Always Gotta be Drama

About two months ago, an order was issued in our case.  This was after I petitioned the Court to limit the time my daughter has to spend time with her spath dad.  He lived 90 minutes away from her and had an every other weekend parenting time schedule.  This isn't a lot.  But when parenting time is spent listening to your parent fight with his significant other CONSTANTLY, it makes for a long three days.  So I requested this.  What I got in return was nearly a year of absolute hell, a $20,000 debt to a family law attorney, and a new order that basically did the opposite of what I set out to do. 

So now spath dad gets MORE days, MORE holiday time, and MORE time to make our daughter miserable.  The order came out in July.  Immediately after the order was issued, he requested the two weeks of vacation that was granted to him and then basically monopolized our daughter for the rest of the summer.  The irony of that scenario is that he didn't actually go on vacation with her.  He worked, and left her home while he was at work.  And when he couldn't get her to the activities that were court ordered, he had his fiancée do it.  He was specifically court ordered not to do that.  The judge wanted him to concentrate on spending more time ALONE with her.  So that all ended in dramatic fashion when he asked me to take her, in the middle of his vacation.  I know he resorted to this because he is also ordered to make her present at EVERY SINGLE sport and extra curricular event.  And during his vacation time, it became very obvious to him that it wasn't possible to get her to all of her events because he worked.  So he "gave back" his vacation time.  He did this, of course, by trying to convince me that it was because he was trying to be "fair" and not take our daughter away from me for too long.  Hilarious!  Then later in that week, he told me that his boss "canceled his vacation." 

So I told him since his boss "canceled" his vacation, then I guess vacation was  over and our daughter could remain home for the rest of the summer.  That didn't go over well, and he got special favor with the Court and got an emergency phone conference with the judge.  I had to pay my attorney for this.  The judge told me she had to go back to his house.  Our daughter was devastated.  By the end of the day, after all this drama, court involvement, paying my attorney, spath decides he's going to let our daughter stay home three more days before she goes back to him.  NUTZ! 

So after the vacation time was over and Labor Day passed, I figured school would start and we'd get into a better routine.  He's allowed to have her after school (or soccer) on Mondays and Wednesdays.  After school started, soccer interferes with that a lot.  But, he's been pretty consistently taking her for even just an hour or two after the games and practices. 

But here's why I believe that in the next four years before she emancipates, I know I will NEVER have peace from him......

Last week, she hurt her knee in soccer.  This means, she's sitting out of games and she's not playing up for Junior Varsity like they had asked her to.  So this past Monday, she was sitting on the sidelines for the Freshman team.  I go to the games to support her even when she doesn't play.  I show up to the game, and spath is not there.  I just assumed it was the same thing as always.  He would never come sit there in support unless he could watch her do something good and then take credit later for it.  If she's sitting on the sidelines, he could care less about the team itself or any of the other players.  So I watched the game, said goodbye after, and told her I'd see her when her dad brought her home later.  One of the soccer moms asked me to meet her for happy hour after, and since our daughter was with her dad, I agreed.  Seems like a normal day, doesn't it?

Well, nothing is ever, ever normal.  As I'm sitting at happy hour, I get a call from my mom asking where my daughter is.  Of course, I casually respond, "She's on the bus on the way back to school.  What's up?"  She responds, "Well, her dad is here, wondering where she is."  Huh. He's never picked her up at our house after school  The plan has always been he picks her up after school or after soccer...at school.   Long story condensed, he proceeded to call, call again, left two messages, one threatening to call the police, and then emailed me twice that night.  He was accusing me of interfering with his parenting time and keeping our daughter away from him.  See what I mean by making drama out of nothing? 

It's never going to end. 

The Spath Has Set Me Back

Haven't written for a long time because I've been completely overwhelmed by the craziness of the year.  So very much has happened since January when I got the idea to start blogging my feelings about being enmeshed in a co-parenting relationship with a sociopath.  The spath ran off to Belize for a "mission trip."  He got engaged to his spath girlfriend.  He refused to cooperate with court ordered mediation and therapy for our daughter.  He got his parenting time limited AGAIN.  I took our daughter on spring break, and he did everything he could to make our daughter upset while we were there including trying to assure her that she would not be in his upcoming wedding if she did not behave the way he wanted.  He accused our daughter of being at parties drinking and taking pills.  She was 13 at the time.  The massive amounts of emails he has sent me and the court interactions, it's almost mind boggling.  So in the upcoming months, I'm going to start pulling together a rough timeline and I'm going to start making the skeleton for a book or at least a collection of writings.  I am certain that with all the ramblings I've done in the past year or two, many of my friends wish to not have anything to do with me.  I've even had words with my ex best friend about my "mental problems" because it upsets me that my ex is such a manipulative freak.  The very end result to sum it up quickly is that our judge finally issued an order in July.  I initially thought it was a good order, but upon really putting thought into it, I realized it was like a giant slap in the face to me, and knowing that my ex would completely twist every possible situation into screwing me out of any time I would get.  The hardest thing is that my daughter cries A LOT.  She says she doesn't want to go with him, and she thinks nobody listens to her.  She is depressed.  She goes to therapy regularly, and now her dad wants to try and say that she's "just fine," and she doesn't need all this therapy.

This is just so utterly and completely dysfunctional and I realized last night after receiving about seven or eight emails from the spath, that the situation is actually making me DEPRESSED.

So if you've stumbled across this blog by searching terms like parent alienation or coparenting or personality disorder or sociopath, stay tuned.  I've got some goodies for you.

Please don't harass me while I harass you about harassing me

On January 31, 2015, Mr. Crazy left the country to go on a "mission trip."  This is beautiful.  he gets a week of vacation time for spring break with his daughter this year, and instead of planning a trip that he can take her on or take her with, he plans a trip for ten days to Belize when she can't go.  He also gave up one of his parenting weekends during this time, you know, one of those precious weekends he's been fighting so hard for.  Oh, he tried to "trade" with me for "compensatory time."  But when my daughter says she doesn't want to go down there, and I didn't find out about the "mission trip" out of the country until only a few days before they left, why would I trade?  It doesn't benefit our daughter in any way to trade for that.

So the past ten days were glorious.  I didn't receive a single email from him.  Normally when I hear the email ringtone I have set on my phone, I almost always have that feeling of, Oh, God, what does he want now?  So after the fist few days they were gone, I relaxed and checked my emails knowing it was only the usual junk mail I should unsubscribe to.

Then Sunday came.  I knew they were on their way soon because my daughter sent me the photo of their Facebook status announcing that they made a total spectacle of themselves as he proposed to the girlfriend on the beach during the mission trip.  They couldn't do this trip without making it all about themselves.  So that was their last night there and they arrived back home some time Sunday.  At 6:50 p.m., I got the email from him.  UGH.  They've returned.  Now he needs to know what we're going to do about the spring break our daughter doesn't want to go on with him, the one he didn't plan to do anything with her.

I have nothing to negotiate.  We have a very detailed schedule.  I've learned my lesson over the past year, DON'T vary from the schedule.  If you want to give up your time, give it up.  I'm not giving anything in return.  So I didn't answer.

Oh, he doesn't like when I don't answer.  So at 10:37 a.m. the next morning, he send me another email asking me to get back to him about this spring break thing and a few other matters that won't occur until mid and later summer.  I'm not inclined to deal with those right now since I have no idea what will happen in our pending court case.  So I didn't respond.

At 3:43 p.m. that day, I got an email from him asking for my address.  I've lived in my house for 3 1/2 years.  He knows where I live.  He's been there multiple times.  The address is in multiple court order.  I'm not giving it to him again.  In this email though, he accused me of harassing him.  He complained that he's had to deal with my twice already since he's returned from his trip.  This is hilarious to me.  The last correspondence I had with him was January 28.  I'm not sure how I've been harassing him when I haven't been in contact.

So then this morning, I get another email, 11:36 a.m.  He wants answers about spring break and summer vacation and he wants the answers ASAP.  Oh, heavy sigh.  I'm obviously not answering buddy.  He threatened that I need to answer by 2:30 p.m.  He was not happy I didn't get back to him.  So at 12:29, he sent me another email.  This time he gave me the dates he wants to take off for vacation and said I must email by 2 p.m. or he'll have to choose without my input.

How funny.  He doesn't want me to harass him, but since he's been back to town on late Saturday or early Sunday, he's already sent me five emails.

If I can Hold on for 1579 Days

So I married a sociopath way back when.  At the time, of course, I didn't know it.  I didn't know it because he was good at what sociopaths do.  They convince you how wonderful you are, how wonderful they are, how wonderful you'd be together.  I guess at the time, it's what I needed.  When all the wonder and magic hit me, I did question how it could be so amazing.  I guess that should have been my first red flag.  But every time I said to myself, "Could he be parroting what I say so that I think he knows me inside and out?"  It seemed impossible.  I made efforts not to reveal too much so he couldn't "predict" and because he seemed to love all the same things and want all the same things, it must have meant we were "soul mates."

So I marched into "soul mate" history and married him.  Quickly became pregnant by him, and quickly started to realize that something was gravely wrong in our marriage.  Thus was the beginning of more than a decade of me asking myself over and over, "Am I going crazy?  What is wrong with me?"  

In 2010, after ten long years of the story, I divorced him.  This story will be like those movies you see where I won't start at the beginning, and I won't start at the end.  I'm starting sort of in the middle.  I feel like if I start at the beginning, I won't be able to keep track of the present.  The story hasn't ended yet, so starting at the end just isn't possible.  It will be a story with flashbacks and recollections to bring things into perspective.  The story will one day be turned into a book, and if you feel the need to add your story or comment one way or another, in support of me or in defense of bad dads and sociopaths, perhaps that will be in the book someday too.  

I intend to share this history so that others know they are not alone.  Because of that, I will need to protect the privacy and identity of certain persons.  The names and of folks and place may be changed for the sake of protection and anonymity.  Some of you reading this know me, and you know my life, so you will know the people, but respect the privacy of the characters and don't divulge their identity.  The names don't matter anyway.  

The main thing you're going to find here is a collection of emails.  Why am I choosing to publish that?  Well, these emails are special.  They're special because I don't have to use my imagination to come up with the words to describe how crazy this bad dad is.  He used his own words, and I just need to copy and paste.  Then you be the judge...is this a bad dad?  Or was I right during my marriage to wonder if I was crazy?