How does one GAL with young kids at home? I don't want to be accused of abandoning the kids to do my own thing. Do I ask H to watch the kids or do I make plans, announce I'm leaving and go?
How old are your kids?
Personally, I think it is extremely rude for one parent to make plans and just assume the other parent will watch the kids.
I take it you haven't met my wayward wife then!
It is challenging, and maybe my experience will be a cautionary tale. We have a 2-year-old and little extra money for a babysitter, and D2 is terrible around people outside her very tight inner circle anyway. So when one of us goes out, the other is almost always home with D2.
Since the start of 2019 my W has wanted to go out just about all the time. On a work/school trip (she works in a school) in February, she befriended a colleague she didn't know before. They are inseparable since and it seems my W would go out with her every single night if not for pesky D2. For a few weeks she was grabbing every opportunity to go out and just leaving D2 with me. It made it very hard for me to GAL.
After she went out with no notice to me at all, I told her we needed to put things on a calendar in advance. That became her scrambling to fill in every night on the calendar possible before I could, and me trying to beat her to the punch, an escalating arms race of GAL.
I felt D2 was a casualty in this, as we scrambled to grab chances to go out and make sure we "got ours." It felt dirty to me. Of course, I don't want any of this. I do believe W needed a break from the way things were, and it would have been healthy for each of us to carve out some individual time while having plenty of together time, the 2 of us and the 3 of us as a family. It looks like that ship has sailed.
Eventually, to have some sort of balance I said W could have Mon-Wed-Fri and i would take Tue-Thurs-Sat. We could request to switch off if there is a good reason. Predictably, W asks regularly if I'm "doing anything" on my days and, if I don't have something specific planned, she wants to grab my days as well. Plus she's managed to be out every Sunday. Some family day of rest!
I didn't want to go back to square one, with her out and me home all the time. So I started making sure to find something to do on "my" days. Not out of spite, but because I really do need some space and to GAL. Putting some limits on her endless cake eating didn't hurt.
M 44, W 32 T 10, M 8 D 2 Oct '18: Fantasy affair with OW1 (yes, W) Feb '19: Inseparable from new lesbian BFF Still live together but a lot of tension
