That old nagging feeling...

There are plenty of days when I just have this nagging feeling that Stella is up to something, and there must be information out there...somewhere...

I end up scouring the internet with every search site I can think of to try and see if she's plotting something publicly. Luckily for her, she's not that stupid. Annoyingly for me, she's not that stupid.

With all of the information out there on the internet these days, you'd think that it was almost inevitable that you'd be able to find out everything about anyone with just a few clicks. Well, that's not really true, and for privacy purposes, I'm almost glad of that. People have gotten a lot more savvy about how to privatize their information, and social networking sites have gotten a lot more proficient at providing ways to privatatize that information, and now there are very few people who leave their online profiles out there for strangers to see.

Personally, I have nothing to hide, and I'm all over the freaking internet. I've got public profiles for work, listings in the phone book, MySpace, Facebook, and of course, this blog. However, I'm not so stupid that I allow everyone to see my everything. The last thing I need is some creepy stalker, or minion of Stella's, pouring through my Facebook photos. Heck, I don't even let my parents look at some of those photos (sorry Mom and Dad, but there are just a few things you don't need to see...you can just trust the stories I tell you and don't need to have evidence of my escapades). But there are friends I'd like to share them with, so that's why they're up there.

The thought of creating a fake online profile for someone that Stella went to high school with in order to gain access to what I'm sure is juicy info on her page...well, it has occurred to me. But saying the plan out loud sounds crazy and makes me feel like a stalker. So, no online tricks. That would be unhealthy and borderline illegal. After all, assuming I did find something juicy that could be used in court, how would I justify presenting that information to the judge? "Um, yes, your honor, I got that from her Facebook page. I pretended to be a long-lost friend...." Yeah, that doesn't sound so credible.

I guess I have no choice but to just try and ignore that little buzzing in my gut that's telling me she's plotting something. But then again, I know she's always plotting something, and I'm sure that today isn't any different than any other day.

The Tragic Nature of PEs

I'm a member of another website where people stuck with Psycho Exes (PEs) go to learn from each other's experiences, ask advice, and vent frustrations. Well, this morning on the site I found a post that made me cry.

It was in response to a query a member submitted, asking all of us to list all of the ways that we've found the Psychotic Other Parents interfere with parenting time, and it made me tear up. Why? Because looking at the list I'm about to re-post below, the only thing that came to my mind was how badly these kind of shenanigans affect the kids. My childhood was filled with safety, stability, and two non-perfect yet very good parents. I never had anyone, other than the grandparents, fighting over my sister or me. Yet children whose divorced parents have a high-conflict relationship get yanked back and forth practically on a daily basis.

There are more nasty tricks than just these that get used by PEs all of the time to ruin visitation with the other parent, but here are just a few:

1. Signing the kid up for an activity, or scheduling a doctor's appointment, or some other can't-be-missed event that only the psycho parent can take the child to, during the other parent's parenting time.
2. Making the child feel frightened of the other parent, or guilty that they're going to spend time with the other parent or go to the other parent's home.
3. Setting up the child to prefer the psycho parent's home by purchasing pets, inviting friends or relatives over just before exchange time, or buying love in general.
4. Sabotaging the parenting time by dressing the child in clothes that either don't fit, aren't appropriate, or are tattered; by feeding the child sugar right before an exchange so that the child is hyper; allowing the child to stay up too late the night before a morning parenting time exchange so that the child is sleepy and cranky when the other parent picks the child up; picking a fight with the child just before the exchange time so that they are emotionally wound-up when the other parent picks the child up.
5. Telling the child over the phone that he/she can "come home" whenever he/she wants.
6. Telling the child that they're "so sad" that the other child isn't with them and that they're lonely.
7. Incessantly calling/texting/contacting the child while he/she is at the other parent's home or with the other parent.
8. Intentionally withholding important things like medicine, sports gear, clothing, etc., in order to "have to" visit the child while they're with the other parent and thus interrupt parenting time.
9. Going to the other parent's home while the child is there, where they basically stalk the other parent and the child.
10. Emotionally manipulating the child into believing that they are miserable when with the other parent, or that the other parent is abusive.
11. Denying parenting time and then making it appear to the child as if the other parent cancelled.

The reason I got teary when I read this list was that I realized that Stella has done 8 of the 11 things on that list. I say 8, instead of the whole 11, because a few of those things require that the PE and the non-PE live close to each other. We have the benefit of living in separate states, so she can't really withhold medicine, but of course in order for the kids to have medicine for colds or whatever she would have to take them to the doctor, and that's not something she ever does. She also can't come near our home without driving for 6 hours, and most of the time she won't even drive 3 to meet up in the exchange city. She doesn't tell the children that they can "come home" whenever they want, because the kids know that's not true and since we get them for scheduled school breaks it's pretty clear when they're going to go home.

All of that other crap, though, she's done. She signed Marsha up for a 1-week summer camp to intentionally ruin Guy's parenting time for the summer, which also ran over Father's Day and his birthday. It worked. We lost 3 weeks with the kids because she refused to give them over. As a reward for coming home from summer break with us (as if they had a choice?) she bought them a puppy. Nevermind that she got rid of the dog they'd had for 4 years, 8 months earlier, because it was "too much." She wouldn't meet us in the exchange city for a makeup parenting time order in October because she didn't feel like it (those weren't the excuses she gave, but that was basically why) which meant that we didn't get the kids for their fall break this year because we couldn't afford the time to drive all of the way to her city in her state, and then back to ours (12 hours total of driving) to get them. Meanwhile we'd been telling the kids they were going to spend their fall break with us, and all of a sudden they weren't. Stella told them it was because we wouldn't drive out to get them, nevermind that she had refused to help with the transportation and refused to release them on the day she was supposed to. We've picked up the kids on two occasions now, in winter, to have them not wearing socks nor jackets, nor have any socks or jackets or sneakers with them. Stella has convinced Marsha that Guy used to beat her with a belt when she was 3 years old and that I yell at the kids all of the time. Nevermind that kids are generally incapable of forming long-term memories until the age of 4, Guy would NEVER beat a child, let alone a 3 year old with a belt, and that I don't yell at the kids all of the time. Stella tells the kids that she's lonely when they're not there to the point where she sounds manic depressive and forlorn without their presence.

Almost every second of every visit we have with the kids is spent trying to set the very best example possible, meanwhile dispelling some of the lies that Stella has told the kids. Such lies, relayed to me by Marsha, have included:

"Mommy said that she didn't want us to go with you for spring break because she was afraid you wouldn't bring us back."

"Mommy said that she thinks you write down all of the bad stuff Johnny and I tell you about her so that you can get her in trouble."

"Mommy told us we weren't allowed to talk to you or Daddy for a while or see you." (Response to us asking if they had questions about why they hadn't talked to us for 3 weeks or if they were wondering why we hadn't seen them in 3 months.)

"Daddy used to hurt Mommy. That's why she calls the police." (Not true.)

"Mommy says you aren't going to be around very long." (To me. I've been around 2 years and have told the kids I have no plans to go anywhere.)

Ug! It's so frustrating. Most of the replies to those kinds of things are, "Sweetie, what do you think?" or "Sweetie, that's just not true. That's ridiculous. We would never do that." Luckily for us, Marsha is a smart kid. She knows her mom is full of crap, but that's her mother and she's going to go along with whatever "Mommy Dearest" says. Most of the time she isn't put off, she just does what her mom tells us.

The best way, we've found, to combat this kind of crap is to ask the children questions about the lies in the form of "What do you think?" or "Do you remember that happening? No? Who told you it happened that way? How do you remember that happening?" The kids end up putting the pieces together pretty quickly and start remembering things for themselves or drawing their own, true, conclusions. The problem is getting those corrected-to-truth memories to stick and not fizzle again when the psycho, manipulative, other parent gets their claws back into the kids.

Every day I pray that a judge will somehow see this behavior through testimony in court from Stella herself, the court advisor, Guy and me, family, etc., and that he'll decide the kids don't need to live with Stella anymore. In two months we'll know for sure what our lives for the next two years, at least, are going to look like. Please keep us in your prayers.

The Never-Ending Battle Over Phone Access

One of Stella's most frequent, and most favorite, ways to block my boyfriend, who I'll start to refer to as Guy, from contact with the kids is to ignore his phone calls. To an outsider, Stella's not wanting to talk to her ex-husband on a daily basis seems reasonable. But the thing is, whenever he calls her phone, he's just trying to reach the kids and would rather not have to listen to her nails-on-a-chalkboard whining, scratchy, smoker's cackle.

In this "wonderful" age of wireless technology, very few people keep a house phone around anymore, and even those who do usually have Vonage, or MagicJack, or some other voice-over-internet-protocol phone that's reliant on a working internet connection. Stella can barely manage to maintain internet service at her house and has an aging computer that isn't getting any younger, so she only maintains a cell phone. Guy has no choice but to call her phone, every night, and suffer through her "I've Seen The Light" Christian music ringback tone until he gets sent to voicemail.

"Hi, you've reached Stella. I'm sorry I can't take your call, but leave a message and I'll return it as soon as possible? Have a blessed day!"

Yuck. She pretends to be a "Christian" yet actively prevents Guy from being able to contact the kids on an almost daily basis. Because torturing another person by dangling your position of power in front of them is very Christian. It was so bad a few months ago that Guy had to request that the police to welfare checks on the kids since he hadn't been able to get a hold of them for days at a time and the last he had heard on one of the occasions, was that the little one was sick.

Since we live 400 miles away from the kids, phone calls are all we've got on a regular basis, and thanks to the current parenting time orders approved by the court, and agreed to by Stella, Guy is supposed to be able to talk to the kids every night. Of course, what he's supposed to be able to do, and what Stella feels like allowing are two completely separate things. Dealing with a Borderline Personality like Stella, court orders don't mean much and they are pretty much useless. I mean, after all, she's the mother and shouldn't have to obey any rules because that might not be in the best interests of the kids, right? She doesn't believe that the rules should apply to her and that the orders only exist for us to have to follow...which we do because that's the right thing to do. Most of the time, Stella will insist that she's not blocking communication, but really, how effective is it to put a phone next to a 5 or 10 year old and say, "Call your father." The kids both know his number, but they're kids. They're not necessarily going to pick up Stella's cell phone and call their dad when told to. In fact, when I was a kid I only picked up the phone if I wanted to ask a relative something, or on one occasion, my spunky 6-year-old self called Grandma to tattle when Dad wouldn't let me have gummy bears with my lunch. Still though, I would rarely call a relative if I were told to do so. When I was the ages that the kids are now, my mom or dad would have to dial the number first and then put me on the phone. What Stella is supposed to do, and was even told to do by an officer of the court during a Parenting Time Enforcement Conference she was dragged into by Guy, is to dial Guy's number and then put the phone in the hands of the kids. She just decides not to. Instead, Guy gets text replies to his phone calls that say, "I told them to call u. It's not my responsibility to call." This happens all.the.time. Or, he'll get a text reply that says, "The kids don't want to talk to u. They are watching their favorite TV show." Guy will request a call back but of course, never gets one, because TV is more important than talking to Dad, and by the time the shows are over Stella has decided to wisk the kids off to bed...or allow the 1o year old to keep watching TV...or allow a friend to come over and hang out with the kids at 9pm on a school night......

I believe that if they had a house phone, the contact wouldn't be blocked so much. But, I might be wrong. I would like to believe that the ringer for the phone wouldn't be kept off and that the annoying sound of a telephone ringing off the hook would resound through the house and let EVERYONE know, "Dad is calling! Pick up the phone!!" But, knowing Stella, that ringer would be broken off and the only time it would be used would be for outgoing calls, when she felt like it or when her Cricket phone gets turned off, again. Stella recently decided to get the 10 year old, who I'll start calling Marsha, her own phone to fix the contact problem! Oh yay! Even our judge figured that it wouldn't be long before that phone was lost or broken, when the contact issue was brought up in a hearing. Stella's reasoning was that 1) the kid had told her she wanted her own phone for Christmas, and seriously, whatever Marsha wants, Stella gets her, and 2) Stella feels that Guy's nightly attempts to get a hold of the kids and say hello is really his attempt at harassing her daily, so now that Marsha has her own phone, she believes that Guy shouldn't feel the need to call her own phone anymore. Of course, now what happens is that two phones go unanswered instead of one.

Phone contact with Marsha, and her brother, who I'll start calling Johnny, has gotten a tiny bit better with the new kids' cell phone, but the phone is regularly turned off, or goes dead, or the kid doesn't return messages and her mother doesn't make her. Another thing to note is that Marsha and Stella have a very co-dependant relationship. Marsha is Stella's best friend, and sometimes her daughter. Marsha believes whatever her mother tells her is truth and won't do anything unless she's made to do it. Of course at the same time, Marsha makes most of the rules in the house and manipulates the crap out of Stella so that she doesn't have to worry about bedtimes, can talk on the phone to pretty much whomever she wants, and so that she can also eat whatever she wants. It's not a healthy environment. Johnny is then left to play video games and clamor for attention, and is left to suffer being mothered by his "mother" and also by his sister. The poor kid never gets a break, and it's very obvious that he's frustrated with living with Stella and Marsha because whenever we get the kids, we'll spend about the first two days re-establishing boundaries and balancing power. Johnny will start to clamor for attention then get confused because he realizes he's getting it and that he's not being picked on. It's sad and funny to watch. In fact, it's almost like having to daily deal with a broken car handle, then someone comes along and fixes the car handle, and you forget to notice until you go to complain and realize you no longer have a reason. Meanwhile Marsha tries to fight us on bedtimes and sugary snacks all day and by the third day she finally remembers that she's 10 and is supposed to do what she's told. The "please's" and "thank you's" return and the kids go from being spoiled or ignored monsters back into obedient, well-behaved children.

As soon as the kids go back to Stella's, after every visit, they immediately revert to the cold, distant behavior we experience with them on the phone whenever we are able to get through to them. In person, they're chatty and bubbly and giggly. On the phone it's, "I don't want to talk right now. I don't want to talk to you. I love you. Bye." And we can't get anything else out of them. Of course, in the background, we can hear Stella screeching, "GET OFF THE PHONE!!!!! IT'S TIME FOR BED!!!!!!!!!! THAT'S ENOUGH!!!!!!" I can practically see her head about ready to start spinning around while she spits fire, just like Sissy Spacek in Carrie.

The battle over phone access is a major part of the war. There's literally nothing we can do to win, though. We can't MAKE them answer the phones. We can't MAKE the kids talk. We also can't exactly send a friend over to the house every night, knock on it, and tell Stella, "Hey. Guy wants to talk to the kids. Answer your phone. NOW." That could be taken as actual harassment... A judge can't even get Stella to stop blocking phone contact. An officer of the court tried, to no avail. So here we remain, frustrated that the kids are being told that they shouldn't have to feel like they need to talk to us, by their mother. Or simultaneously being told that their dad will get their mom arrested if they don't talk, because we know that Stella likes to scare the kids and make them think that Guy is abusive when all he's trying to do is tell the kids he loves them and see how their day at school was. The only thing we can hope for is that maybe, just maybe, the judge will end our suffering and send the kids to live with us because when they're with us, phone access is NEVER blocked. Stella is NEVER told, "Oh, we told the kids they needed to call you. I guess they didn't because they don't want to talk to you and are watching TV." We do dial Stella's number, make the kids turn off the Wii and the TV and talk to their mother every night they're with us. That's called "encouraging a relationship with the other parent" and it's something Stella is too evil to understand how to do. After all, that small act of decency would diminish her sense of power over the situation, because clearly in her mind it's more important to make her ex-husband suffer for having gone through with the divorce after she cheated on him, than to allow the kids a chance to have a relationship with their dad.

Parenting With a Shadow Overhead

I love having the kids at our house. I love the energy. I love the activity. I also really love that we don't have to battle with their mother in order to be able to reach them!

Life at our house for the kids is full of routines. There will be fruit at breakfast. The kids are required to make their beds and pick up their rooms every day. There are bedtimes. There is also mandatory time to call their mom on the phone. After dinner we always make the kids stop whatever they're doing, we dial their mom's number, and we put the phone in their hands. "I don't feel like talking!" is never acceptable and they get on the phone with her whether they like it or not. We don't make them stay on the phone, but they get on the phone. There's no drama when they're here. Stella barely ever has to text my boyfriend other than to schedule exchanges or get updates from doctor's appointments, and things are so...peaceful.

The only non-peaceful thing about the times when the kids are with us is worrying about what hell Stella is going to try and start because of my parenting. Because of Stella's lack of parenting, and her letting Skeezer do all of it in the past, a judge actually had to issue a court order banning anyone other than Stella from punishing the kids while in her care, and the judge also had to mandate that no corporal punishment be used in her house. Yeah, she's great. She's so great, in fact, that she let her boyfriend administer hot sauce to her 5 year old's tongue, and we believe that he also put it in the child's eyes, as a punishment on a few occasions. The children told my boyfriend and me about that months later, which is why we had to get a judge to issue those orders to Stella.

When the kids have bad attitudes with me, they get a warning, a chance to fix their mindsets, and then if they don't shape up immediately, they get a time-out in which to shape-up. No screaming, no spanking, no hot sauce, no soap, no nothing. Just a time-out. My boyfriend parents them the exact same way. In fact, when we got together and later when he introduced me to the kids and I started watching them on school vacations, our parenting styles were something we had a brief conversation about and then didn't find the need to discuss again. Why? Because we think the exact same way when it comes to appropriate behaviors from the children and appropriate punishments. We have the same outlook on the kids' diet, on bedtimes, on the importance of encouraging a relationship with their mother, on treating others with respect. We believe in the same boundaries and the same ways of teaching them to respect us and others.

However, with everything we do, and more specifically, everything I do, there's always that shadow of the kids' mom hanging over my head. What are they telling her about me? What is she going to try and take me to court for? Is she going to decide to accuse me of child abuse in retaliation for her boyfriend being accused and investigated by Child Protective Services? What kinds of problems is she going to cause for me because I'm involved in the children's lives?

This past summer while the kids were with Guy and me at our house for their portion of the summer break with their dad, it came to light one night that Stella's boyfriend Skeezer had decided to punish Johnny on at least two occasions by putting Sriracha Chili Sauce in his EYES. After the kids told us what had happened, we spent the next five days gently prodding the kids for more information, then when we were convinced that the punishment had actually been administered, and that getting it in Johnny's eyes was not a one-time accident, we took the kids to a therapist to see if they'd tell her the same thing they told us. They did. Guy called CPS and started an investigation. The same day that Stella was supposedly contacted by CPS, she also decided to go to the court and take out a restraining order against me and listed the kids on it. When one goes to get a restraining order, no proof is required. The only proof they have to supply at the time of request is an incident or two, according to their own recollection, where another person threatened or harassed the person seeking the protective order. Stella decided to accuse me of impersonating the children's parent and threatening a co-worker if I wasn't supplied a camp record for a camp she had signed Marsha up for at her work, as well as accuse me of having been hostile to her at a parenting time exchange a week earlier (what had really happened was that she had started approaching our car at the exchange, she has a protective order against Guy right now that was also granted to her based on similar lies, not wanting her to create a scene with Guy and be able to accuse him of violating his order, I put up my hand to her to signal "stop" and told her that we'd be over to her in a moment. She took that as my being hostile to her in front of the children). She put the children on the initial petition for the order, but she didn't realize that they never made it from the petition to the actual order and that the judge had simply issued a "stay away" and no-contact order between the two of us. Two weeks after it was issued I was able to get it dropped by requesting a hearing and proving that I had not done the things she was accusing me of. Still, though, that was my very first time having to go to court to defend myself, and although Stella came out looking like a vindictive lying bitch, I would still rather not put myself at risk of having to repeat that experience.

I try and parent the kids without thinking about their messed-up, awful mother, but sometimes it's really hard. It hurts when Marsha and Johnny will.not.shut.up. about "One time..at Mommy's...she let us do this-and-that-and-see-whatever-and-stay-up-until-really-late..." and when they go off on tangents comparing things at our house to her house. Her house has no structure and Marsha is considered an equal party in making decisions. Not appropriate. Ten-year-olds should not get a say in making household decisions such as where/when to see their father, whether or not to talk to Guy on the phone, bedtimes, diet, etc. Yet in Stella's house, it's Marsha who gets to make a lot of the rules. It also stings when the kids are getting punished and they scream, "I WANT MY MOTHER!!!! I WANT TO GO TO MOMMY'S!!!" But of course, they know it hurts, and that's why they scream it at me. Later, they usually apologize for lashing out, but it still sucks.

I can't worry about what Stella is going to do to me or what the kids are going to report back to her about, every second of my day. The best I can do is be a good parent. Forget about Stella, make my own rules with Guy, and parent those kids the way they're supposed to be parented. If she wants to drag me back into court, fine. I say bring it on, because I've done nothing wrong, I cover every inch of my butt with evidence to back up everything I do, and I'm not afraid. Stressed at the prospect, yes, but not afraid.

Dating a Man With a Crazy Ex and Kids

Being a steppie was never something I thought would happen to me. But then again, do many people actually plan on that? Maybe there are women out there who have mentality of a gold-digger, except that instead of looking for men with money they look for men who have children then can raise instead of having to birth any of their own? Well, I'm certainly not like that. I always pictured my life with a man I'd meet in college, we'd have 3 kids of our own, I'd have a good advertising job, he'd do...something...and we'd be comfortable and happy. Wow, was I ever off base with that line of dreaming!

My college boyfriend ended up, well, let's just say that his relationship with his "friend" Matt gave me the courage to finally end our tumultuous relationship. Then years later, I meet my current boyfriend. He's 5 years older than me, divorced, and has two children. Hmm... That was an interesting twist on my usual "type." Still, though, we hit it off, we couldn't get enough of talking to each other in that first month of knowing each other, and here we are two years later living together. We're also engaged in a nasty custody fight with his ex-wife.

Some people who are divorced will say that their ex is a complete psycho. "Why?" you might ask them. They'll list reasons like, "She tried to extort money from me!" or "She turned into a total bitch toward the end of our marriage," or "He's an ass. Nothing I did was ever good enough and he was very controlling." Ok, fine, those are all reasons why not to like an ex-spouse, and probably all things that would drive someone to divorce, but those reasons don't necessarily make someone "crazy."

Divorce counselors, family law practitioners, mediators, divorcees themselves, and just about anyone else in the "divorce industry" will explain that when a marriage first breaks up, there's usually a period of "divorce crazy" that people go through. The wounds are fresh, each party wants some kind of revenge, and if there are children in the marriage, custody becomes a HOT issue. Most people, after a little while, if they're sane, will be able to quell the "divorce crazy" and get down to business figuring out what they want, what they can reasonably get from the divorce agreement, and what's best for the children. However, in the case of dealing with a truly crazy soon-to-be ex, there are nasty, nasty games that get played and often times the children are put in the middle by one party or the other. In our case, my boyfriend's ex-wife is crazy and she's the one putting the kids in the middle, and manipulating every single legal angle she can to make my boyfriend look like an abusive asshole who shouldn't have any contact with their kids, when she's the one actually putting them in harm's way.

When my guy and I first started dating, sad to say, we did bond a little bit over his explaining his marriage and his current relationship with his ex (or what was current at the time) to me. His ex-wife would cause drama with money or call him whining about the kids, and he'd tell me about it. I felt special because he was confiding this stuff in me and wanted to open up about this bad situation, and he felt comforted by being able to actually talk about it. Of course we talked about lots of other things, too. Religion, politics, family, our hopes for the future, our views on how people should treat each other, pet peeves, likes, loves, etc. And we talked about the kids. He has two, and at the time we started dating, they were 3 and 8 years old. Little did we realize over the next couple of years how much his relationship with his ex-wife would deteriorate once I came more fully into the picture and started to help take care of the kids when they were with my boyfriend for his parenting time. Also, little did we realize how much the crazy ex was going to start putting the kids in the middle. It's a sad situation, and even sadder to find out through research and finding support groups, that we're not alone in having to deal with this kind of insanity.

Due to job losses and changes, my boyfriend and I live in a different state than his ex wife and kids. This is a blessing and a curse. A blessing because our jobs here in California are pretty great and the distance between where we live, and where the ex lives in Arizona, creates a nice little buffer for sanity when we need it. When she's trying to create conflict, we can disengage and we don't have to worry about her dropping by our house uninvited to cause trouble. At the same time, we save ourselves from being accused of any trouble by not being able to drop by her house and check up on the kids when we can't reach anyone. We've been apart like this for just over a year. The curse part comes into play when we want to try and make it to events at the kids' school and we just can't do that often. Or, when the ex decides to ignore my boyfriend's calls to the kids, and the kids alone, for days on end even though in the parenting time order he's allowed to call and should be able to speak to them every day. We don't get to see the kids very much, and thanks to their manipulative mother, we don't get to talk to them every day either. It's heartbreaking.

Now, some readers might be looking at this thinking, "Well, clearly he shouldn't have moved away from his kids, and if the mother thinks it's necessary to block contact, then she probably has good reason." However, know this, my boyfriend lost his job in 2009 just before the economy crashed. I lived in California, he lived in Arizona. I was planning to try and move to Arizona 6 months later, but after doing some job hunting, my boyfriend realized that there were more opportunities for him in his field in California. In order to pay child support, he needs a good job. In order to make sure the kids are taken care of, he needs to pay child support. He's NEVER missed a child support payment, and has even on a couple of occasions given his crazy, financially-irresponsible ex-wife monetary gifts when she expressed that money was really tight and that she needed extra cash for groceries and bills. Living 400 miles away from the kids is not ideal at all, but at the time my boyfriend and his ex were setting forth a new parenting plan so that visits with the kids would be spelled out, she even said that she would consider looking for work in California within the next year. She works for an online university. She can find a job just about anywhere. That all sounded great! Again, not ideal, but certainly manageable. Then, the crazy ex got a boyfriend and everything went down the tubes.

The only thing we can suppose is that the crazy ex, let's start referring to her as Stella, decided that she wanted her new boyfriend to be more of a father figure for the kids than my boyfriend, who biologically helped make the kids and who had looked after each of them since the days they were born. We also suppose that the new boyfriend, let's call him Skeezer, decided he wanted to have a more "man of the house" role and with the ex-husband so much in the picture, Skeezer might have decided that that relationship needed to change. All of a sudden, we started having trouble arranging for pickups/drop offs for parenting time exchanges. All of a sudden the phone conversations with the kids started being cut back to 4 a week, on average, instead of nightly. All of a sudden my boyfriend was being blamed for everything that went wrong at the house from the utilities being turned off (remember, Stella is very, very, very bad with money) to the car being "reposed" which we think meant repossessed. My boyfriend has never done anything to warrant this kind of treatment, yet Stella has decided to embark on a campaign to get him out of the picture.

There are many, many crazy exes out there like this. Most of them are women. Some are men. Many of them actually do suffer from psychological disorders, often undiagnosed. We believe that we're dealing with what is classified in the DSM-IV as a "Cluster B" personality in Stella, or a High-Functioning Borderline Personality Disorder. It's conflict and frustration on a daily basis, and in the last 10 months, my boyfriend has had to apply to the courts to intervene on four occasions, none of which have really gotten Stella to stop putting the kids in the middle of the drama or actually let my boyfriend have an easy time getting to talk to the kids or see them at his court-ordered parenting times.

So, where do I fit into all of this? I'm my boyfriend's support. I'm the partner. I'm the cheerleader, the encouragement, and I try to be the solace. I'm also the kids' "other mother" when they're with us. I love the kids (well, they are pretty great, even despite their mother's craziness), I help feed them, clothe them, make sure they're bathing, I kiss owies, I give time-outs for bad attitudes. I parent them. And my relationship? Well, it's a relationship. We make each other laugh, we support each other, we love each other. We have long-term plans. But in the meantime, every day is a challenge with battling his crazy ex, and also a challenge to not let that war take over the rest of our lives.

I've got lots, and lots, and lots of stories. Some touching, some appalling, and all of which I plan on sharing here, if there is anyone out there interested in reading them.