We're still stuck on Christmas Day. The current arrangement is for me to have Christmas Eve/morning and X to have Christmas afternoon/Boxing Day. I want this every year, he wants alternating years. I'm just not willing to budge. I told him when he ran off 18 months ago that Christmas Day was the most important family day of the year to me. At the time, he was so positively giddy about leaving that he agreed to whatever I wanted.
In the midst of a tense email discussion on the topic, he sent my stepdad a text without my knowledge asking him to make me be reasonable. That made me feel kinda steamed; I felt like my boundaries were violated. My stepdad has acted as a mediator before during an in-person negotiation, but that was all done out in the open, not surreptitiously. My stepdad was more gracious than me about the assumed motivation behind the text.
The email discussion started to devolve into threats and accusations on his end, so I had to step away for a bit because I started to get the panicked feeling of wanting to climb out of my own skin and run away to avoid dealing with this crap. I went to my friend's house and vented over a cuppa. Then I pulled myself together and wrote back a polite, empathetic, and solution-focused email that he really didn't deserve.
He offered for me to spend Christmas morning with them opening presents! WTF. I would rather spend every Christmas alone than make a mockery of what would have otherwise been a happy and joyous family event. Does he think I'm going to sit there with him and OW watching our son open presents like some sort of blended family composed of old friends whose relationship simply ran its course? W. T. F.
Soooo that's where things stand. X is now stonewalling again. There's no new parenting plan without agreement on Christmas Day. I'm not trying to punish X with this arrangement. If I thought S2 was missing out by not waking up with his dad on Christmas, I would sacrifice my own desires to give him that opportunity. If it came to down to a point where I was forced to do that, I would live with it. But as long as I have a choice, I'm doing this one thing for myself.
