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.