family member who was not close to her back when they were married, but now they share gossipy snipey backstabby reports, and he is uncomfortable even seeing his own family! If we even pass the Family member at the supermarket now the Ex hears a story from her about how rude we were for not greeting her with the proper enthusiasm or some other BS, and she calls to yell at my guy for imagined slights!
Now. I may have been unusually sheltered or something, but I don't understand people being so cruel. I grew up bullied, and I am not naive, but seriously i never believed someone could just be so freaking EVIL. She got me on the phone once and the conversation started peacefully enough, but she decided that she had to start shit-talking the man i love, and basically his biggest crime seems to be not showering her with money and otherwise being invisible. She even told him she has "friends" who get close to a half a million a year in child support, for "half as many" kids, and implied he was a failure for not supporting her the same way! She routinely threatened to not let him see or speak to the kids prior to getting the lawyer. Even after we got the lawyer she threatens or makes crazy demands, one time he wasn't allowed to pick up the kids unless someone made the drive with him, another time he could only get the kids in this narrow window of time (he has to drive hours and hours around a busy metro area-- sometimes traffic is unpredictible, giving someone a twenty minute window after a six to eight hour drive is pretty shitty. She screams at him at least once a week. When she gets on a tear sometimes it's every day!
He feels such guilt for not being able to see them more, and she just doesn't give a rat's rear end. She lies constantly, even about things she's JUST said! She twists everything we say, so that you can say "thank you" and suddenly she's jumping down your throat, "what's THAT supposed to mean? " etc. She will whine for hours about how hard her life is, but if you try to point out that we aren't living in a palace either (i work three jobs, he works full time, overtime and takes classes) she freaks out and screams that she doesn't care if we have it hard, it's "not her problem" though clearly her hardships should be our problem, I guess?
Anyway, it goes on and on. I feel like she's driving me mad sometimes. I love this man so much, we both had crappy first marriages, but at least my ex had the grace to move on (of course we didn't have kids, so there's that-- in fact my ex told me that at 28 years old I was too old for him! He was five years my senior! He said "I can have kids when I'm fifty, you can't"!). Neither me nor my love wanted our divorces at first, we both wanted to save our marriages at any cost. Our respective partners left us. We found each other, both about two years after the divorces. Having a loving partner is such a change-- for each of us! I get so scared sometimes because his ex is really nuts, and just so awful. The kids are still in elementary so we have years of her shit ahead of us. Sometimes she just puts him through the wringer and i am left cleaning up the pieces. I just need to know there are people who get through this shit, I guess. I love my mom, and usually i tell her everything, but I try not to tell her all the crap with his Ex. I am afraid she will reject him. She told me she'd rather we just live together until after the kids grow up... Not get married, just be a casual couple. But we want to have kids of our own, i want a child, and he is a really loving father. He just dotes on his kids and adores them. Mom's afraid the Ex will have a way to get to me once we're married... But she ALREADY "gets" to me, when she hurts the man i love. I know she isn't going away, and it's unlikely she'll get better. We were hopeful when she told us she was engaged, but apparently her fiancé isn't enough to distract her from her one true love, which is trying to make my love absolutely miserable.
Just help me see the light at the end of the tunnel.... Cause sometimes it seems like we are going straight to hell...
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Bad ex syndrome, oh yes
Bad ex syndrome, oh yes indeed... I am all too familiar. My dh has an ex that too verbally abused on top of physically abused where she got arrested for domestic violence. It took time to build up my dh to the point he would stand his own ground. Shoot, to see him now, he would knock her teeth out if she ever tried that crap now.
The ex would go through goofy stages that included: hate, anger, let's get back together, I hate you again and I'm going to tell the kids all about it, to anger again. It gets exhausting. With you being in the picture, jealousy is taking over. She will try to hurt you through your husband and the kids and seemingly enough, probably enjoys it knowing how bad it upsets the bunch. It's a sick game.
I think your husband should refuse and/or hang up on her if she disrespects him at all. Tell her she can call back when she calms down and can talk as though someone her age should. You may even have to go as far as calling the police for harassment ? We had to go that route and it did work I must say. She tried other tactics, with the kids of course. Court orders do work but take too much damn time and money. You need to find her weak spot and grab her by the balls. I remember one year I helped the kids make Mother's Day cards for the ex, oooooooooo as much as she wanted to tear them up she couldn't because they were from the kids BUT with my help. Ha! Anytime she spoke negative of me or my dh to the kids I would simply reply " I don't understand why your mom would feel that way about me, I'm sorry she does because I think she's awesome!" The kids would tell her this and she would be so mad. But the kids saw me in a positive light and soon they were telling mom , " hey she never says bad things about you, why are you talking bad about her, we love her and she's nice!"
Your husband has been through a lot. He's going to need you to be his backbone and lay the law down with that ex. It's a dirty game that some of us are forced to play but never lose your cool, your faith, or your sanity. Breathe deep. Get to know her pattern. Watch and listen and write it down. Record it if need to be. If she wants to threaten have it recorded. Your husband should not allow her to talk to him in any way that is disrespectful and he doesn't have to. He can hang up on her and text her " I can't talk to you when you are so threatening and angry. Please call me when you calm down". Be polite but don't put up with it.
I'm sorry you are going through this. Remember , kill with a smile and act as though nothing bothers you, it does work when you need it to. I have been there and your situation seems a lot more then mine and I really am just speaking from what I went through and putting it out there. It may or may not help.
Thanks for the advice... We
Thanks for the advice... We have finally told her we need to record her calls, it was just getting too nuts. Her immediate reaction was to scream that it wasn't admissible in court, and then she said she just wouldn't answer the phone and we'd never speak to the kids, then she shouted "GROW UP! " and hung up on me, in a spectacular display of immaturity. I truly believe she secretly/not-secretly wishes that my guy was an honest-to-god deadbeat dad, because then she would be justified in being the victim and her entire martyr complex would be validated. He has never missed a payment of support, but because it's all now being handled through the revenue dept, we have no control over when they give her what, but that doesn't stop her from calling to screech about it!
I tried, at first, to make nice with her. I knew being "friends" was unlikely, but I hoped that maybe if she would talk to me instead of My guy, maybe my love would not have to face his abuser every day. It makes him physically ill to talk to her, and these days i get this sick anxious feeling every time his phone chirps! He has tried hanging up on her, he tells her " this conversation is not productive. We should talk when you've calmed down," but her response is always "I'M NOT ANGRY!" Shouted at top volume! Unfortunately she won't just put the kids on the phone, so most of the time we have to wait for her to say her nasty piece before he gets to say goodnight to the kids. We've had the lawyer go over this, and the judge even said he needs to be able to talk to the kids every day. But there is no way around conniving insanity. She will back off for a day or two but then start right back up again. My hope is to never have to talk to her again, since the last two attempts left me shaking and crying... I never yell at her, but she is so hateful and venomous! We had an entire phone call that started with her screaming and me very calmly saying, "you're clearly very emotional about this, we should really not talk if you can't stop yelling at me," and she screamed-no exaggeration, she SCREAMED, "I AM NOT YELLING!" And I calmly said, "I'm sorry, but your tone and volume indicate to me that you are, in fact extremely upset, and i don't want to have this conversation if we can't be polite." I managed to talk her down to a normal tone for a while, and then we even talked about the kids in a normal way. Then I said, "I'm really glad we had this talk, I hope we can do this again," and she decided to pick a fight with me, telling me then that my love needs to "grow up" and that we wouldn't even have to talk if he would only talk to her and "take her seriously" and that her life is so hard, and she is struggling for money and he needs to just give her more money! To which i said, "well, we don't have any more money, we have bills and responsibilities here, too," and she freaked, shouting how she doesn't care, he needs to "FIND THE MONEY" like we've got a big stash somewhere we forgot about and we're just selfishly hoarding it to be jerks to her. What she really thinks is that his parents are well off and we should be borrowing/begging from them whenever she wants money. She has this impression because they lent the two of them money for the house and fees related to adopting the kids. What the Ex doesn't understand is that his parents are retired, they have a finite amount of money, and SHE HAS NO RIGHT TO IT. they aren't wealthy, they are just comfortable, and they can't afford to shell out every time she wants money for something either! What's worse is that the Ex goes on shopping sprees to the outlets and blows hundreds of dollars on clothes and shoes and crap for herself, and then she calls my guy screaming that she doesn't have enough money for groceries! She took his last tax return from their married years--ALL OF IT-- (this was before he felt he could stand up to her) and she bought herself a very expensive foreign car, and now she calls to complain to him how expensive it is to fix and upkeep this car, and how if he really loved the kids he would be helping her fix and maintain this stupid expensive car! FOR THE KIDS!
AAAAUGH!
I forgot where i was going with this rant. Sorry. Thank you for your insight.
She really is full of drama
She really is full of drama shitstorms! I looked into that Shrink4men site... I appreciate what they are trying to do, but I was a little put off when i tried looking around their facebook page and saw a LOT of anti-feminist anti-women stuff. I understand that their focus is men struggling with huge problems, but that doesn't make it ok to hate all women or claim feminists are all vicious cunts out to keep men from seeing their kids. I am a feminist, and i want 50/50 custody laws and to eliminate biased courts! Biased courts are the result of a patriarchal system that thinks women are natural caretakers because they have vaginas, that is the exact opposite of feminism. I have browsed Shrink4men, and I like some of their articles. I just get really nervous about the backlash.... Clearly a lot of guys have had miserable experiences, my guy went through hell, and i wouldn't blame him for being afraid of women.... But really it's not the Ex's uterus that's the source of the problem, it's that she is BATSHIT FUCKING CRAZY PANTS INSANE. I need o look up the golden uterus thing. She sounds like she has that delusion, but the funny thing is that they adopted both kids. She claims she can't have bio kids (but we know she lies about everything, now.... She was diagnosed bi-polar but now she claims that never happened!) she left my guy one week after the adoption of their second child, took both kids to her new boyfriend's cabin on the lake that very week. Now she likes to say things about how I couldn't POSSIBLY love those kids, because *I*am not a *parent*.... Well, technically she is not a parent, either, by that logic. Also, how sad is it that she thinks it's impossible to love two little kids who you've known for three years now because they aren't legally mine? Isn't that like a deplorable lack of empathy?
Your situation is very close
Your situation is very close to mine. DH and I have been together for two years. BM has done everything you've listed and more. Here are a few things that has helped me and DH keep our sanity:
1. I do not have contact with her at all. No phone calls, texts, emails, or in person contact. If she will be at one of the skids' events, I don't go. She does not have any of my contact info.
2. DH only communicates with her in texts or email. If she calls, he will not answer. This took some backbone on DH's part. When he started enforcing this boundary, she flipped out. She would call him at work. She would blow up his cell phone. She finally got it, though. To my knowledge, she only calls to speak to skids on our days (she is allowed one call per day when we have them for visits).
3. Unless there is something that directly affects me in some way, DH does not discuss BM's craziness with me anymore. He realized how upset I would get, so he stopped telling me about it. We talk about everything else, but he no longer subjects me to her drama.
4. When BM does act crazy, DH either doesn't respond at all, or he only responds to questions regarding skids. If he must respond, it is fact only with no emotion and no response to her craziness. Tell your FDH to hang up when she starts being crazy. He doesn't have to listen to that.
5. Never speak ill of her to the skids. Like yours, mine have been told what a bad person I am, but they know better. They've told me and DH that they don't get why BM doesn't like me. They think I'm great. They have also noticed that we don't say bad things about her to them. We don't talk about her at all, actually. If the skids start talking about her, we just say "oh that's nice." Then we redirect the conversation.
You will find a lot of great advice here from ladies (and men) who have been doing this for a long time. Hopefully you will find things on this site that will help you and DFH deal with the psycho ex. Welcome to the site!
Thanks! I do want him to
Thanks!
I do want him to switch to emails, it would be a lot better, and all DOCUMENTED. She is totally nuts, but she is cunning. She figured out that emails could be taken to court, so she stopped emailing him and texting him. So we finally told her we would have to record all of her calls. This is recent, so it's still a work in progress.
I need to never speak to her. Seriously, you and a few others have mentioned it, and it was something i was beginning to conclude myself before I blogged here. But me talking to her does nothing but give her ammunition, and that is never good. I have proven myself to be an extremely diplomatic and rational communicator, I am surprised at how well i can keep my cool with her, even when i feel just awful and furious and sick about it, i can stay pretty polite, but she will take anything as an insult! You could say "thanks for calling back" if she missed the first call, and she would go off like "what is THAT supposed to mean? i ALWAYS CALL BACK. are you saying that I didn't call you back before!?" And then it's all down the drain like a shit in the toilet. She frequently doesn't call back, but that is pretty much word-for-word a conversation we've had more than once. It makes me start to wonder if *I* am the crazy one for even trying!
Hi, I am new to the site and
Hi, I am new to the site and after reading your post I thought, wow thank god, it isn't just me that deals with this nightmare. I too am in a relationship with someone amazing, we have the most loving relationship possible, until you stick the BM into the equation. I love my step-daughters to bits, they're fantastic kids and we have a close relationship but like you have experienced, I too have been subject to nasty criticism stemming from the BM's mouth, leading the kids to question my intentions - thankfully though, they seem to ignore the majority of what is said.
The advice given to you, is all that I want in my life although I personally would struggle not knowing about BM's craziness. All the advice that I can give to you, is just reiterating the 'don't bite' phrase. Often, BM's are extremely threatened by SM's. My experience though, is that I came into the picture at a time when BM had her life totally as she wanted it (but may I add, still wasn't happy): 2 gorgeous kids, part-time job, fiancé AND total control over DH (my now partner.) Despite the divorce, I know that, through fear of her psychotic ways and for a quiet (as quiet as it can be with her involved) life, he would: answer all calls, about all topics that she felt had some slight link to the kids, he'd pick them up as and when she said, from where she wanted, he would withstand her verbal abuse etc. So as soon as I came on the scene she wasn't happy as her world was slightly different - she now didn't have utter control over her fiancé and ex as her ex had a new priority alongside the kids. At the beginning of our relationship, I obviously didn't feel that I had the right to dictate in anyway to DH's contact with BM. However, I soon found out that BM was trying to dictate to MY life by guilt tripping DH. When my partner and I first got together, I chose not to tell my family about the kids until I knew my partner and I were in it for the long haul. Despite the fact that we weren't planning on me meeting the kids for a while at that stage, she told my partner that I HAD to tell my parents NOW if she was ever going to enable me to meet them! Since then I have been involved to some extent, as we are a couple and I believe it should be my business as well as his. I have asked him to cut-down contact, so they only speak when necessary and it is only ever about the girls. Also, I asked him to minimise phone calls, I believe that all basic contact like 'Pick them up at 4', 'Ok no prob' can be done by text/email generally... he was fine with this until she went MAD. She said there was no way she would only speak to her kid's dad through text/email and said she would ring him whenever she wanted to. However, I have recently found out that she doesn't let her husband have ANY form of contact with his son's mother unless the child is literally about to be taken to hospital...
The main issue I personally have is my partner's desire to keep everyone happy. I know he doesn't love her anymore and loves me, is planning our marriage etc. Yet, recently I feel he has slightly succumbed to her continuous abuse and in some ways she has managed to get in his head... for instance, she has been bombarding him with phone-calls (which he has answered for fear there is a problem with the kids - after the arrangement that calls were only made when necessary) and has picked up to hear her screaming down the phone 'we need to have more contact' and there not to be any prob with the kids. I just hope and pray that he doesn't fall back down the path of, her way or the high-way... and doesn't speak to her without telling me, in order to try and avoid my unhappiness.
The only advice I can offer you, as SM to SM is to never argue with her. She would LOVE that! My partner's ex's life should be full but from what I have gathered she is still unhappy. Her job doesn't stimulate her mind enough or perhaps she needs a hobby... she loves arguing, she loves trying to wind up my partner and to bad-mouth me in hopes that I will react. Don't do it - don't drop to her level. Bite back by being the best wife & SM that she can't be.
I totally relate to your upset & send my love and hope for you!
Yeah, I made the mistake of
Yeah, I made the mistake of trying to talk to her a few times a few months ago. Tried to just be reasonable. Total fail! But not I know not to try to talk to her! I just stay away!